Wondrously Wounded

Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ

Brian R. Brock

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781481310147
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Discapacidades en sociología

The church welcomes all—or it should.

The church has long proven itself a safe refuge despite the sad reality that it can be, and has been, unwelcoming toward those perceived as different. This is especially true of the contemporary church's response to those with disabilities—a response often at surprising variance with its historic practices of care. The church once helped shape western morality to cherish these individuals with love and acceptance. It is thus ironic when today's church neglects this care, or practices care with no awareness of the rich theological history out of which such moral sensibilities originally emerged. In Wondrously Wounded, Brian Brock reclaims the church's historic theology of disability and extends it to demonstrate that people with disabilities, like all created in God's image, are servants of God's redemptive work.

Brock divides his volume into five parts. Partone chronicles how early Christianity valued and cared for those with disabilities, putting into practice Jesus' teachings about divine mercy in decidedly countercultural ways. Parttwo details how a rise in the fear of disability tempted the church away from these merciful practices as well as its confession of the infinite worth of all God has created. Partthree traces how the fear of difference continues to negatively shape contemporary practices in today's schools, churches, and politics. Partfour lays the foundations of a vision of Christian life that is resistant to this pervasive fear. Finally, Partfive shows how the recognition of all people as part of the body of Christ not only demonstrates the love of Christ but displaces the fear of disability in a manner that invites the church beyond even the most ambitious contemporary hopes for full inclusion.

Brock interweaves his historical and theological analysis with the narrative of his own disabled son, Adam. These stories vividly bring into view the vulnerability, as well as the power, of the disabled in contemporary society. Ultimately, Brock argues, those with disabilities are conduits of spiritual gifts that the church desperately needs. Wondrously Wounded is an appeal to the church to find itself broken and remade by the presence of Christ on offer in the lives of those society has labeled "disabled."

Part I

Disability in the Christian Tradition

1

Wonders from Jesus to Augustine

A Pastoral Dilemma: Wonder or Monster?

Many strange and wonderful stories come down to us from the first centuries of the Christian era, but few are stranger than the story of Augustine’s strange vocations. Early in the fifth century CE, a Christian bishop in a provincial port city on the southern edge of the Mediterranean took up a theme that had never received sustained treatment by Christians: how to understand the birth of an abnormal child. Like everyone else at that time, Augustine of Hippo understood such a birth as a clear departure from the orderly progress of nature. Questions would immediately be swirling about the probity of the child’s parents in the bedroom, about the fortunes of the community into which the baby was born, and about whether the baby was in fact even human. By beginning with this last question, Augustine opens questions about the hermeneutics of viewing the body that reverberate down to the present day.1

Christians, too, have heard the many stories circulating in pagan culture about “certain monstrous races of men.”2

If these tales are to be believed, it may be asked whether such monsters are descended from the sons of Noah, or rather from that one man from whom the sons of Noah themselves have come. Some of these are said to have only one eye, in the middle of their forehead. Others have feet which point backwards, behind their legs. Others combine in themselves the nature of both sexes, having the right breast of a man and the left of a woman, and, when they mate, they take it in turns to beget and conceive. Others have no mouths and live only by breathing through their nostrils. Others again are only a cubit high, and these are called Pygmies by the Greeks, after their word for a cubit, pygme. . . . It is not, of course, necessary to believe in all the kinds of men which are said to exist. But anyone who is born anywhere as a man (that is, as a rational and mortal animal), no matter how unusual he may be to our bodily senses in shape, colour motion, sound, or in any natural power or part or quality, derives from the original and first-created man; and no believer will doubt this. It is, however, clear what constitutes the natural norm in the majority of cases and what, in itself, is a marvellous rarity.3

This being Augustine, the pastoral is intertwined with the exegetical, in this case a question about the repopulation of the earth after the flood. After asking how animals released from the ark could have reached even far flung ocean islands, he has taken up the question of whether, as the myths of the pagans indicate, there might be other races of humanlike beings.4 His conclusion is unambiguous: human beings are creatures born from other humans, and therefore must be affirmed as rational in kind and in possession of a rational soul. He also insists that every human being in existence is good because they are created by God exactly as they are.

