spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

Four pneumatological sketches of healing are offered. These sketches are fragments of language
about God and healing, because the suggestion of a grand narrative about God and healing
should be avoided. This study seeks to appreciate aspects such as contextuality, nonessentialism,
diversity, non-closure and particularity. The implication is that the four
pneumatological sketches may be contradictory but cannot be mutually exclusive: that is, each
fragment refers to the diverse ways of the Spirit who brings healing in human life.
The four sketches show that Reformed language about Spirit and healing can be developed on
the basis of the motifs of relationality, transformation, quality of life and power. It is proposed
that Reformed pneumatological perspectives on healing include (1) the retrieval of the
identification of the Spirit as the bond of love and as ecstatic God who communicates God’s
relational life to creation; (2) the focus on the disorienting and counter-cultural ways of the Spirit
of adoption; (3) the biblical idea that the Spirit, the breath of life, redefines the vulnerability of
human life as quality and beauty; and (4) the development of the idea that the Spirit redefines
power and gives resurrection life after non-survival, even in this life.
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