spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

SUMMARY
This study is an exploration of the link between the Holy Spirit and healing in Africa from a
Reformed perspective. It is meant as a contribution to the development of Reformed contextual
perspectives on healing in Southern Africa, and investigates whether a pneumatological
exploration, sensitive to multi-layered understandings of health, could open productive avenues
for Reformed theology in Southern Africa.
The exploration consists of two parts. The first part is based on interdisciplinary research, and
gives an overview of African health concepts that are influential in Southern Africa. The
exploration starts with the struggle to find an appropriate definition of health, resulting in the
understanding of health as a social construct. This means that one’s social context determines
one’s understanding of health. The approach of social constructivism is non-essentialist and
inherently open to the contextual, social and subjective nature of health. As such, social
constructivism provides the epistemological frame for this thesis’ understanding of health and
healing in the African context.
Social constructivism implies that there are multiple understandings of health in a society. When
a health concept occurs in a systematic or coherent pattern of ideas and practices, this coherent
structure can be characterized as a health discourse. In Southern Africa, various health discourses
can be identified: (1) the African traditional healing or the ngoma discourse; (2) the missionary
medicine discourse; (3) the HIV/AIDS discourse; and (4) the church-based healing discourse.
Each African health discourse is determined by a specific notion which characterizes the way
health is interpreted according to that particular health discourse. The notions that have been
identified are: (1) relationality; (2) transformation; (3) quality of life; and (4) power.
In the second part of the study, the relationship between African health discourses and Reformed
theology is developed on the basis of a pneumatological focus, which begins with an account of
pneumatological approaches, developed by Reformed theologians (Calvin, Kuyper, Barth, Van
Ruler, Moltmann, Welker, Veenhof and Van der Kooi), and a description of the Heidelberg
Catechism’s pneumatology. The overview of Reformed pneumatologies suggests that most key
ideas of the African health discourses correlate with specific motifs of the Reformed
pneumatological matrix. Only the motif of power seems to be underdeveloped in Reformed
thought.
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