Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ (Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability)

by Brian Brock

will tell stories as occasions to display the theological hermeneutics of experience that I understand to be my main contribution to the scholarly discussion of disability.

My aim will be to write his life as we have lived it: together.

By daring publicly to amplify the quiet joy of Adam’s witness I hope to explode some of the layers of uncomfortable avoidance and outright censorship that surround disability in churches, in public discussion of social care policy, and in medical contexts. In each of these contexts most people assume they know what disability is. In fact their views are often skewed by unacknowledged fears of disability as a dark thundercloud threatening to destroy lives and eject people into a desolate life of social isolation, grinding practical difficulties, and unbearable expense. It is difficult for any of us to eradicate the fear evoked by the term “disability,” which threatens at the very least an unbearable diminishment of the life choices available to us. This fear points to an enslavement to the desire to control others, to make them into our images, and to make ourselves into an image of perfection. It is an enslavement that renders our lives, and our societies, frightfully two dimensional—efficient, homogenous, and so unsurprising.12 One way of summarizing the Christian gospel is as an empowerment to risk living as the vulnerable beings we in fact are, to make peace with our limits and blemishes and to delight in the unexpected. Human redemption consists in the recovery of the joy and freedom that come with being content to be creatures rather than aspiring to be gods. The central theological task of this book is to give theological density as well as contemporary tangibility t...

Fear and disability is

None of this is meant to suggest that pain and suffering are not part of the human experiences typically labeled disabilities. The title Wondrously Wounded highlights the entanglement of blessing and suffering at the heart of the story of God’s people.

The body of Christ is the result of God’s gracious attack on the antihuman certainties that keep each fallen human generation estranged from one another.

Facing the possibility that the accessibility movement has hardened problematic views of disability is to confront the central problematic of a theological account of disability: the resistance of the human heart to being claimed and reshaped by genuine difference.

the community of open human hearts.4

Disability is in an overarching and in some ways artificial category that encompasses congenital and acquired physical differences, mental illness and retardation, chronic and acute illnesses, fatal and progressive diseases, temporary and permanent injuries, and a wide range of bodily characteristics considered disfiguring, such as scars, birthmarks, unusual proportions, or obesity. Even though the prototypical disabled person posited in cultural representations never leaves a wheelchair, is totally blind or profoundly deaf, most of the approximately forty million Americans with disabilities have a much more ambiguous relationship to the label . . . . Disability, then, can be painful, comfortable, familiar, alienating, bonding, isolating, disturbing, endearing, challenging, infuriating, or ordinary. Embedded in the complexity of actual human relations, it is always more than the disabled figure can signify.5 The

The vulnerability intrinsic to reliance on the Spirit reveals vulnerability as ultimately not a threat, but the condition of relation, and indeed, its very promise.

Human beings estranged from their Creator have not found suitable words to express all that needs to be said about those currently called disabled. To escape becoming entangled in this us-them thinking, I want to begin differently: from the wonder at the heart of the creaturely life human beings live. I write as a prayer for God to transform misshapen fears and repulsions into joy and delight.

Just as people with bodily impairments can experience being “abled” by intimate and supportive relations with others, so too can loving someone lead to a vicarious internalization of their (largely social) disablement.

While clearly comforting parents confused by the birth of a child who looks very unlike them, Augustine’s wider aim is to normalize human diversity as a natural part of God’s story with creation.

The idea of diversity is not new

disability and the anthropology of political liberalism.11 These accounts position disability as the biologically rooted incapacity of an individual to achieve mainstream pictures of economic productivity and aesthetic beauty.

Similar to results

In such pictures the marginalized earliest Christians depicted the miraculous healings of Jesus as stronger than military might.

Patristic Christianity bequeathed a problem for modern Christians who care about “disability issues”: to escape understanding themselves as those who care for disabled people.

The practice of medicine is a difficult subject because it so deeply shapes modern Westerners’ understanding of what constitutes a good society, a good life, and even a good body.

