2 Disability and theology
We begin with an account of the emergence of disability theology against the background of conceptualizations of disability in the modern period (including models of disability), disability studies, and the phenomenon of disability politics. We cannot begin talking about disability theology without attending to the relative novelty of ‘disability’ as a concept. In the nineteenth century the emergence of a norm for healthy human development led to the conceptualization of its opposite. In the intervening years, the idea of what constitutes ‘disability’ has been continually shifting, and today ‘disability is never simply a medically or culturally determined identity but is always a pliable negotiating of desires, anxieties, and needs in specific contexts’ (Swinton 2016: 21). The section concludes with a consideration of four scholars whose work has been foundational for disability theology: Stanley Hauerwas, Nancy Eiesland, William Gaventa, and John Swinton. Each of these thinkers has a distinct approach that shaped the development of the conversation in its nascent stage, 1970–2000.
2.1 Disability studies
Disability theology has evolved in tandem with disability studies, as Nancy Eiesland’s work will show. As a discipline, disability studies has focused on the experience of people living with disabilities, aiming at reducing prejudice and marginalization, and improving quality of life. The study of disability (in the US) began within a less well-defined conversation about chronic illness, impairments, and disability. Disability studies thus originated in the broad frame of healthcare concerns. The Committee on Social Adjustment of the Social Science Research Council laid the groundwork for this conversation in the United States. The Committee’s work focused on individuals’ psychological adaptations to their impairment, whether congenital or aquired (Eiesland 1994: 57-58). The US-based Society for Disability Studies, founded in 1986 by disabled sociologist Irving Zola, had existed since 1982 as the Section for the Study of Chronic Illness, Impairment, and Disability. In the UK, Michael Oliver’s The Politics of Disablement challenged the focus on impairment, which centred on the medical diagnosis of impaired individuals. On both sides of the Atlantic, the approach to disability as primarily a medical phenomenon shifted from the individual to the social, cultural, and political dimensions of disability. As the discourse developed throughout the late twentieth century, it expanded to include intersections in identity politics and other areas of critical theory, particularly race, gender, and sexuality.
The history of the US-based Society for Disability Studies and its journal, Disability Studies Quarterly, illustrates the unfolding of disability studies more generally. The journal started in 1980 as The Disability and Chronic Disease Newsletter, predating the Society itself. It began as a publication of a few dozen pages, offering not only or even primarily scholarly articles; rather, it served as an information exchange, including journalistic reporting and job advertisements. It became DSQ in 1986, though it retained its newsletter format until Fall 1996 (volume 16, number 4).
Disability Studies Quarterly offers a window onto the interdisciplinary nature of disability studies as well as its attention to the lived experience of people with disabilities, especially their quality of life. For example, Marcia Rioux’s 1996 article, ‘Services and Supports in a Human Rights Framework’ (16.1, pp. 4–9), highlights the link between disability studies and disability politics, whereas the special issue the previous year, devoted to ‘Disability Culture’ includes articles from scholars in the fields of sociology, history, psychology, and anthropology – as well as an annotated bibliography of monographs, edited volumes, articles, works of fiction and film, and a report from university administrators about a disability-related protest and the changes it precipitated at their university. Irving Zola, longtime editor of Disability Studies Quarterly, transformed the newsletter into the journal of the Society for the Study of Disability and increased its academic standing. Since the late 1980s universities have been offering degree programmes in disability studies, from undergraduate to PhD. While many of these universities are in the UK or the US, there are a number of programmes in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Beyond the English-speaking academic community, disability studies has found a place in universities and academic societies across Europe and is growing in other parts of the world. (See, for example, Cushing 2009; https://www.disability-europe.net/about-us; and https://ajod.org/index.php/ajod.)
2.2 Models of disability
As Disability Studies developed as a discipline, different approaches to disability emerged. Michael Oliver’s pathbreaking study (Oliver, Sapey and Thomas 1983) distinguished a ‘social’ model of disability from an individual model. The social model developed a life of its own as an alternative to a ‘medical’ model of disability. Since 1983, a wide variety of approaches have been developed, in conversation with a range of philosophical traditions. (See Retief and Letšosa 2018.) For example, a Marxist engagement with the social model of disability yielded the area of materialist disability studies. Theologians have tended to work with three types of models. The first of these, usually called the ‘medical’ model, focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of individuals whose development or capacities are impaired in some way. The second kind of model, in contrast, considers the social dimension of disability. The ‘social’ (or ‘minority’) model of disability draws attention to individuals’ lived experience and is the cornerstone of the disability rights movement. A third model, peculiar to theological reflection on disability, combines theological reflection on the doctrines of creation and incarnation with the study of disability to produce a ‘limits’ model of disability.
2.3 Medical model
The medical model regards disability from a clinical perspective. An individual presents with symptoms, typically involving some impairment of mobility or the senses, and a condition is diagnosed. Whether the disability is considered physical, developmental, or intellectual, the impairment is a feature of the body. The medical model thus ‘explains disability disadvantage in terms of pathological states of the body and mind themselves’ (SEP 2022). Disability studies emerged from a conversation about helping people with disabilities to adapt to their environment, a conversation that framed disability as a medical condition. This approach to disability was first criticised as an ‘individual’ model of disability, a framework that assumed that the individual’s medical condition was what needed to be fixed or mitigated to enable access (Oliver, Sapey and Thomas 1983). More recently, questions have been raised about the implications of the diagnosis of disability. Diagnosis is typically the first step in a process that tends toward cure. With many disabilities, cure is not an option; the only way to eliminate the disability is to eliminate the person (see Hauerwas 1977).
