Body Parts

A Theological Anthropology

Michelle Voss Roberts

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506418568
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506418575
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christians have traditionally claimed that humans are created in the image of God (imago Dei), but they have consistently defined that image in ways that exclude people from full humanity. The most well-known definition locates the image in the rational soul, which is constructed in such a way that women, children, and many persons with disabilities are found deficient.Body Parts claims the importance of embodiment, difference, and limitation--not only as descriptions of the human condition but also as part of the imago Dei itself. This thesis is inspired by a parallel claim in an Indian tradition that posits the reflection of the divine body in humanity. Its thirty-six parts invite Christians to consider how consciousness, limitations, mental and emotional capacities, organs of sensation and action, and elements are reflections of divinity. Each chapter pursues openings in the Christian theological tradition in order to imagine these sets of "body parts" as the image of God.

2

The Limited Body (Part 1)

In the biblical fall narrative, God instructs Adam and Eve not to eat—not even to touch!—the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. The penalty for transgressing this rule would be death (Gen 3:3). Although they do not die immediately, “death” includes a range of difficulties regarding birth, family, and livelihood (Gen 3:19). As a bookend for this narrative, Augustine imagines heaven as a place where such limits are overcome, “where no evil at all can touch us, no good will be out of reach; where life is to be one long laud extolling God, who will be all in all; where there will be no weariness to call for rest, no need to call for toil, no place for any energy but praise.”^[1] He writes of imperishable bodies, vigorous minds, and a freedom of the will that “sin will have no power to tempt.”^[2]

Limits appear to be the effect of sin in this familiar narrative. Limits seem to depart from God’s intent for humanity to be healthy, whole, even immortal. In addition to individual physical and mental limits, collective limits are also attributed to sin, as when God creates linguistic differences after the people of Babel attempt to build a tower reaching heaven (Gen 11:9).

Jesus moderates, but does not entirely abrogate, this theme. His opponents challenge him with the case of a man born blind: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus appears to reject the reasoning behind the question: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (John 9:2–3). Physical limitation, at least in this case, is not punishment. Nevertheless, Jesus grants the man sight, and, adding to the confusion, he elsewhere tells the recipients of miraculous healings, “Your faith has made you well” (see Mark 5:34, 10:52). Does salvation guarantee healing? Will God remove limitations, if one only has enough faith?

Western thinkers after the Enlightenment aimed to transcend limits as they flirted with the idea of boundless human progress. An increase of knowledge and innovation could throw off the shackles of the past, uncover the laws of nature, and create a society free of conflict and disease—a salvation of our own making, in which limitation would be overcome. However, as modern optimism waned with the twentieth century, Christian theologians again needed to come to grips with the limitations inherent in the human condition. How could supposedly enlightened societies harbor such prejudice and, aided by technology, wreak such destruction? How could new freedoms usher in unprecedented economic inequality? How could the best minds have missed the unforeseen ecological and health hazards harbored within the Trojan horse of scientific innovation?

Questions such as these prompted twentieth-century Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr to offer up a paradoxical view of human nature as simultaneously finite and free, temporal and transcendent, creature and the image of God. For him, this paradox lies behind modernity’s quandaries. It also provides individual and collective occasions for sin. Niebuhr remains one of the most admired Christian public thinkers in the United States. His impact on subsequent ethical and political thought offers a substantial opening in the Christian tradition for reconsidering the role of limitation in theological anthropology.

Niebuhr, Limits, and the imago Dei

The paradox of finitude and freedom is evident in Niebuhr’s treatment of the imago Dei, which he defines as self-transcendence. In his analysis, the human person is not only able to will and think, as in models of the divine image as the rational soul, but is also aware of thinking and willing. This existential orientation allows a person to transcend nature by relating to a supernatural end, but it exists in tension with human finitude.

For Niebuhr, this paradox leads to errors on both sides. On the one side lies an overinflated view of human nature. Neoplatonist Christian thinkers, for example, hone in on humanity’s inherent connection to God, but they tend to forget the limits of creaturehood. When the early Augustine “sought God in the mystery of self-consciousness,” for instance, he came dangerously “close to the deification of self-consciousness.”^[3] On the other side, we can err by deprecating created existence, as when the apostle Paul associates death with sin and the later Augustine gets mired in ambivalence about sex and the body. These great thinkers contradict a basic biblical teaching “that the created world, the world of finite, dependent and contingent existence, is not evil by reason of its finiteness.”^[4] Finitude and limitation must not be equated with sin, because they are part of God’s good creation.

