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

by Brian Brock

“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.