The dialogue between medical science and theology in disability theology addresses scientific accounts of disabilities, whether due to chronic illness (such as ME or clinical depression) or impairments (physical or cognitive, congenital or acquired). Swinton offers an excellent example of the way disability theology can engage with medicine in particular. Swinton (a) attends to the spiritual needs of people with cognitive or psychological impairments/struggles and (b) challenges the culture of diagnosis. A medical diagnosis, Swinton argues, does not give the full picture of a person’s situation. Depression, for example, can be diagnosed according to the DSM-V by an assortment of symptoms, and there are medical treatments for depression, including drugs and counselling. Swinton suggests, however, that, for Christians, the experience of depression cannot be divorced from Christian faith; while depression may challenge faith, faith can also be a consolation in the midst of depression.
Moreover, as important as a scientific explanation of a person’s impairment can be, it does not answer the pressing theological ‘Why?’ To say that Down Syndrome is caused by a tripling of the twenty-first chromosome, for example, does not explain why one child is born with it and another is not. Thus, a medical diagnosis (‘trisomy-21’) does not rule out divine causation. In disability theology, diagnosis is less important than a process that tends not towards ‘cure’ but towards living with and making sense of disability as it presents itself in the lives of people with disabilities and those who care for them.
2.4 Social model
A ‘social’ model of disability begins from the premise that the impact of an impairment depends not on pathology alone but on the individual’s physical, social, cultural, or educational context. Impairments may be more or less disabling depending on an individual’s surroundings. For example, a wheelchair user on smooth, level ground may get along as well as an able-bodied person. When she encounters a flight of stairs without a lift or a ramp, however, the difference in ability shows up. On the social model, disability is socially constructed; that is, although an individual’s condition may have a medical diagnosis, it is labelled as a ‘disability’ within a social and cultural framework.
Considering disability as a social phenomenon also creates a group identity. The label ‘disabled’ names a political identity. This approach to disability is often referred to as a ‘minority group’ model. Like other marginalized groups, people with disabilities call for measures to facilitate their full participation in society, such as accessible spaces, and legal protections.
2.5 Other models
As disability studies has expanded, scholars have supplemented medical and social models with a wide range of theoretical approaches. The concept of disability as interpretation is at the heart of cultural models of disability, and links many alternative models. Such models rest on the idea that what constitutes disability differs depending on the point of view of the assessor. Cultural models of disability divert attention from impairment, highlighting instead the diversity among human beings’ ways of experiencing and living in the world. These differences ought to be appreciated rather than perceived only as problems to be addressed. Deaf culture exemplifies this approach to disability. (See Morris 2008.) Many of these theoretical approaches also consider the impact of intersecting and overlapping identities: people with disabilities are also identified by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. At one such intersection a crip-queer theme in disability studies has emerged, for example. Many alternative models also emphasize the variability in human capacities among people, and across the lifespan of an individual. As Nancy Eiesland pointed out in The Disabled God, we are all only temporarily able-bodied. Alasdair MacIntyre made a similar observation in Dependent Rational Animals. He observes that, in a well-functioning community,
those who are no longer children recognize in children what they once were…those are not yet disabled by age recognize in the old what they are moving towards becoming, and…those who are not ill or injured recognize in the ill and the injured what they often have been and will be and always may be…[and]…these recognitions are not a source of fear. (MacIntyre 2009: 146)
Disability is a common human experience, particularly in the experience of aging. Disability studies continues to generate models of disability that begin from the reality of disability as part of ordinary human life, rather than treating disability as an anomaly.
Theologians working on disability have adapted a variety of models from disability studies or advanced their own. Deborah Creamer’s influential book, Disability and Christian Theology in 2009, offered a ‘limits’ model of disability developed in conversation with themes in Christian theology. Thinking about disability in terms of limits emphasizes human variation and vulnerability, an approach that sits well with a variety of themes in Christian theology. The ‘limits’ model and theological approaches to disability are discussed further below.
2.6 Disability politics
Disability politics arose in conjunction with disability studies. The social model of disability made space for a political movement in the pursuit of legal protections for people with disabilities. As a result, legislation like ADA (in the US) and IDEA (in the UK) now supports the development of special education. The ADA also covers accessibility and raises consciousness, including increasing awareness that not all disabilities are visible. Examples of accommodations include not only ramps and accessible toilets. For example, the Duke of Edinburgh awards programme has opened up to work with young people with a range of disabilities, including intellectual disabilities. A group of young people with developmental disabilities who had achieved their Duke of Edinburgh gold award were presented to HRH Prince Edward, (now) the Duke of Edinburgh, in May 2022.
2.7 Founding figures in disability theology
Nancy Eiesland, Stanley Hauerwas, Bill Gaventa, and John Swinton have each shaped the foundations and development of disability theology. Hauerwas and Eiesland represent distinct ways of doing disability theology, and one task of this article is to chart the course of the development of methodological approaches to theological reflection on disability. Hauerwas and Eiesland’s approaches have generated distinct conversations that continue to spark debate in disability theology. Eiesland, trained in sociology, viewed the challenges people living with disabilities faced in church settings through the lens of disability studies, started a conversation at the intersection of disability and theology. Disability studies and the politics of disability have continued to influence theological reflection on disability. Hauerwas’ starting point within theological ethics set his work on a different course, setting Christian responses to disability (particularly intellectual/developmental disability) in the broader context of the church’s witness to Christ in an increasingly secular culture. In response to secular concepts of human nature, Hauerwas advocated a theological account of disability that assumed the full humanity of people with disabilities and sought to protect their place within human community.
