Disability and the Way of Jesus

Holistic Healing in the Gospels and the Church

Bethany McKinney Fox

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830872381
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Disabilità in sociologia

- 2019 IVP Readers' Choice AwardWhat does healing mean for people with disabilities? The Gospels are filled with accounts of Jesus offering physical healing. But even as churches today seek to follow the way of Jesus, people with disabilities all too often experience the very opposite of healing and life-giving community: exclusion, judgment, barriers. Misinterpretation and misapplication of biblical healing narratives can do great damage, yet those who take the Bible seriously mustn't avoid these passages either. Bethany McKinney Fox believes that Christian communities are better off when people with disabilities are an integral part of our common life. In Disability and the Way of Jesus, she considers how the stories of Jesus' healings can guide us toward mutual thriving. How did Jesus' original audience understand his works of healing, and how should we relate to these texts today? After examining the healing narratives in their biblical and cultural contexts, Fox considers perspectives from medical doctors, disability scholars, and pastors to more fully understand what Jesus does as he heals and how he points the way for relationships with people with disabilities. Personal reflections from Christians with disabilities are featured throughout the book, which concludes with suggestions for concrete practices adaptable to a variety of church settings. Bridging biblical studies, ethics, and disability studies with the work of practitioners, Fox provides a unique resource that is both theologically grounded and winsomely practical. Disability and the Way of Jesus provides new lenses on holistic healing for scholars, laypeople, and ministry leaders who care about welcoming all people as Jesus would.

Chapter One

BRIDGING THE GAP

OUR CONTEXT AND CULTURE in the modern West is vastly different from the context and culture of Jesus two thousand years ago. So to create contemporary practices based on Jesus’ own practices, we need to bridge that gap of time and place. But before I describe a helpful method for doing that, we first need a sense of just how wide the gap can be. Anne Fadiman, in her acclaimed book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, does a great job of illustrating this as she writes about the life of young Lia Lee.1

Lia Lee’s story is marked by cultural differences and misunderstandings about health and medical care that have tragic consequences in her life and for her family. Lia was a daughter of Hmong refugees from Laos living in California. She began to have seizures during her infancy. One of her early, severe seizures led her parents, Foua and Nao Kao Lee, to seek emergency medical care at the local hospital. From the start it was clear that her parents’ perceptions of Lia’s illness and the type of healing she needed could not have been more different from her physicians’ perceptions. This first visit to the emergency room marked the beginning of several years of clashes between the family’s perspective on sickness, healing, and the body, and the perspective of Western biomedicine, all with ramifications on the treatment of Lia.

Hospital physicians diagnosed Lia with epilepsy and prescribed a complicated regimen of medications with very unpleasant side effects. Lia’s parents, however, identified her condition as qaug dab peg, caused by her soul being lost, translated as “the spirit catches you and you fall down.” As part of the Western biomedical system, Lia’s doctors believed her epilepsy to be a potentially life-threatening illness requiring intensive and sometimes uncomfortable medical treatment to keep her seizures under control. But her parents, though concerned by some of Lia’s more severe seizures, regarded her condition as a mark of distinction, demonstrating a special connection to the spiritual realm and perhaps signifying her vocation as a healer. For them healing would mean consulting a Hmong folk-healer (a txiv neeb) to sacrifice pigs and chickens in an effort to call Lia’s soul back to her body.

Due to these incredibly different ideological starting points about Lia’s condition, the Lees and the hospital personnel rarely understood what the other proposed or why they deemed it helpful. Lia’s illness progressed over a period of several years until finally she lost most of her brain activity and later passed away. The Lees blamed the interventions of Western medicine for the deterioration of her health, while the hospital personnel believed Lia would have fared better if her parents had more closely followed their medical recommendations. Given the constant misunderstandings, it is no surprise that one of the physicians involved in Lia’s case believed that the ideological gulf between the Lees and their doctors was “unbridgeable” and the regrettable outcome was inevitable. He recognized the deep, pervasive chasm between the way he and his colleagues understood bodies and health and the way the Lees understood them, and he felt their viewpoints and concepts were so different that they could never truly understand each other.2

Most of those involved in Lia’s care over the years have admitted that neither side grew to appreciate or even understand the other’s approach and methodology. One of Lia’s nurses likened the conversations between Lia’s parents and her doctors to the myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned to roll a boulder up a hill over and over only to have it roll back down just before he reaches the top. Both the Lees and the doctors would probably have identified with Sisyphus in the analogy—feeling that they kept trying to do what was best for Lia but having their plans and progress continually thwarted by interference from the other.

Fadiman further illuminates this divide by explaining that when a Hmong patient walks into a Western medical clinic complaining of a stomachache, the physician will perceive the problem as something in the body that needs to be diagnosed and treated medically. However, the Hmong patient is actually complaining that “the entire universe [is] out of balance.”3 In Hmong culture as Fadiman describes it, illness is connected to religion, society, economics, music, and all of life—which is hugely different from the individualized, body-focused way those trained in Western biomedicine tend to view it. This returns us to Lia’s physician’s claim that the chasm between two divergent perspectives on illness and healing is unbridgeable and to the vital question of whether he is right.

As a Westerner in the twenty-first century seeking the healing practices of today’s churches to be informed by the healing ministry of Jesus, this is a key issue. After all, in this case there is not only the cultural divide between the West and the Near East—a divide similar to Lia Lee’s situation—but engagement with Jesus means engagement with the ancient Near East. If two cultures existing in the same time period and interfacing directly were not able to understand one another (the Hmong and Western biomedical cultures), what hope is there that a comparable cultural divide compounded by a two thousand year temporal gap might be bridged?

