“He Hath No Form Nor Comeliness”: The Disabled God and an Alternative Theology of Physical Disability
‘Tis not the continent, but the contained,
That pleasance makes or prison, loose or chained.
What groweth to its height demands no higher;
The limit limits not, but the desire.
Francis Thompson, “Epilogue: To the Poet’s Sitter”
I. A Liberatory Theology of Disability: Nancy Eiesland’s Argument
Nancy Eieisland’s first published book, The Disabled God, is subtitled Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Eiesland’s efforts to apply disability studies to the discipline of theology trace their motivation to Eiesland’s own experience with a congenital joint disorder, a condition that relegated her from birth to wheelchairs, braces, and a series of complicated surgeries. Her life story intersected with her vocation as a theologian – Dr. Eiesland is currently a professor of the sociology of religion at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology – to produce this very personal 1994 study in disability theology.
Eiesland describes two ways in which the church has failed to establish a healthy relationship with its disabled members: theologically and practically. The church’s primary theoretical error, according to her, has been to accept what she refers to as “an individual or functional limitation approach to disability,” or what Lennard J. Davis would call “the hegemony of normalcy.” Where Davis accuses literature of perpetuating the myth of “normalcy” by encouraging readers to identify with the normativity and universality of main characters, Eiesland accuses the church of failing to identify with disabled parishioners precisely because they fail to conform to their images of normativity and universality. For both theorists, the problem lies not in the challenges posed by the disability itself, but in the failure of the majority to integrate the disabled. The American Lutheran Church defines people with disabilities as individuals “whose difficulties are sufficiently severe to set them apart from the norm or ordinary ways of living, learning and doing things.” This definition is typical of the Christian response to disability that Eiesland documents insofar as, firstly, it marginalizes the disabled by placing them outside the norm, and, secondly, it places the responsibility for accommodation on the disabled individuals themselves by locating the disability within the individual rather than within society’s “architectural and attitudinal barriers.”
Having mishandled the task of defining disability, the church also commits three fatal theological errors in its ministry towards those it has so defined: an insistence on a link between disability and moral character, a doctrine of virtuous suffering, and a network of charity that relies upon segregation and marginalization. There is considerable scriptural support for the longstanding Christian belief that disability is linked to personal sin. When Jesus heals the lame man by the pool of Bethesda, he sends him away saying, “Go and sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.” The very concept of a just God is suggestive of such a doctrine – that God’s wrath is bodily punishment, and vice versa. Obviously, strict adherence to this doctrine of divine retribution through disability is complicated by the existence of congenital disability like Eiesland’s own, which is inflicted from before birth.
The church has attempted to temper the lesson of John 5:14 by reinterpreting disability as divine testing, special training in the virtue of humility that God sends to people with the strength to handle such a life. Eiesland is dissatisfied with this alternative also, pointing out that it still establishes a wall of separation between the “temporarily able” church and the disabled. Such marginalization is gentler than the marginalization that comes from condemnation of the disabled for their supposed sin, but does nothing to lessen the isolation and depression that disabled Christians feel, nor does it give the church any motivation to rectify “unjust social situations” that fail to accommodate disability. Extolling virtues gained through suffering makes alleviation of that suffering seem less urgent.
When the church does take steps to alleviate the suffering of the disabled, its efforts to do so have the ultimate effect of reinforcing those attitudes and social institutions which cause the suffering in the first place. Ministry to the disabled has historically taken the form of almsgiving and healing, both of which, in Eiesland’s opinion, perpetuate the indignity of disability that is the primary source of its misery. According to her social accommodation model, a better response would be for the church to incorporate disabled members into its community by making church life more accessible. The strongest evidence of the church’s failure to engage in this kind of ministry is the American Lutheran Church’s decision to deny ordination to people with disabilities on the grounds that it would interfere with the fulfillment of their responsibilities. The ALC, while declaring that handicapped Lutherans “have the right to participate fully in society and utilize community service[s] the same as every other citizen” in accordance with the UN’s declaration on the rights of the disabled, relegated the handicapped to “lay ministry” at its 1986 General Convention.
Eiesland is careful to make clear that all of these theological slights to the disabled community create very real and material problems for disabled people. She devotes her entire second chapter to the personal stories of two women: Diane Devries, a quadriplegic, and Nancy Mairs, who developed multiple sclerosis at twenty-nine. In her discussion of the Eucharist, Eiesland brings in her own experience of receiving the Eucharist:
I would be alerted by an usher that I need not go forward for the Eucharist. Instead I would be offered the sacrament at my seat when everyone else had been served… Hence receiving the Eucharist was transformed for me from a corporate to a solitary experience; from a sacralization of Christ’s broken body to a stigmatization of my disabled body.
As a disabled person herself, Eiesland realizes that such stories of negative experience are valid evidence against the church’s present way of doing things, just as much as philosophical arguments are. For her, even if the church were to correct its doctrines pertaining to the disabled, the real test of success would be whether disabled members reacted to church practice with feelings of isolation and depression.