John Swinton and Bill Gaventa represent the practical and pastoral dimension of disability theology. Gaventa founded the Summer Institute on Disability and Theology, which has provided a space for conversation and collaboration since 2010. Swinton’s work covers a broad range of themes and topics in disability theology, from theological reflections on personhood and theodicy to issues in disability, mental health, and dementia. Gaventa’s work highlights the practical side of work in disability theology.
At this junction, it is appropriate to mention a landmark text that sits, like Gaventa and Swinton’s work, at the intersection of theology and practice. The same year that The Disabled God was published, a volume of essays appeared: Developmental Disabilities and Sacramental Access: New Paradigms for Sacramental Encounters. The essays, written by men and women in Catholic religious orders, describe the inclusion of people with developmental disabilities in preparation for and celebration of the sacraments. In addition to the narrative dimension, several of the essays offer theological reasons for making a path to communion and confirmation for people with developmental disabilities. The volume also reprints two Church documents setting out episcopal guidance that calls for parishes to facilitate such access to the sacraments. Those two documents, both published in the 1980s, point to an ongoing conversation at the intersection of theology and disability that responds to liturgical rather than philosophical questions. Catholic thinking about disability thus first emerged as liturgical theology, and aimed not at shaping academic discourse but at the full inclusion of people with disabilities in the celebration of the sacraments and the human community more broadly. (See, for example, https://ncpd.org.)
2.8 Nancy Eiesland and The Disabled God
Nancy Eiesland’s landmark book, The Disabled God, represented a new mode of thinking at the intersection of disability studies and theology. Her constructive theological proposal is presented in a social and political frame that engages disability studies and is rooted in disability politics. She uses ‘the minority group model […] to identify the social situation of people with disabilities’. For Eiesland, this is ‘a political statement of solidarity with the disability rights movement’. She self-identifies as ‘a person with disability’ and her theological writing self-consciously reflects her involvement ‘with the disability rights movement’ and uses ‘sociological theories and methods that empower and provide a foundation for political action’ (Eiesland 1994: 24). For Eiesland, disability theology is also a mode of political engagement.
Although she describes her work as aiming ‘Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability’, Eiesland does not explicitly engage with liberation theology. Rather, along the lines of disability politics and identity politics more generally, Eiesland assumes that disability theology is produced by people who are themselves disabled, in much the same way that feminist theology emerged first as theological reflection by women on the meaning of their womanhood in relation to God, Christian faith, and the church. Thus her ‘liberatory theology of disability’ is not a liberation theology of disability. Liberation theology, in the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez and others, is on the side of the poor, while not being necessarily the work of the poor themselves. The location of the theologian with respect to disability continues to be a significant theme in disability theology.
Eiesland’s illness and early death prevented her from mentoring students who might have developed her work and continued to shape disability theology. Yet Eiesland’s study was, and remains, a touchstone for theological reflection on disability. For example, Deborah Creamer’s seminal work (to be considered in detail below) is built on a plot of academic ground cleared by Nancy Eisland. Eiesland created a space in which disability came to be discussed theologically from an increasing range of angles. In Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (Swinton 2012), her work is drawn into conversation with Calvin and Barth. She is also a key source for the chapter on women, which includes lengthy passages from her work. The Disabled God has been widely read in the academic theological world, reaching into subfields in theology that Eiesland would probably not have imagined. For example, philosopher Richard Cross drew Eiesland’s work into conversation with medieval accounts of the Incarnation in his gesture ‘toward a theology of personhood’ (Cross 2011).
2.9 Stanley Hauerwas
With the publication of The Disabled God, Nancy Eiesland may rightly be credited with the launch of disability theology. Yet, in 1994, Stanley Hauerwas had already been writing about intellectual disability in his work in Christian ethics for more than twenty years. Hauerwas takes a different approach: he does not reflect on the experience of living with a disability, nor does he engage with disability studies. Rather, Hauerwas observed the challenge that people with intellectual disabilities presented to theological ethics. His writing on intellectual disability aims at a critique of post-Enlightenment accounts of personhood, and consequently, ethics, that assume a Kantian understanding of the autonomous subject. With the explosion of work on intellectual disability in the early twenty-first century his early pieces on people with intellectual disabilities were drawn into conversation with disability theology. (See Swinton 2005.)
In Truthfulness and Tragedy, Hauerwas’ essays show how ethical reflection on personhood, a staple of theological ethics, leads naturally (if not inexorably) into theological reflection on disability. In the early 1970’s, Hauerwas argued that Christian ethicists were ‘trying to put forward “person” as a regulative notion to direct our health care as substitute for what only a substantive community and story can do’ (Hauerwas 1977: 127–128). An inherent danger in defining personhood, for Hauerwas, is that such definitions can then be used to deny care to those it excludes. Against this tendency in Christian ethics, he insisted that ‘the crucial question we should ask about [disabled] children is not whether they are less human because of their defects, but rather how we should act toward them in order that we do not arbitrarily cut them off from human community’ (Hauerwas 1977: 176).
