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 oneâs social context determines
oneâs 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 thesisâ 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
Catechismâs 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. 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 Godâs
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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ufs/oai:etd.uovs.ac.za:etd-05272013-115036 |
| Date | 27 May 2013 |
| Creators | van den Bosch-Heij, Deborah |
| Contributors | Prof C van der Kooi, Prof R Venter |
| Publisher | University of the Free State |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en-uk |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.uovs.ac.za//theses/available/etd-05272013-115036/restricted/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University Free State or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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