II. “Diversities of Gifts, but the Same Spirit”: Heterodoxy in Eiesland’s Model
There are several problems with Eiesland’s polemic against contemporary church practice. First, her adherence to a social construction model of disability is incompatible with orthodox Christianity’s insistence on objective reality. Christianity has stood as a bulwark against the modern threats of solipsism and moral relativism by clinging to the idea that mankind was created by God for a specific purpose – to praise God and live within his laws – that it is within man’s power to accept or reject, but not to change. Thinkers like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson call disability a “culturally fabricated” notion, pointing out that concepts of “corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, [and] excess” are, like femininity, determined by culture. Eiesland draws the natural conclusion, then, that what culture has established culture can cure.
If God truly did create man his own image, then it is not within man’s power to cure disability simply by adjusting his attitude towards it. Discrepancies between the ideal body that God designed in the garden and the deficient body of a quadriplegic are objective and must be dealt with as such. Lennard Davis contrasts the modern idea of normalcy, which is determined through statistical averages, with the classical concept of the abstract ideal. Eiesland and Garland-Thomson’s refutation of the former does not speak to the validity of the latter, especially given that Eiesland, as a Christian, accepts that, for the human body, such an ideal does exist.
Tom Shakespeare places the British social model of disability in opposition to a medical view. The former defines disability as “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments.” Because the medicalization of disability against which this definition is set depends on some ideal of a normal body that disabled bodies fail to live up to, the medical model of disability is vulnerable to the valid point that, from a secular perspective, no such objective ideal exists. It is this same secular moorlessness that motivates the outrageous statements of philosopher Peter Singer. In a Christian framework, murder is wrong because God endows each human soul with infinite worth, and it is not necessary for disabled individuals like Harriet McBryde Johnson, the Georgia lawyer who famously debated Singer at Princeton, to justify herself. It is only in the absence of objective morality that such justification becomes necessary. Unfortunately, McBryde Johnson offers no philosophically robust alternative to Singer’s dictum that the only inhibition to killing a creature is that creature’s conscious aversion to being killed, even though this dictum leads him to condone infanticide. Without rejecting the social model of disability in favor of a more Christian understanding, neither can Eiesland.
Another flaw of The Disabled God is that its author neglects the Christian virtue of humility so persistently that it discredits her argument. At one point, Eiesland goes so far as to advocate the sin of pride, that children with disabilities be “taught by disabled adults to be proud of the characteristics valued in the community of people with disabilities but devalued in the dominant society.” In addition to promoting pride, Eiesland’s advice serves to reinforce self-segregation of the disabled, which does no less to contribute to their isolation than marginalization by the church. Perhaps most problematically, the attitude exemplified in this sentence and evident throughout the book betrays a stubborn reluctance to acknowledge that disabilities have real disadvantages that are not socially controlled. Blind men will never experience color; neither will deaf men ever enjoy music. The “individual or functional limitation model” against which Eiesland rails admits this difficult truth, while her social construction model does not. All of these problems and inconsistencies suggest that an alternative both to current practice and Eiesland’s critique might strike closer to the actual truth of the disabled Christian experience.
III. “If Thou Doest Not Well, Sin Lieth at the Door”: A Refutation of Eiesland through the Lens of Genesis 4
Paul writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.” His refutation of material differences might validly be extended to say that in Christ there is neither able nor handicapped. However, Paul does not mean to say that gender, for example, is utterly irrelevant. After all, even in the garden “male and female created He them.” Discerning the paradoxical nature of the equality that Paul describes in Galatians provides the key to a theology of disability that is as liberating as the one Eiesland describes but is in closer keeping with traditional Christianity.
The fourth chapter of Genesis tells the story of the brothers Cain and Abel. Cain is a “tiller of the ground”; Abel is a “keeper of sheep.” Each offers the best portion of the fruits of his labor as a sacrifice in praise of God. God finds favor with Abel’s sacrifice but not Cain’s. This is not because Cain did not offer his sacrifice in a genuine spirit of thankfulness to God, but simply because it is a fact of Jewish law that animal sacrifices are appropriate and plant sacrifices are not. Cain, presumably upset at this seemingly arbitrary hierarchy of offerings, is visibly angered by God’s disapproval. God answers, “Why are thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.”
Paul’s insistence that all who are baptized in Christ are fundamentally equal does not demand that God react to Cain and Abel’s respective sacrifices with equal favor. Neither does it suggest that Cain should have been a shepherd instead of a farmer, in order that he might have offered a better sacrifice. Rather, it means that Cain should have accepted his inferior status with grace. His crime was not his inferior offering, but his expectation of praise, his pretension to equality with Abel.
The story of Cain and Abel simultaneously reinforces and subverts hierarchy – Abel is superior to Cain, but his superiority is ultimately unimportant. The people of Israel are God’s chosen nation, and gender differences have consequences for individual behavior, but none of these differences inhibit any human being’s ability to fulfill the most important task of all, which is to love God and keep his commandments. In other words, material distinctions between men are both real and relevant, but pale in comparison to the greater, universal quality of being a child of God.