Hauerwas’ influence may be seen in two streams within disability theology. One stream consists of theologians working specifically on intellectual disability. The publication of Critical Reflections on Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability explored his work, considered criticisms of it, and drew him work into conversation with a range of voices in disability theology. Hauerwas’ inclusion in the symposium that eventually produced The Paradox of Disability (Reinders 2010) is further evidence of his role in the field. The other stream is represented by moral theologians who draw on Thomas Aquinas in their work on intellectual disability. Such theologians offer a distinctly Roman Catholic theological response to disability, and tend to work on the themes of personhood so prominent in Hauerwas’ work. This second stream is the subject of further discussion below.
Hauerwas has had his critics as well. (See Swinton 2005.) He has been perceived as instrumentalizing disability; that is, he used people with disabilities to make theological points, rather than allowing the experience of disability to shape his theological thinking. In the same vein (as mentioned above) Hauerwas has tended to focus on intellectual disabilities and those who live with such disabilities in the abstract rather than engaging with their lived experience (even in the case of his ‘Uncle Charlie’; see Hauerwas, in Swinton 2005: 113–126).
In connection with Hauerwas’ work (as well as that of John Swinton and others yet to be discussed) Jean Vanier must be mentioned, though his legacy has been spoiled by his misconduct. Vanier’s practical work with L’Arche and his writing about the spirituality of L’Arche has influenced theologians. His presence in the field of disability theology is ineradicable, but no longer individual. While theologians reflecting on disability no longer engage Vanier explicitly, insights originally developed in conversation with him continue to enrich their theology.
2.10 William Gaventa
In 2018, William Gaventa published Disability and Spirituality: Recovering Wholeness, but he has worked at the intersection of disability and spirituality since the 1970s. His influence on the field of disability theology has been both profound and oblique. As the founder and former director of the Summer Institute on Theology and Disability, which meets annually in the United States, Gaventa made possible many interactions essential to the development of Disability Theology. His writing in disability theology emerges from his work as a chaplain to people with intellectual disabilities and their families.
Although Gaventa is not an academic theologian himself, his influence on academic scholarship in disability theology may be seen in his work as editor of the Journal of Disability and Religion (formerly the Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health) and his essays included in The Paradox of Disability (Reinders 2010) and Disciples and Friends (VanOmmen and Brock 2022). His work aims at understanding and supporting the spiritual needs of people with intellectual disabilities.
2.11 John Swinton
Resurrecting the Person: Friendship and the Care of People with Mental Health Problems (Swinton 2000) marks the emergence of a distinct approach to theological reflection on disability. Swinton’s experience as a mental health nurse and chaplain shape his pastoral and practical theological work, which places lived experience at the heart of the enterprise. He explains that Resurrecting the Person ‘is not a book about mental health problems’. His concern is, rather, ‘with people whose lives have been radically altered by their encounters with mental health problems’ (Swinton 2000: 9). Swinton’s person-centred approach brings his unique blend of theological insight and professional expertise to bear, with a view to challenging not only our ideas about disability but also the practice of the church.
Swinton’s work pushes back against a clinical culture focused on cure. His attention to the person has not only generated new ways of thinking about dementia (Swinton 2012), disability (Swinton 2016), and mental health challenges (Swinton 2020), but responds to individualistic, competency-oriented accounts of the human person with an account of being human that centres on the fellowship of human creatures made in the image of God. A central theme of this account of human being is friendship. His first book took friendship as the point of departure for theological reflection on ‘the care of people with mental health problems’ (Swinton 2000). Good Christian practice centres on friendship as the truest imitation of Christ. His work on dementia and disability is characterized by the practice of friendship. Rather than being represented as research subjects whom he has interviewed, Swinton writes about people as one who has come alongside and walked with them on a part of their journey.
3 Reading disability theologically
Since Nancy Eiesland’s death in 2009, the shape of the conversation between disability and theology has changed. That year saw the publication of a landmark text in theological thinking on disability: Deborah Creamer’s Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilites. Creamer’s book took the conversation forward, proposing a new, explicitly theological model of disability. Her model engaged the work of Eiesland and others, noting a lack of scholarship in disability studies on what she referred to as ‘cognitive’ disabilities. Yet theological work on intellectual disability was then ongoing; Critical Reflections on Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability was published in 2005, and Amos Yong’s Theology and Down Syndrome appeared in 2007. Theological reflection on intellectual disability now accounts for the majority of work in disability theology. The advent of the limits model and explosion of work on intellectual disability have yielded a number of distinctly theological approaches to disability.
3.1 Disability, Christian theology, and the ‘limits’ model
Deborah Creamer’s Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities proposed a new, explicitly theological model of disability. She drew standard models of disability into conversation with Christian theology and developed a ‘limits’ model of disability. The body is the site of her theological and theoretical reflection. ‘To write about disability’, she wrote in the book’s introduction, ‘is to reconsider our understandings of human embodiment’ (2009: 3). Accordingly, her ‘limits’ model of disability begins from the principle that ‘we not only have but are bodies’ (2009: 57). The concept of the body takes on a particular significance because of the identification of the church as the body of Christ.