Internalized norms are far more subtle and powerful tools for keeping order in liberal societies.

“normative norms” that bluntly decree limits to behavior enforced by the threat of state violence can be laid aside in favor of econometric approaches.

“Normality” has now become the behaviors most citizens assume to be normal and which are capable of statistical documentation.

The Bible wants Christians to be members of one another. Christian theology offers a politics of redeemed communion that displaces the politics of both exclusion and inclusion.

Yet the language of inclusion suffers from the same deficits as the earlier Christian model of “charity toward the unfortunate.”

The subject of 1 Corinthians 12 is the renewal, healing, and opening of genuine communion with God and others called church. The chapter is focused on why the body of Christ is

Nevertheless, in recent decades disability theologians have largely embraced the inclusion agenda.

Jean Vanier has drawn on the chapter more deeply and systematically, his readings influencing several disability theologians to position the chapter as a treatise on the dynamics of a community of friendship.

The apostle offers a single answer to all three questions. The politics of the body of Christ arise from an economy of service to one another for mutual upbuilding. In the hospitality of the Holy Spirit, Christians discover that they never escape the role of recipient. The Spirit thus upends widespread assumptions about who the “we” is and who needs to be “included.” In the working of divine mercy that is the Holy Spirit, human beings receive their being in Christ from each other, in community.

On being “abled” by others, see Eiesland, Disabled God, 38, 103. The church is notorious among people labeled disabled for the ferociousness of its judgmental gaze, as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s daughter and sufferer of chronic fatigue syndrome Katherine Welby has observed. “‘You can feel quite uncomfortable [in church], like people are looking at you, like you’re not paying attention or not engaging properly.’ She says more flexibility and acceptance is needed. ‘If someone goes in and the first week they’re there they get tutted at, then they’re not going to come back.’” Beth Rose, “Archbishop Justin Welby: I Don’t Pray for My Daughter’s Disability,” BBC News, July 6, 2018.

Eiesland drew heavily on liberation and correlationist theological frameworks as she sought a Christian theology more open to the whole breadth of the human condition. My divergence with Eiesland is in how the Christian tradition is assessed. We agree, as Hans Reinders has pithily put it, that theology’s responsibility “is to clean up its own mess.” Disability, Providence, and Ethics, 10. But unlike her I will undertake this critical work, not by stripping out problematic aspects of historical Christian faith, but instead attempting to display the rounded fullness I have found constantly present in the broad Christian tradition of thinking about the human. To take this approach demands being constantly on guard against extremes: either assuming Christians have always been resistant to what they took to be disabled lives or falling into nostalgia about a supposedly pristine past in which Christians loved everyone without regard. The task of Christians today is to face our tradition as a work of repenting of the sin that has so obviously been carried by malformed theological ideas and church practices over the centuries.

Monteith maps the conceptual convergences between Paul’s argument and the modern concept of inclusion.

“Another fundamental text for L’Arche is 1 Cor. 12, which remains an enigma for me.” Jean Vanier, in Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World, 36. Vanier later comments, less modestly, that the chapter “is the heart of faith, what it means to be the church . . . In other words, people who are the weakest and least presentable are indispensable to the body” (74). This sentiment was already evident in the 1989 first edition of Vanier’s foundational Community and Growth, in which the dominant imagery is arguably that of the community conceived as a body exchanging spiritual gifts and anchored in its vulnerable members (as seen especially 1 Cor 12:22, 24-26). Vanier, Community and Growth, 49. Vanier’s seminal work on friendship is surveyed in Jason Reimer Greig, Reconsidering Intellectual Disability: L’Arche, Medical Ethics, and Christian Friendship (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2015), ch. 6. Vanier’s account of friendship provides the theological core of Hans Reinders’ Receiving the Gift of Friendship. These appropriations develop a more explicit ontological grounding for Vanier’s account of friendship based on the perichoretic divine self-giving. The redemption of human relationships is positioned as flowing out of this intertrinitarian love, via the work of the Holy Spirit, to create a community of friendship.