“Piercing the veil into Beliefs”: Christians Metaphysical Realities vis-à-vis Realities on African Traditional Medicine (original) (raw)
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African Traditional Healing Practices and the Christian Community
The article draws attention to the continuing popularity of African traditional healing practices, and asks whether African churches and modern medical programs can continue simply to denounce or to ignore such practices. The need for a further appraisal becomes apparent when it is shown that the purposes of these healing practices fulfill certain functions not met by modern medicine. When a comparison shows that the healing practices recorded in the Old and New Testaments often have more in common with African traditional practices than with modern medicine, the question whether the African Christian community should re-evaluate the traditional healing practices becomes unavoidable.
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Most of African Christian Churches place a lot of emphasize on healing practices as a response to the teaching of Jesus Christ. This explains why churches or crusades that practice healing in Africa are very popular and command the greatest numbers of adherents. According to these churches, the Lord commanded them to heal, and so they heal. Although some of these churches do not discourage the use of modern medicine, they are convinced that spiritual healing is a higher method than the effort to compete with God and yet there are others that completely discourage the use of modern medicine. Seen from the modern Kenya where science is understood to be the foundation of development and progress and religion as an important stand. This paper assesses African Christian Church believe on the relationship between religion and science. It also explores African Christian Church’s attitude spirituality has had on African Christian Church healing practices.
The Challenge of Trado-medical Practices to the Church in Africa
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Illnesses are perennial challenges that have confronted human society from time immemorial. Humankind does not take sicknesses for granted. They sought healing anywhere they can get it, when people are sick, they pursue healing by all means and at all cost to get relief from sickness, not minding whether the source of healing is biblical or not; all they want is healing. The methods of achieving wholeness does not matter to them once they get healing they are satisfied. Some Christians condemn other sources of healing aside from prayer and faith in God’s word. They engage those that sought healing from other sources as unscriptural and fake, unspiritual, carnal and faithless individuals. This becomes a challenge. This paper tackles the challenge posed by Yoruba Trado-medical practices to the church in Africa. It discusses various implications of these and then look at the challenge of integrating orthodox and traditional medicine in the concluding part. The methodology adopted is eclectic. Whereby the writer combines participation and observation techniques with interview and literary methods. He uses the tools of intercultural hermeneutics to investigate various healing methods and their implications to the church in Africa. This study recommends that since the use of material objects is paramount in these practices and the Bible did not condemn the use of means to achieving wholeness, it is wrong for any Christian to cast aspersion or stigmatize any user of means as carnal and unspiritual. This paper encourages the church in Africa to make use of natural herbs and products around them for therapeutic purposes, for they are cheap and available at all times.
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Religion: The Gateway to Traditional Medicine: A case Study of Berekum Traditional Society of Ghana
In view of their strong theistic world view, the people of Berekum traditional society, usually attribute all forms of misfortunes: sickness, pestilence, epidemic, famine, sudden deaths, abject poverty etc. to the work of the spirit forces especially the evil ones. Therefore, whenever a misfortune strikes any one of them, the spirit beings are consulted through human agents who are generally or collectively known as medicine men and women (priests, mediums, diviners, magicians etc.) in Berekum, to find out the cause, the spirit being(s) involved and the appropriate ways to address the problem. This paper examines the concept of religion and medicine from the perspective of the ‘traditional Berekum’ people. The paper argues that religion plays a vital role in the practice of traditional medicine in Berekum traditional society and it is difficult to de-couple religion and medicine in this traditional milieu.
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Religion and culture always go together. From the very first day a new person is brought out into this world, s/he starts learning how to live with her or his people, and starts learning their beliefs and values. The person grows up with this knowledge, and it forms a part of his/her life. These beliefs and values are unquestionable from the perspective of that person. They are accepted as natural and normative. If s/he, for example, is brought up in a culture in which kneeling is a form of showing respect, s/he will internalise this, and will always kneel when the act of showing respect is required. For another person who is brought lip in a different culture where standing lip, for example, is regarded as the way of showing respect, kneeling or sitting before a respected individual or occasion can be regarded by a such person as an impoliteness. As we can see, cultural values are subjective, and they are appropriate for the people of a specific culture in which they were fashioned and accepted as normative. What often happens is that when two different cultures meet there is a collision between them, and what often happens is that the one which is supported by power smashes the other and imposes its normative rules on it. When Christianity came to Africa, it was full charged by European way of viewing the world, and in its worldview, anything which was not within the European cultural nornlative frame, was something to get rid of Consciously or unconsciously, Christianity was used as a powerful tool for the West's cultural domination over Africans. The Church demonised African culture , VI] and regarded it as a prototype of anti-Christianity. To become Christians, Africans were required to forsake their life style and assimilate the Western style of living. Things such as drums, xylophones, which were part of African culture, were associated with the demons and thus banned from the lives of the "faithful" African Christians. The memorial ceremonies, which were held for our ancestors, were understood as being a form of idolatry, whereas the church's memory of the saints was regarded as something very Christian. And, if the African culture and practices were abominable for the Western Christian missionaries, its traditional health care system was seen as the ultimate manifestation of the evil. [t is with the desire of reclaiming the legitimacy of African traditional health care system for Africans that 1 set out to examine healing from a cross-cultural perspective, and above all healing in the Bible, and specially Jesus' healings in order to see what is abominable with African traditional medicine.
As shown by research on ‘the social life of medicines,’ pharmaceuticals can be used in a number of ways. Based on research with Ghanaian Pentecostal practitioners and patients in Ghana and Europe, I examine how pills and substances can become points of contact for God. By being prayed upon, pills move from being a medical commodity to becoming a boundary object in the connection created between a sickness, biomedical practices, and the Holy Spirit. It is the unmarked position of the Holy Spirit in the plethora of spirits that makes this possible. Unlike in Catholicism or other religious traditions that work with spirits through objects, the Holy Spirit is not carried in the pills but only amplifies their pharmaceutical potential.
Diseases and Healthcare: The African Indigenous Religion Practitioners’ Perspective in Ghana
E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Issues of diseases and healthcare are very crucial to human life and survival. Africans have always sought to find holistic and impeccable remedies to diseases and sicknesses that disturb human life and survival. Africans being incurably religious have sought to employ religious perspectives in their healing systems. Ghanaians have from time immemorial employed their indigenous or traditional worldview in their healing system or approach to diseases and sicknesses. This paper explores the African indigenous practitioners’ approach to diseases, their causes and solution. It also looks at the traditional healing systems in the face of the Western approach to diseases or healing systems. This work is a result of a discussion of scholarly works on African indigenous religious approaches to diseases and traditional healthcare vis-a-vis the orthodox healing systems. It is the ardent hope of the authors that readers appreciate African indigenous healing systems and how they can be combined...
Verbum et Ecclesia, 2016
There are different streams of healing praxis in Africa today, namely African traditional healing, biomedical healing and spiritual healing (which includes the more recent �touch your TV screen� healing method) among others. These streams offer contemporary African people diverse alternatives with regard to healing. As much as the hegemony of Western biomedicine, as endorsed by missionaries in the past, can no longer serve as a norm in the area of healing, we can also not use the African traditional healing methods and or any other alternative presented to Africa without discernment. This suggests therefore that Reformed mission ecclesiology and missionary practitioners should critically engage the African context, worldview and culture on the matter of healing. It should also engage other forms of spiritual healing methods on offer in the African soil.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The use of an indigenous knowledge system when coming to healing in the Afr...