The foundation of Creamer’s proposal is the idea that ‘insights that come from disability are something with which we all have experience’ (2009: 96): that is, human beings are inherently limited. Some limiting conditions are labelled ‘disability’; yet, Creamer points out, noboby is disabled before God. Moreover, the most important liberation is one all people require: a liberation from the tendency ‘to hold inaccurate self-representations, especially insofar as we deny or depreciate our own limits’ (2009: 71). Her ‘limits’ model focuses on physical disability. Her brief discussion of the challenges presented by what she terms ‘cognitive disabilities’ concludes with uncertainty about how a narrative of the experience of cognitive disability might find ‘an entry point’ to ‘a discourse dominated by intellectual and academic rigor’ (2009: 108).
Creamer instead looks forward to further academic work in disability that might ‘add complexity and theoretical rigor to these already powerful images of inclusion and justice [proposed by Nancy Eiesland, Jennie Weiss Block, and Kathy Black]’ (2009: 91). Yet the conversation has moved in other directions. Although a new disability liberation theology has not emerged, theological work on intellectual disability has grown into a broad and lively conversation since the publication of Disability and Christian Theology.
3.2 Theology and intellectual disability
Even as Creamer lamented the lack of attention to cognitive disabilities (2009: 104), theological work on cognitive disabilities was emerging. In 2007, the gathering that produced The Paradox of Disability: Responses to Jean Vanier and L’Arche Communities from Theology and the Sciences (2010) took place at the birthplace of L’Arche in France; the group included John Swinton and Stanley Hauerwas. The academic engagement with L’Arche produced a set of essays marked by the communites’ way of being together, in which people related to one another not as carer and cared-for but as a community of people living together as friends. Also in 2007, Amos Yong published Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity. Yong’s study reflected on theological anthropology, sotieriology, and eschatology from the perspective not just of disability, but of intellectual disability. It was followed in 2008 by Hans Reinders’ Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics and Thomas Reynolds’ Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality, both of which reconsidered areas of Christian faith and practice in the light of intellectual disability. (See Volpe 2009.)
Attention to intellectual disabilities raises questions about what the goals of disability theology are because such disabilities are by nature not easily accommodated. While Eiesland and Creamer both oriented their theologies toward liberation, it is not at all clear from what people with intellectual disabilities need to be liberated. Typical adjustments do not help: a person with autism who does not communicate with spoken language needs a different kind of adjustment in order to be included in neurotypical spaces. Theological reflection on intellectual disability increasingly points away from individuals. The values of the contemporary culture, including independence, efficiency, and freedom of choice, disable those people who cannot ‘keep up’ (Swinton 2016) or speak for themselves (Brock 2019). This approach to disability is typified by many of the essays in The Paradox of Disability.
Theological reflection on intellectual disability foregrounds the challenge of disability as it has been described in disability studies; as Tom Shakespeare observed, even with all possible accommodations in place, inequalities are bound to remain (2018: 22). Historian of disability Henri-Jacques Stiker identified precisely the root of the problem. The world, he explained, is organized around ‘a kind of average person, designated normal. This is a world that the person who cannot, or can no longer, mover there comfortably threatens to modify and remake’ (3). When the disability is a cognitive impairment or neurological difference, Stiker’s observation about disability cuts more deeply. If the person with a physical disability ‘threatens to modify and remake’ the world in which the person designated ‘normal’ moves easily and comfortably, the person with a profound intellectual disability calls into question the meaning of the ‘person’ who inhabits that world. Theological reflection on intellectual disability therefore raises questions not only about access but about what we understand to be the purpose of human life and human flourishing, and the character of relationships and communities.
Theological reflection on intellectual disability thus also addresses the whole setting of worship and the concept of discipleship, with a view to facilitating the full participation of people with intellectual disabilities in the whole life of the church. Christian communities confronted with the challenge of including persons with intellectual disabilities have faced different issues according to their liturgical and doctrinal norms. In this vein, theologians have considered the role of understanding Scripture and doctrine in Christian discipleship (Yong 2007; Volpe 2017). Churches that require sacramental preparation before the reception of Holy Communion face questions around what constitutes readiness. (See, for example, Foley 1994).
Theological reflection on disability has also brought to light implications of Christian doctrine that have been overlooked, and probed areas of Christian doctrine that seem to ignore disability, or worse, to exclude those with disabilities. For example, classical Catholic teaching on the human person has long been read as excluding those with significant intellectual disability from Christian discipleship on the grounds that they do not have the requisite rational ability. Countering this and other misconceptions has brought fresh insights from Christian tradition.
4 Bible and pre-modern church history
Because disability theology emerged as a modern discipline at the intersection of disability studies and theology, engagement with Scripture and Christian theological and ecclesial history is part of its development rather than its foundation. The key themes in disability theology are not new to Christian theology, however. The question as to how cure is related to salvation arises from the many narratives of healing. It is worth highlighting here the centrality of the theme of healing in the Bible. Healing was a significant aspect of Jesus’ earthly ministry that was foretold, and, occasionally, practiced, by Hebrew prophets. Interpreters until late twentieth century assumed that such impairments had theological or spiritual significance, or that they served as opportunities for a show of God’s healing power – or both. Healing also tends toward perfection, a debated theme within disability theology. Discussion around the nature of Christian perfection stems in part from the requirement that priests be perfect and the injunction to Christians, ‘be perfect’. The disciples’ question in John 9 (‘Who sinned?’) foreshadows disability theology’s engagement with theodicy-related themes. Although the Bible does not mention the concept of disability, references to the blind, the deaf, and the lame, accounts of acquired impairments abound. Disability theologians employ the concept as an interpretive frame for their study of the Bible and pre-modern Christian theology. The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of disability readings of illness and impairment in the Bible, which challenge traditional interpretation, particularly the notion that such conditions were punishment for sin.
