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

by Brian Brock

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.