The consequences of this interpretation of Genesis 4 for disability theology should be clear. It is not necessary for society to adjust in order to make blindness as irrelevant a distinction as hair color, or to eliminate every disadvantage of being wheelchair-bound. The most important attitude change in the effort to manage disability must take place in the minds of the disabled themselves. By accepting their lot as Cain should have, the disabled might redirect the energies they now devote to effecting cultural change to making the most of the distinct role that their handicaps carve out for them.
IV. “My Yoke is Easy and My Burden is Light”: A Brief Comparison between Disability and Feminist Theologies
Eiesland reacts to the ALC’s refusal to ordain disabled people with considerable anger. She interprets the ALC’s demand that pastors “be sufficiently able-bodied, ambulatory and mobile” as a condemnation of physical and psychiatric disability as inferior. A brief glance at the question of female ordination to the ministry proves that Eiesland might be jumping to conclusions.
In an Apostolic Letter issued in 1994, Pope John Paul II reiterated the traditional church teaching that women are ineligible for ordination to the priesthood. The rationale behind this teaching is that priests, during the Eucharistic ceremony at Mass as well as during the act of absolution in the sacrament of confession, act in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” and therefore must share certain vital characteristics with Christ. However, John Paul is quick to point out that the veneration of the Holy Virgin “clearly shows that the non-admission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them.” It is not that the Church violates women by denying them the sacrament of ordination; rather, it is women who violate God’s plan by demanding that they be permitted a role which, according to Christ’s own laws, they cannot adequately fulfill.
The clearest explanation of the difference between denial and discrimination is given in the Gospels by Christ himself: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Christ does not propose to free men of their bonds, only to make their bonds light. He will enslave them to his law, but, as Christians are meant to love God’s laws, the yoke will be light. If women react the impossibility of female ordination by renewing their love for the roles which they can assume, it will be no oppression. It is exactly this kind of pacific grace that the Catholic Church prescribes, and which, by extension, provides be a Christian solution to the problem of disability.
An example of the intersection of feminism and disability studies might further illustrate this point. Susan Wendell points out that both disability and femininity are relegated by the patriarchy to the private sphere, with the consequence that female family members of people with disabilities are saddled with their care. While it may be true that care for disabled persons is seen as a family responsibility rather than a social one, and it may further be true that this has the consequence of forcing women into caretaker positions, but this does not change the fact that many mothers do not see this task as oppressive. To tell a mother who loves taking care of her children that the task in which she delights is a cruel imposition creates more oppression than it prevents. Oppression, like inclusion, is a matter of attitude.
V. A Positive Theology of Disability
Many disability theorists would agree with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson that “disability is perhaps the essential characteristic of being human.” A theological unpacking of this statement introduces layers of meaning that its secular author may not have intended.
One common emotional reaction to disability is a feeling of not being at home in one’s own body. Eiesland describes the story of Nancy Mairs in detail: after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Mairs begins to find her own house “too big” for her, then finds her own body eerily foreign. As Eiesland puts it, “[h]er body had betrayed her.” This sensation of being not-at-home is more formidable than the alienation from normalcy that the disabled feel, because it is alienation not from a social group, or from an ideal, but from oneself.
This experience of the rebellious flesh that betrays itself by its own imperfection is a personal illustration of the abstract concept known as the Fall. Ever since original sin was introduced into the world, man has been broken and unable to fulfill the task of perfect virtue for which God made him. Disability studies and orthodox theology intersect when original sin is understood as a universal disability.
Another aspect of disability with universal implications is helplessness. The reliance of disabled individuals on caregivers is only an extreme example of part of the human condition which Garland-Thomson calls “the fact of human dependency.” If disability is simply a matter of being unable to live a satisfactory life without help from others, then all of mankind is disabled. According to Christianity, this fact of dependence is even more true of mankind’s relationship with Christ, without whom all men would be damned.
“Modern Western medicine,” Susan Wendell says, “plays into and conforms to our cultural myth that the body can be controlled.” It is precisely this myth of control that both Christian humility and non-medical definitions of disability attempt to refute. In this way, the phenomenon of being disabled is a perfect symbol for the universal human experience of existing in a universe controlled by forces that do not answer to you.
VI. Conclusion: The Disabled Christ
Eiesland describes her agenda regarding the Eucharist as a shift from the model of “virtuous suffering, or conquering lord” to “a formulation of Jesus Christ as disabled God.” She is correct that the disabled God is an edifying way to think of the Incarnation. After all, while Christ existed on this earth for thirty-three years before his death, the most iconic image of God in all of Christianity is Christ crucified and bleeding. Saints show their godliness by imitating his wounds through the miracle of stigmata. According to Christian theology, it is not by living but by being the paschal sacrifice that Christ ransoms mankind’s sins and redeems humanity.
Eiesland might go further than she does in outlining the concept of the disabled God. If Christ’s disability is fundamental to his divinity, then this is relevant not only to our understanding of the Eucharist but to the commandment for Christians to imitate Christ. If the perfection of mankind looks like a beaten and bruised man dying on a cross, then mortal men can aspire to a less tortured relationship with their own frailties. The image of the disabled Christ shows that infirmity is inherent to humanity, and our hope lies not in repairing disability, but in redeeming it.
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