Amos Yong (2011) takes Eiesland and Saliers’ edited volume, Human Disabiility and the Service of God (1998) to mark the beginning of a disability hermeneutic in Biblical studies. The four essays on biblical interpretation in that volume challenge what came to be called ‘normate’ readings of Biblical themes and texts. One of these analyzes terms associated with disability and their usage in Leviticus; a second examines liturgical practice in the ancient world from a disability perspective; a third re-reads the healing narratives in the Gospels; and the fourth challenges the assumed link between salvation and healing, particularly in relation to blindness. While these are not perhaps the first attempts to read the Bible with an eye to disability, they indicate the trajectory of the conversation as it has unfolded in the twenty-five years since the volume was first published.
Disability theology’s engagement with the Bible began from the observation that Biblical interpretation operated according to assumptions about the human person that diverted attention away from the portrayal of disability in the Bible. For example, whatever it may signify, commentators did not identify Jacob’s limp as a disability. The central issues in disability-aware Biblical interpretation centre on the relationship between salvation and cure. First, disability theologians ask about the relationship between wholeness and holiness, attending both to the restriction of the priesthood (as well as animals to be sacrified) to the ‘unblemished’ and to the exclusion of lepers and menstruating women from worshipping in the synagogue. For example, the laws in Leviticus prohibit anyone ‘who has a blemish’, is blind or lame, ‘who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or […] an injured foot or an injured hand’, is ‘a hunchback, or a dwarf, or [has] a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles’ from approaching the altar (Lev 21.18–20). Likewise, the in Gospels the leper and the woman with an issue of blood must be healed of their infirmities in order to be restored to the community. How should we read such texts today? Should we expect infirmities to be healed? Second, questions have been raised around the diagnosis of demon possession in the Gospels. From a modern perspective, some of the incidents described present in the same way as conditions familiar to us as epilepsy or schizophrenia (and the deaf-mute). Despite the impossibility of diagnosing such conditions (Lawrence 2018), the re-examination of the narratives has played a central role in the development of a disability hermeneutic. The narrative of the man born blind in John 9 has been the subject of sustained discussion within disability theology. (See, for example, Horne 1998; Yong 2011; Clark-Soles 2017.)
Finally, disability readings of the biblical text ask how we ought to understand and apply Jesus’ common pronouncement, ‘your faith has made you well’ (or, in the case of the paralytic in Luke 2, your friends’ faith)? Eiesland (1994) and Yong (2011) both attest to the psychological pain caused by a literal application of such texts. Eiesland reported her own experience of ‘the negative effects of healing rituals’ that have ‘normalization’ as their aim. ‘Failure to be “healed” is often assessed as a personal flaw in the individual, such as unrepentant sin or a selfish desire to remain disabled’ (1994: 117). Yong (2007) reported his parents’ similar experience in their church. While there is no consensus on the way these texts ought to be read, there is broad agreement about the compatibility of faithful Christian discipleship and ongoing disability and/or illness. This principle has changed the shape of Christian ministry as well, opening up the ministry to those with disabilities.
4.1 Disability and Christian tradition
While the concept of disability is a relative newcomer to theology, theologians from the earliest period of church history have discussed various kinds of illness and impairment, both in commentaries on scripture and in relation to the people around them. In the early Christian period, leprosy was a common, disabling illness that occasioned discussion both in the scripture and from early Christian theologians. Those theologians approached the issues of disease and impairment with a distinct set of assumptions and presuppositions that have long since ceased to serve as intellectual furniture for theologians. In addition, early Christian theologians did not share contemporary cultural values such as independence and self-sufficiency. As a result, their interpretations of scripture, doctrine, and human experience can appear skewed to modern eyes. Care must be taken when engaging these sources. Anachronistic readings obscure the insights that theologians from the Christian past have to offer disability theologians today. For historical theologians reflecting on disability, disability functions as a new lens through which aspects of early Christian thought may be analyzed in order to probe more deeply ideas about embodiment and personhood in the early Church.
A landmark in the development of disability theology’s engagement with church history appeared in 2012: Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader. The editors, John Swinton and his colleague at the University of Aberdeen, Brian Brock, pose the question about the humanity shared by those living with and without disabilities in a Christian theological frame, ‘in dialogue with the communion of saints’ (Brock and Swinton 2012: 3). Twelve of the essays in the volume re-read theologians through the lens of disability and offer excerpts of their work. The aim of these essays is to consider ‘what Christians of other ages might bring to [theological reflection on disability]’ and thereby ‘place modern accounts of disability within a much broader canvas’ (Brock and Swinton 2012: 3–4). In this volume, disability functions not as a lens for interpretation but the focus of a conversation between interlocutors that aims to reveal new insights about disability as it relates to Christianity and Christian tradition, as well as seeing disability in the light of Christian thought.
