spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

give in, just like she has to give in, some day. It was an agonizing thought, but it made her
perceive her life in a different way. God had been faithful, because Christ was resurrected
through the power of the Spirit. She knew that the Spirit was doing the same thing with her life
now: God has placed her life close to Him, close to the cross, and now the fear was going away.
Sure enough she felt the bitter pain of leaving her children behind, and she was anxious about
how painful and lonely the process of dying might be. She had witnessed the dying of her own
daughter. But she also had the feeling that the Spirit of God had redefined her life: the power of
His love and faithfulness now gave her the strength to live through the illness and the suffering.
She sees now that resurrection is not that the Spirit removes the illness from her body (in a
miraculous way) so that she can continue with life as it was before; instead, resurrection is the
work of the Spirit who encourages her to search for God’s power beyond her own illness. One of
the many ways in which Grace Banda tries to embody resurrection life, is in avoiding to pass the
HIV infection to someone else. For the virus in her blood cannot outlive her if she keeps the virus
to herself; but if she allows the virus to infect someone else, it will survive and prosper and kill
others, even long after she dies. Binding the virus to her own body would mean that the day
Grace Banda dies, the virus will be buried with her and will be finished. That is her personal
victory over the virus; that is how Grace Banda seeks Christ’s example of resurrection and
death-destroying power. This is how she embodies the power of God.
10.4 CONCLUSIONS
This chapter offers an exploration into Reformed articulations on God and health on the basis of
the motif of power. In some way, the exploration is a continuation of Chapter 5, in which the
church-based healing discourse was identified and described as an important source of health
conceptualizations currently existing in Southern Africa. It turned out that the notion of power is
the centerpiece of the church-based healing discourse. In this chapter, power was made a key
theme for theological reflection on health and healing on the basis of the question: what kind of
power can be attributed to God in relation to healing?
It was shown that the notion of divine power is a precarious subject in theological discourse.
Divine omnipotence namely touches on complicated topics like the existence of evil, power as
the unilateral dominance and control that excludes human responsibility, and on power as victory
that disregards human suffering. Theological reflection on divine power is thus a complicated
enterprise.
There is, however, one clear observation to make: the theme of divine power implies a
dialectical approach. Speaking about God’s power requires the inclusion of the paradox that
272