For God is the Creator of all things: He Himself knows where and when anything should be, or should have been, created; and He knows how to weave the beauty of the whole out of the similarity and diversity of its parts. The man who cannot view the whole is offended by what he takes to be the deformity of a part; but this is because he does not know how it is to be adapted or related to the whole. We know of men who were born with more than five fingers or five toes. This is a trivial thing and not any great divergence from the norm. God forbid, however, that someone who does not know why the Creator has done what He has done should be foolish enough to suppose that God has in such cases erred in allotting the number of human fingers. So, then, even if a greater divergence should occur, He whose work no one may justly condemn knows what He has done.5

Scripture, for Augustine, is never read well without one eye on the material world, and here his earthy empiricism yields the observation that most people seem to be born in a rather predictable configuration. Hence the pastoral question: how should parents whose child seems different, out of the ordinary, perceive this child? After all, as bewildering as it might be for the individuals involved, it is not exactly a rare occurrence.

Who could call to mind all the human infants who have been born very unlike those who were most certainly their parents? It cannot be denied, however, that these derive their origin from that one man, Adam; and the same is therefore true of all those races which, by reason of their bodily differences, are said to have deviated from the usual pattern of nature exhibited by most—indeed by almost the whole—of mankind. If these races are included in the definition of ‘human’, that is, if they are rational and mortal animals, then it must be admitted that they trace their lineage from that same one man, the first father of all mankind.6

A theological question remains that goes to the heart of Augustine’s pastoral response to the parents of an apparently anomalous child. If there are races of different sorts of human beings, they must have been created by God for a reason.

Perhaps it was so that, when monsters are born of men among us, as they must be, we should not think them the work of an imperfect craftsman: perhaps it was so that we should not suppose that, despite the wisdom with which He fashions the nature of human beings, God has on this occasion erred. In which case, it ought not to seem absurd to us that, just as some monsters occur within the various races of mankind, so there should be certain monstrous races within the human race as a whole. I shall, then, conclude my discussion of the question with a tentative and cautious answer. Either the written accounts which we have of some of these races are completely worthless; or, if such creatures exist, they are not men; or, if they are men, they are descended from Adam.7

Augustine’s pastoral response offers all Christians a densely layered accounting of the unexpectedly formed human child. A child’s body is legible as a work of God in the same way as the myths of fabulous races.8 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.

Even more strikingly, Augustine urges Christians to read this expected appearance of the unexpected not as freakish or repulsive but a special communicative act of God. “Not many years ago, within living memory, a person was born in the East who had two heads, two chests, four hands, as though he were two persons, but one stomach, and two feet, as though he were one. And he lived long enough and the case was so well known that many people went to see the wonder.”9 Disability, the divinely communicative “wonder” of a loving Creator. It had not always been thus. This chapter tells the story of the transformation of the ancient world’s views of the human that arose with the advent of Jesus Christ. In so doing it sets out some of the fundamental insights necessary for a Christian account of the human phenomena we today label disabilities.

The Political Potency of a Healing Jesus

The roots of the revolutionary understanding of the human that developed in the patristic period lay in the New Testament. The revolutionary nature of the New Testament’s view of human life has, however, been masked for many modern readers by the tendency to picture Jesus’ healing activity as not unlike that of the modern doctor. Since those labeled disabled often experience modern medicine as aiming for a healing that looks like an attempt to make them “normal,” the specter of Jesus being an irresistibly powerful healer has appeared to many as a decidedly threatening prospect.10 To recover the roots of the creative practices of Christians in the patristic period requires revisiting the Jesus who inspired them.