The broader canvas the volume envisions also functions as a space for engagement with pre-modern sources, which has emerged as a persistent and fruitful enterprise in its own right. The volume amplifies the voices of those already working at the intersection of disability and historical theology and encourages the development of historical-theological reflection on disability. While such engagements have not always recognized the distinct intellectual context of early Christian theological reflection on disability, theologians with a deep appreciation of that context are beginning to challenge misrepresentations of pre-modern theologians’ writing around disability.
4.1.1 Disability in early Christianity
Several themes from early Christian commentary on disability intersect with current work in disability theology. Yet our early Christian interlocutors examined issues around disability against a distinct theological and conceptual backdrop. For example, many contemporary disability theologians engage with philosophical theodicy and liberation theology, but such disciplines have no ancient or medieval equivalents. Pre-Englightenment theological thinking about disability employs scientific knowledge and traditions of reason and assumes corresponding Christian teaching on God, creation, human nature, salvation, and eschatology. For example, early Christian theologians asked questions about the meaning and purpose of disability in connection with their accounts of providence and creation. So, when a theologian like Augustine asks why some babies are born with disfigurements or impairments, he is not calling God’s goodness or omnipotence into question. For Augustine and his contemporaries, the quest for meaning is paramount. That is, the question is not ‘why did God allow this to happen?’ but ‘What does this mean for our understanding of human nature and divine providence?’
Insights from early Christianity nonetheless have contributed to contemporary work in disability theology. Consideration of disability in late antiquity suggests, for example, that human nature persists through disease and impairment. Ailments like leprosy, quite common in the period, may disfigure the body but do not diminish the humanity of the sufferer. Early Christian theologians counselled Christians who encountered lepers (or people afflicted in other ways) be reminded of their own vulnerability to disease and infirmity, the Christian’s duty to care for the afflicted (Matthew 25), and to remember that a wise and compassionate person who might be ailing in body was nonetheless worthy of love and admiration.
4.1.2 Thomas Aquinas and disability
Thomas Aquinas’ influence in the development of Christian theological anthropology, especially the place of reason in our understanding of what it is to be human, is unparalleled. Thomas distilled the Fathers of the Church, mixed in some Aristotle, and produced a dogmatic treatise (the Summa Theologiæ) that has served as a touchstone for centuries. Scholarship on Aquinas and disability bears special mention here because the view that the essence of human nature is the exercise of rational thought has often been traced to Aquinas. Such an account of human nature emphasizes individual choice and abstract thought as key to demonstrating our full humanity. This view puts the humanity of people with intellectual disabilities or other cognitive impairments (such as severe mental illness or dementia) at risk.
In the last decade and a half, however, a handful of students of his thought have re-read Aquinas’ contribution to theological anthropology, highlighting his nuanced treatment of rationality and cognitive impairment. Although the rational soul is, for Aquinas, what distinguishes human beings from other creatures, the exercise of rationality is not required: infants possess a rational soul as surely as adults do. Whether or not a person comes to exercise the capacity for rational thought, she is and remains fully human. Far from excluding people with profound cognitive impairments from reflecting the image of God, this strand of scholarship suggests that Aquinas offers new ways of thinking about the participation of the profoundly intellectually disabled in the divine life.
4.1.3 Disability through Reformation and Enlightenment
The Enlightenment and associated scientific and philosophical developments transformed the conceptual lenses through which human beings perceive themselves. This shift has created an interpretive gap between contemporary theologians and their pre-modern antecedents. At the same time, it has opened up new theoretical spaces within which to think theologically about disability. Most importantly, the emergence of an account of natural causes (as seen, for example, in Immanuel Kant’s treatise on the Lisbon earthquake) spurred medical science to investigate causes and develop new treatments for illness. Assigning illness and impairment to intermediate causes intensified questions of theodicy, however. As more and more instances of suffering can be alleviated or avoided, it becomes only natural to wonder why Providence allows suffering at all. Thus theodicy questions have persisted in disability theology, sometimes inspiring creative work in response to certain forms of disability.
5 The current shape of the conversation: growing edges and knotty problems
Disability theology continues to develop in sets of distinct and divergent, yet overlapping, conversations. First, the themes of salvation, perfection, and theodicy persist, generating the knotty problems with which theologians continue to grapple. Issues around theodicy continue to provoke discussion, within the field of disability theology and in the work of outside observers who use disability as a test case for working out their own theodicies. (The paradigmatic example here is Eleonore Stump, but she is not alone.) Questions about the character of salvation and the nature of Christian perfection likewise continue to provoke lively discussion. Second, scholarship focused on intellectual disability continues to provoke disagreement about key questions in theological anthropology (What does it mean to be human?), soteriology (In what does salvation consist?), and ecclesiology (Who can be ordained? What is required in order to receive the sacraments?). Third, more attention needs to be paid to disability theology from the majority world. Tom Shakespeare’s advocacy work in Africa is an example of the kind of engagement theology ought to be thinking about. What disability means varies by cultural context and the impact of disability is not universal.
5.1 The constellations: theodicy, salvation, and Christian perfection
Despite theologians’ resistance to the modern philosophical enterprise of theodicy in recent years, the question why God allows disability and the suffering it often entails is still asked. To that question, there are no straightforward answers. Disabled theologians and those reflecting on intellectual disability have tended to make sense of disability in ways that avoid the question whether the suffering is justified. In so doing, they are in company with late ancient theologians and theologians reflecting on human life in the midst of poverty and oppression: the question is not whether the suffering is justifiable but on how to think well about God in the midst of it.
