What Disability Theology Can Teach Science and the Church Part 2

As a Christian with disabilities, I believe that my body has moral significance outside of medicine. I recognize that medicine has been given power to construct and control my body, but my body cannot be reduced to medicine’s schemes. This richer conversation about embodiedness and disability is rarely taken up within bioethics and as a result, bioethicists are often most concerned with how to prevent disability.

[When bioethics and theology do not interact] we lose is a way to connect with the very people we are hoping to speak to and about.

Ciara: Metaphors of the body are prevalent throughout scripture, from the church as the body of Christ, to the symbolism of communion as Christ’s body. How did early Christians understand the body and disability? How have we reinterpreted this?

Devan: This is a difficult question to answer, in part because of the difficulty of defining disability I mentioned earlier. There was no category of “disability” in the Bible in the way we understand it now. “Disability” today encompasses radically different characteristics and identities such as blindness, Down syndrome, multiple sclerosis, and bipolar disorder. Early Christians likely didn’t have just one category like disability to put people into. Instead, it appears that they understood things we might call disabilities as separate conditions with different connotations.

Take blindness for example. It is clear from Scripture that blindness was a prevalent part of the community and that it was sometimes considered some sort of punishment from God. This is likely why Jesus’ followers asked him who had sinned, this man or his parents, so that a man was born blind?

Of course, Jesus answers in a way that is unexpected, saying that neither sinned but that he was born blind so that God might be revealed in him. (John 9:2-3) Like most of Jesus’ sayings, it isn’t clear exactly what he means by this, but it does reveal that there are multiple and conflicting interpretations of various disabilities happening in the first century that Jesus’ disciples and later theologians were contending with. Unfortunately, the notion that disability is a result of sin has never fully been eradicated from Christian theology. Many Christians still believe that various disabilities are caused by sin, either personal sin or the original sin of Adam and Eve. I think it is quite common to believe that everything we call today a ‘disability’ is the result of the Fall.

there are multiple and conflicting interpretations of various disabilities happening in the first century that Jesus’ disciples and later theologians were contending with. Unfortunately, the notion that disability is a result of sin has never fully been eradicated from Christian theology.

Leonard: I am not an expert here. But a few things come to mind that feel important to remember in order to answer your question. The first is that medicine changes. If we’re thinking about the time of Jesus, then the predominant medical model would have been one based on humors. Scientists and medical doctors believed that a person had a certain number of humors and that they had to be balanced in order to be in good health. I do not know how what we now consider disability fared under such a model, but I can imagine not well.

I am also reminded of the cultural and religious upheavals taking place. Rome was the ruling empire during the time of Jesus and this created cultural flashpoints about the perfect or ideal body. Scholars of gymnasiums have told us that Jewish men tried to alter their bodies in order to look more like Romans. Moreover, we know that Greco-Roman art and aesthetics demanded the social presentation of perfected bodies (think about popular sculptures from this period), while Greco-Roman religion valued the beauty of an Aphrodite or Diane and held that gorgons or Medusa were as physically unattractive as they were morally evil.

Ciara: At the end of your article, you write that the work of disability theology is “not only important for the academy and the church, but for all spaces in which ableism continues.” What is ableism, and how can we guard ourselves against this and combat it in our communities of faith?

Devan: Ableism is discrimination and social prejudice against disabled people. Ableism sets up able-bodiedness as preferable, valuable, and normal. Most ableism isn’t overt or even conscious, it’s the way we’ve been taught to see and value normalcy. There is much our churches can do to draw attention to ableism.

1. We can watch our words more carefully. Obviously, we should never use a disability as an insult against others. But we should also notice when we use disabilities as negative metaphors in language (e.g., blind to the truth, crippled with fear, deaf to justice). Our spiritual language, hymns, and Scripture is laden with these metaphors. We should try to use more precise language or give warnings and explanations for when we do use disability negatively. Learning to speak differently may awaken us to new ways of understanding God and ourselves.
2. We can do more to universalize experiences of limitation. All of our bodies and minds are limited in fundamental ways, and these limitations are not always bad (if they were it is hard to explain why Christ came to us in a limited and finite body). Pastors and religious leaders can also begin to name the ways in which they struggle to destigmatize disability and mental illness
3. We need to start allowing people with disabilities to take leadership roles in our congregations. Often within Christianity, disabled people are seen as charity cases, ways for nondisabled people to practice benevolence. Only seeing disabled people this way renders them subordinate and pitiable. When we allow people with disabilities to take on leadership roles, we may begin to understand their experiences as well as their strengths.

First, acknowledge the people with disabilities in your own lives.  When I first began to pay attention to disability, I realized that there were many people in my life who were persons with physical and intellectual disabilities. Trying to comprehend why I didn’t perceive them as people with disabilities or as persons pursuing social justice and the elimination of structural inequalities caused by ableism became my first work.  Remembering people with disabilities in my own life has helped me to ground my conception of disability in material, concrete relationships rather than hypothesized persons.

Remembering people with disabilities in my own life has helped me to ground my conception of disability in material, concrete relationships rather than hypothesized persons.