Though part of creation’s goodness, finitude nevertheless becomes the occasion for sin, says Niebuhr, especially sins of pride. Because no one is the whole of reality, we are anxious. Our perspectives are necessarily limited, conditioned by our time and place in history and our community of origin. We cannot be conscious of all things, as if from a God’s-eye view. Lacking self-sufficiency, dependent individuals are driven by anxiety to shore up the self. In our insecurity, we do our best to contradict the basic truth of our contingency, but we cannot do this “without transgressing the limits which have been set for [a] life. Therefore all human life is involved in the sin of seeking security at the expense of other life.”^[5] When we deny our limits, we become proud. If we have the ability to dominate others, we usually will.

Subsequent generations have appreciated the freshness and relevance of Niebuhr’s ethical insight, but they have also observed his own limitations. We will explore in the next chapter how, even as Niebuhr challenges many of the class-based ideologies of his day, he lacks resolve in the face of racial injustice. His persuasive analysis is limited by his own time, place, and privilege. Perhaps most striking, Niebuhr’s emphasis on self-transcendence leaves bodies out of the picture, thus leaving a gap too easily filled by ideology. Other voices have, therefore, been necessary to identify how factors such as race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and ability contribute to these dynamics.

From a critical disability perspective, the centrality of self-transcendence in Niebuhr’s anthropology betrays an ableist orientation. For him, the paradox of human nature is that, even as our limits constrain us, we humans can imagine transcending them. But, as discussed in the last chapter, because only some of us can imagine this, Niebuhr’s ideal of self-transcendence as the imago Dei falls short of an inclusive theological anthropology. Like other anthropologies that reduce the image of God to a substance or capacity—here, awareness of oneself, others, and God—it excludes people who do not exhibit it—most particularly people for whom profound intellectual disabilities make them unable to differentiate themselves from their environment. His view, like all views, is partial—showing vividly why a variegated model of the human being is so important for Christian thought.

This chapter approaches such a variegated model by putting Niebuhr in conversation with Deborah Creamer’s Christian theology of disability and with the non-dual Saiva categories of the limited body. Each adds a layer of analysis that supplements the others to build toward an inclusive imago Dei.

A Limits Model of Human Being

Christian theologians of disability, like Niebuhr, refute the idea that limits are evil or that God imposes them as punishment for sin; yet in churches, popular suspicion lingers that disability might indeed be the result of sin or unbelief. In order to shift away from the logic of blame that has often governed Christian thinking about disability, theologians of disability further unravel the associations between sin and human limits.

Perhaps most significantly for theological anthropology, disability studies refuses to place disability in a dichotomous relation with normality. Not only is everyone finite and, therefore, limited, but all people also experience disability at some point in their lives. Childhood, old age, injury, and recovery from illness inevitably incapacitate people to various degrees. As Elizabeth Stuart reframes the category, “The contrast is not between the able and the disabled but between the temporarily able and the disabled.”^[6]

Accordingly, Deborah Creamer’s limits model for theological anthropology starts from the premise that human limitations are normal. Noting that “disability is actually more normal than any other state of embodiedness,” she suggests that a theological anthropology should “start with the human variations of ability as the norm, and to build theory and theology from that starting place.”^[7] This model can attend to people’s movement in and out of various degrees of ability and the various ways people might identify with their limits.

Creamer distinguishes her approach from other models in the disability rights movement. In the early stages, the movement assumed a medical model that defined disability in terms of the individual body and its functionality. Developed concurrently with “professional and academic disciplines that concentrate upon the management, repair, and maintenance of physical and cognitive capacity” this model aims to “normalize” people with disabilities, for example through vocational training or prostheses to enable participation in the workplace.^[8] Disability and normality remain polarized in the medical model. Furthermore, by emphasizing the functionality of particular body parts, the medical model plays into the late capi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Diacritics
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Conscious Body
• The Limited Body (Part 1)
• The Limited Body (Part 2)
• The Subjective Body
• The Engaged Body
• The Elemental Body
• Epilogue: The Eschatological Body
• Bibliography
• Index