MODELS FROM MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY FOR EXPLORING HEALING ACROSS CULTURAL DIVIDES

Without question there are deep differences between the Western culture of biomedicine and the understanding of sickness and healing in Jesus’ context. But unlike Lia Lee’s doctor who believed a large cultural gap like this to be unbridgeable, medical anthropologists devote much of their efforts to just that kind of bridge-building. Their work explores ways to bring wildly different understandings of sickness and healing into conversation.

Ethnomedicine, within the larger discipline of medical anthropology, makes crosscultural comparisons that look broadly at what issues pertain to health in a given context. It pays attention to bodies as well as ideologies, physical life along with social life, and how people understand healing in relation to their body, their family, their larger political context, and the universe.4

A key component of any study of one culture by a member of another, like a modern Westerner exploring the healing work of Jesus, is the acknowledgement that the person studying is an outsider to the culture they observe. Biblical scholar John Pilch uses the term emic to describe “an insider perspective.”5 We are the outsiders seeking this emic understanding in regard to Jesus’ healing acts, to know how those experiencing the events firsthand would have understood their significance. In contrast to emic is the etic understanding—the outsider’s perspective—which refers to how interpreters make sense of the same events in their own cultural terms.6 Since our goal is to shape healing practices in contemporary Western churches that are modeled after the healing activity of Jesus, then as Bruce Malina advises, the dialogue will have to move from etic to emic and back again.7 We will need to be clear about the cultural starting point of particular Western interpreters, explore how those perspectives interact with the very different perspective of the actors in the text, then return to thinking about our modern context and the text’s ethical implications.

The first step for outsiders to gain an insider perspective is to become as clear as possible about their own perspective, and all of the viewpoints, values, emotions, and biases that go with it.8 This is why Western interpreters of the healing narratives need to have a general understanding of the values of biomedicine and the assumptions within this system, to notice when these modern values and assumptions might be impacting how we read the biblical text.9 Then, we must learn as much as possible about the viewpoint, values, and assumptions of the culture we seek to engage.10 Prominent medical anthropologist Robert Hahn calls this intentional listening a key anthropological practice for understanding the viewpoint and perspective of another culture.11

The Gospels especially provide insight into their culture’s perspective because they are emic documents written by cultural insiders giving their perspectives on what was happening.12 Since the Gospels are written in the same general temporal and geographical context as the events they describe, they provide glimpses into how people in that context ascribed meaning to what they witnessed (or heard about) and how they, as insiders, made cultural sense of what took place.13 They are emic documents because these tellings reveal how particular narrators framed and interpreted the healing events through the social and cultural paradigms of their time.

One caveat, raised by sociocultural anthropologist Mark Nichter: cultures are hardly ever monolithic in their viewpoints and practices around sickness and healing.14 Neither our Western culture with the predominance of biomedicine, nor the first-century culture surrounding Jesus, has a fixed, singular set of values and assumptions that everybody shares. Pluralism exists in every community or culture. This is a helpful caution, and why in this project I use more general, widely agreed-upon themes and values both from Jesus’ culture and our own. These brushstrokes are broad enough to be largely uncontroversial in their descriptions but with enough particularity to engage in helpful crosscultural dialogue to construct a contemporary ethic for healing in the way of Jesus.

Story

REV. MATTHEW ARGUIN

London, Ontario, Canada
Associate Priest for St. Alban the Martyr and the Church of St. Jude
Diocese of Huron (Anglican)

“I admit it. After thirty-three years with CP, three years of ordained ministry, and two years actively thinking about disability and theology, I’m still unsure how to respond to folks who earnestly pray for my CP to leave my body so I can stand up and walk.”

It strikes me how relevant this Facebook post I made two years ago still is, at age thirty-five, with a couple more years of priesthood under my belt. When it comes to my cerebral palsy (CP) I have heard every theological explanation under the sun. I have been told that my disability is a visible sign of the brokenness of the world, a gift from God to help me empathize with those who are excluded and on the margins. As helpful as that might be in the call to ministry, I’ve never been fully convinced that all the inconveniences caused by spasticity are gifts that I particularly want to have. Especially when a sudden noise or tap on the shoulder causes me to inadvertently dump half of my coffee on my lap at 6 a.m. when I just want that sweet, sweet caffeine rush!

I have been told that being born this way was simply a medical mistake, and that God had nothing to do with it. The doctors simply did not cut the umbilical cord in time and as a result I have to live with the consequences.

By far though, the most frequent explanation I have received from folks is that my being in a wheelchair is simply a matter of faith. If only I could believe a little more, have a little more trust in God’s grace and mercy, I could get up, walk, and be healed! I’ll never forget one experience I had while making my way through a local mall. A man with long hair, a beard, and a very large cross around his neck approached and asked: “Do you believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior?” Initially I had to stifle some laughter, as I felt the answer to this question was pretty obvious given that I was wearing a clergy shirt and collar, but I decided to engage his question seriously, and the following conversation ensued:

“Yes, I do believe that. In fact, you might say I work for him.”

“Do you believe that all things are possible through him?”

“Of course.”

“So if I prayed for you right now, do you believe that he would make you stand up and walk?”

“He might, but I don’t think it’s very li...