Modern views of healing rest on very narrowly conceived presumptions about human life. The phrase “deficiency in need of a cure” is shorthand for the convergence of what has come to be called the medical model of 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. Given the dominance of medical accounts of health and liberal political philosophies throughout the modern period, it is unsurprising that post-Enlightenment thinkers have often figured Jesus as an otherworldly healer. This Jesus gathers outcasts and sufferers to himself for a cleansing and healing while remaining unsullied by their deficiencies. The Jesus of the transfiguration is taken to present the icon of the resurrected body for which every human being ought to hope.12 To present Jesus as a precursor of the modern medical project is to annex him as an ally of a violently paternalistic desire to fix every so-called disabled body to make it “normal.”13

It is both unlikely and anachronistic to assume that the earliest Christians understood Jesus as the great eradicator of disability, a view equally hard to square with the evidence of Scripture. The medicalization of the Messiah is only achievable by overlooking the characteristic insistence of the Old Testament narratives on Israel’s identification with the oppressed slaves of Egypt. To erase the defacing bondage of Israel obscures in turn the pride of place the writers of the Synoptic Gospels gave to the vision of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. The Jesus of the Synoptics is no serene Olympian, but grotesque: “despised, rejected, a man of suffering, acquainted with infirmity, one from whom others hide their faces.”14

Being predominantly from the underclasses, Christians in the early centuries gravitated to the miracle stories. These stories offered them a healer and liberator who freed people from the disfiguring oppression under which they groaned.15 The story of the people of God whose bodies had been subjected to the political whims of the rulers of Egypt, Babylon, and now Rome was continuously concerned about slavery of every type—and Jesus’ power to bring release from it. When these early Christians heard rumors of Jesus’ miracles, what excited them was the destabilization of the powers that ruled their own age that they promised. Jesus had the power to effectively disrupt the prevailing imperial definitions of a worthwhile life.16 Jesus’ healing miracles were claimed by the earliest Christians as a direct challenge to the prescriptive regimes of control by the ruling political powers. This is why, for them, Jesus’ miracles were powerfully hopeful signs. A more biblically rounded account of Jesus’ healing activity understands it as an attack not on the ethical claims characteristic of the Roman status quo, but on the whole ethos that grounded it.

Liberation from bondage is the key term. The New Testament positions Christians as people looking for and living into the liberation offered by Israel’s Messiah now, a tangible release from the powers that break and maim human life.17 The potency of early Christian hope that the reign of the lowly servant king would overturn the oppressive rule of the pagan emperors is signaled by a deluge of images in the first Christian centuries of Jesus as a healer and miracle worker.18 This linkage of Jesus’ healing with the breaking of the denuding rule of the powers of the age requires some unpacking to be intelligible in contemporary terms.

The intentionally spectacular and highly martial procession of the Roman emperor on parade was a pageant designed to evoke the fear and awe that renders a population docile and subservient before an irresistible power. Such parades were called in Latin the emperor’s “adventus.” It was thus a direct challenge to this tradition when the earliest Christians called the triumphal entry of Jesus on Palm Sunday Jesus’ advent. A multitude of early pictures and carvings depict Jesus making his advent in the highly biblically symbolic city of Jerusalem not on a gilded horse-drawn chariot of war but riding sidesaddle (as women did) on a lowly donkey made miraculously docile by the power of his touch. In such pictures the marginalized earliest Christians depicted the miraculous healings of Jesus as stronger than military might. Even riding a donkey, this Jesus was overthrowing the merely military might of the very power who crucified him—the imperial rulers. It was their excitement about this power to free and liberate and restore that so energized and emboldened the Christians of the first centuries, and it is likely that these images and the ideas they promulgated ultimately played a pivotal role in the fourth-century triumph of Christianity that drew the patristic era to a close.19

This Jesus might have been lowly, but he was also a miracle worker throwing down the politically powerful. The earliest Christians grasped the political explosiveness of this prominent strand of the New Testament. After the miraculous conception of Jesus, Luke depicts Mary as speaking of this trait of the Messiah in its most potent form:

. . . his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear him . . . .

He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly

The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away.

He has come to the help of Israel his servant, mindful of his mercy

—according to the promise he made to our ancestors—

Of his mercy to Abraham and to his descendants forever. (Luke 1:50-55, New Jerusalem translation)

Though Jesus’ healings were associated with political potency, this potency was not the promise to normalize every human body, but...