Like theodicy questions, questions about the meaning of human perfection persist in disability theology. The call to be perfect still guides Christian discipleship, because it was issued by Jesus in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, regarded in early Christianity as a compendium of Christian faith and practice. Yet ‘perfection’ has overtones of normativity and exclusivity and is too easily interpreted through culturally-conditioned ideas of beauty and achievement. Thus the question as to whether or how Christians can be both ‘perfect’ and ‘disabled’ provokes disputes within disability theology. For too long, these two dimensions of the human condition have been taken as mutually exclusive. Disability theology aims to produce an understanding of Christian perfection that holds for people who are disabled, either physically or cognitively. (See, for example, Eiesland 1994 and Yong 2007.)
The closely related theme of salvation generates an equally broad and diverging set of conversations. One area in which this knotty problem has been addressed is in thinking about the resurrection of the body. If human beings are raised to eternal life with Christ, as the creed teaches Christians to hope, what will happen to disabilities in heavenly life? Because disability theology has arisen in part as a discourse about what it means for human beings marked as ‘disabled’ to be considered Christians, attention to the question about how intrinsic disabilities are to individual identity has always been part of the mix. If a person sees herself as ‘disabled’, some disability theologians suggest, the eradication of her disability in the resurrection would alter her self-knowledge and her self-identity.
Yet if human nature involves dependency at different stages of life, then disability poses no threat to humanity. It is possible to imagine personal identity as persisting through the changes inherent in earthly life, including disability. Disability theologians who take human finitude as the starting place for theological reflection on disability suggest that human identity subsists not in the personality but in the person, body and soul, in relation to God. Finitude might provide a starting place for thinking about what is foundational to human nature.
5.2 Theology and intellectual disability: a growing edge
In 1994, Nancy Eiesland began a conversation that focused on physical disabilities and argued in a liberationist key for the recognition of the rights and dignity of people with disabilities. Within a decade and a half, the conversation had begun to shift. Intellectual disability has brought some of the questions that have driven the development of disability theology to a head. In particular, because typical accommodations do not enable a person with intellectual or developmental disabilities to participate fully in a social, cultural, and political context that assumes a certain level of intellectual capacity. Education, economic productivity, even participation in democratic processes depends upon an ability to acquire information, deliberate, and make independent judgements. In this context, disability theologians endeavour to account for the valuable contribution that people with intellectual disabilities have to make to the human family.
The challenge of intellectual disability has thus pressed theologians to rethink questions in theological anthropology, including what it means to be in the image of God, or to live a fully human life. In what does our humanity before God consist? There is opportunity for further development in theological anthropology from the perspective of disability, which might produce an account of human nature that replaced rationality and beauty with the fruits of the Spirit in describing ideal humanity, or what it means for human beings to live as the image of God.
Contentious ecclesial issues also persist, concerning topics such as participation in worship, ordination to the priesthood and access to other sacraments, and the manner in which people with profound intellectual disability share in Christian faith. Some of the questions here centre on whether (or how much) knowledge is essential to practicing Christianity. For example, in traditions where sacramental preparation typically precedes receiving communion, the child should understand that the bread and wine are not ordinary bread. But how is this to be determined? Disability theology within the Catholic Church has helped to shape an ecclesial response that shifts the focus away from individual understanding and verbal expression and looks instead to a person’s relationships and non-verbal cues. In churches where worship centres on singing hymns and praise choruses and responding to preaching and teaching, understanding the sung and spoken words seems essential to real Christian belief and practice. But disability theology has created space for thinking about the knowledge that is foundational for Christian life as God’s knowledge of us. If a person is unable to respond verbally or otherwise indicate comprehension, she is nevertheless known by God, in whom she lives and moves and has her being.
5.3 Disability theology from the majority world
The foregoing suggests that the discourse that has emerged since 1994 is primarily a conversation between scholars and professionals in the academy in Europe and North America. Yet the majority world has hosted conferences and published literature on disability and theology for many years. The Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network (EDAN), founded by the World Council of Churches in 1998, is coordinated from an office in the All Africa Council of Churches building in Nairobi. Former EDAN coordinator and member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRDP), Samuel Kabue, is not only a prominent figure in global disability advocacy but has also contributed to disability theology as the co-editor of Disability, Theology, and Society: Voices from Africa and a contributor to Doing Theology from Disability Perspective.
Voices from the majority world, which have not been incorporated disability theology so far, must be included in the scholarly conversation. Although several volumes have been published, books published in Africa and Asia tend not to find their way onto library shelves or into the hands of book review editors in Europe and North America. As a consequence, scholarship in the West has paid little attention to the literature being produced in the majority world. (See Yong 2013.) Nomatter Sande, an African scholar educated in Zimbabwe and South Africa, now a research associate at the University of Glasgow, published African Churches Ministering to and with Persons with disabilities: Perspectives from Zimbabwe with Routledge in 2023. Perhaps his work will open a conversation between Africa and Europe around disability and theology.
The challenge for disability theology in its next phase of development is to promote sharing knowledge across the equator and over the oceans. What might emerge from a robust engagement between North American, European, African, and Asian disability theologians remains to be seen. It seems likely, however, that work done by majority world theologians at the intersection of disability, theology, and culture is likely to challenge concepts of disability that assume independence and rationality are essential to living a human life as well as the centrality of self-sufficiency, economic production, and achievement to human life.