Perfect in Weakness: Disability and Human Flourishing in the New Creation

By Maja I. Whitaker

One of the central and novel convictions of the early Christian movement compared to the existing Greco-Roman beliefs was the dogma of bodily resurrection. The Stoics esteemed temperance, disciplining the body to curb the flesh; the Epicureans embraced pleasure, indulging their worldly desires. However, Paul’s letters to the Corinthians convey a countercultural idea: what you do with your body matters because it will still be with you in the resurrection. But when many contemporary Christians consider the new creation, they imagine the new Jerusalem filled with unblemished people living with normalized and idealized resurrected bodies: "healing" is assumed as a fundamental reality of the resurrection.

In Perfect in Weakness, Maja I. Whitaker develops the proposition that people with disabilities might retain their diverse embodiment in the new creation--that the resurrected body might still be "disabled." This theological claim is based in the accounts of the resurrected Christ appearing with the stigmata, and it is supported by the intuitions of those persons with disabilities who consider that their unique embodiment is identity-forming and entirely unproblematic in itself. If the human person is an essentially embodied metaphysical unity, then there may be features of our particular bodies that must be continuous through the transformation of resurrection for personal identity to be secured. However, this "retention view" has faced conceptual objections on the grounds of theological anthropology, continuity of identity, and biblical conceptions of flourishing human life. Whitaker confronts these objections, integrating philosophical, biblical, and theological methodologies in order to present a reasonable and coherent defense of the retention view.

The possibility of persons with diverse embodiment enjoying fullness of life in the new creation can expose negative attitudes towards disability and unlock a critique of ableist bias in Christian thought and practice in the modern church. Moreover, it can function as an eschatological parable to subvert the powers of this age that idolize success, mastery, and autonomy to the neglect of theologies of weakness, limitation, and dependency. In this way, Perfect in Weakness is important not only in the realm of disability studies but also in the wider Christian community that is mired within the cultural ideologies of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781481319171

Book preview

Cover Page for Perfect in Weakness

Perfect in Weakness

Text logo reading SRTD: Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability

SERIES EDITORS

Sarah J. Melcher

Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio

John Swinton

University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland

Amos Yong

Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California

Perfect in Weakness

Disability and Human Flourishing in the New Creation

Maja I. Whitaker

Baylor University Press

© 2023 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Whitaker, Maja I., author.

Title: Perfect in weakness : disability and human flourishing in the new

creation / Maja I. Whitaker.

Other titles: Studies in religion, theology, and disability

Description: Waco : Baylor University Press, 2023. | Series: Studies in

religion, theology, and disability | Includes bibliographical references

and index. | Summary: "Argues for an understanding of human identity

whereby disabilities are not problems to be healed, but rather marks of

diverse embodiment that will be retained in the resurrection"-- Provided

by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023017751 (print) | LCCN 2023017752 (ebook) | ISBN

9781481319157 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481319188 (adobe pdf) | ISBN

9781481319171 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Disabilities--Religious aspects--Christianity. | Identity

(Psychology)

Classification: LCC BV4460 .W448 2023 (print) | LCC BV4460 (ebook) | DDC

259/.44--dc23/eng/20230629

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017751

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017752

Series Introduction

Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability brings newly established and emerging scholars together to explore issues at the intersection of religion, theology, and disability. The series editors encourage theoretical engagement with secular disability studies while supporting the reexamination of established religious doctrine and practice. The series fosters research that takes account of the voices of people with disabilities and the voices of their family and friends.

The volumes in the series address issues and concerns of the global religious studies/theological studies academy. Authors come from a variety of religious traditions with diverse perspectives to reflect on the intersection of the study of religion/theology and the human experience of disability. This series is intentional about seeking out and publishing books that engage with disability in dialogue with Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or other religious and philosophical perspectives.

Themes explored include religious life, ethics, doctrine, proclamation, liturgical practices, physical space, spirituality, and the interpretation of sacred texts through the lens of disability. Authors in the series are aware of conversation in the field of disability studies and bring that discussion to bear methodologically and theoretically in their analyses at the intersection of religion and disability.

Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability reflects the following developments in the field: First, the emergence of disability studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor that has impacted theological studies, broadly defined. More and more scholars are deploying disability perspectives in their work, and this applies also to those working in the theological academy. Second, there is a growing need for critical reflection on disability in world religions. While books from a Christian standpoint have dominated the discussion at the interface of religion and disability so far, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu scholars, among those from other religious traditions, have begun to resource their own religious traditions to rethink disability in the twenty-first century. Third, passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States has raised the consciousness of the general public about the importance of critical reflection on disability in religious communities. General and intelligent lay readers are looking for scholarly discussions of religion and disability as these bring together and address two of the most important existential aspects of human lives. Fourth, the work of activists in the disability rights movement has mandated fresh critical reflection by religious practitioners and theologians. Persons with disabilities remain the group most disaffected from religious organizations. Fifth, government representatives in several countries have prioritized the greater social inclusion of persons with disabilities. Disability policy often proceeds based on core cultural and worldview assumptions that are religiously informed. Work at the interface of religion and disability thus could have much broader purchase—that is, in social, economic, political, and legal domains.

Under the general topic of thoughtful reflection on the religious understanding of disability, Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability includes shorter, crisply argued volumes that articulate a bold vision within a field; longer scholarly monographs, more fully developed and meticulously documented, with the same goal of engaging wider conversations; textbooks that provide a state of the discussion at this intersection and chart constructive ways forward; and select edited volumes that achieve one or more of the preceding goals.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Body, the Resurrection, and Disability

2 Personal Identity across Life, Death, and Resurrection

3 Identity-Forming Features in the Pre- and Post-resurrection Body

4 The Diversely Embodied Resurrection Body

5 Implications for Pre-resurrection Thought and Practice

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book emerged out of my doctoral thesis, and as such it has been the work of many years and leaves me with many people to thank. Not least, my family: mum was at this for a long time. To my four girls, I am grateful for your understanding and support of me, and I pray that it’s been an inspiration rather than a burden to your childhoods. To Dave, my ever-supportive husband and barista, your encouragement and your unending confidence in me has kept me going through many a crisis. My parents, Alan and Svanaug Nilsen, thanks for your confidence in me and your practical support with the kids in particular. It was a little painful to see me turn down a place in medical school to go to Bible college, but here we are now, a doctor of a different sort and one I’m pretty sure that my Morfar would have been prouder of.

Many thanks to my PhD supervisor, Professor Murray Rae at the University of Otago, for your feedback and guidance, and your encouragement to me to embrace the homiletic tone. I have greatly appreciated your belief and trust in me, which made a PhD an achievable task amid my other commitments to church and family. Ever since you said, Sure, bring a newborn to class, I knew you were the supervisor for me.

I am grateful to Emeritus Professor D. Gareth Jones, of Otago’s Anatomy Department and the Bioethics Centre, for his influence and his consistent and generous encouragement. You took a risk on me, and I am so thankful for it. Your example and support showed me how I could use my intellect to serve God, and you have taught me to always do so with the lives of real people in view.

To my colleagues at Laidlaw College, whose ranks I have joined in more recent years, what a joy it is to work with people committed to the same ends and willing to wrestle with the outworking of those goals.

Many thanks to my PhD examiners for their input, generous encouragement, and the rich discussion of my thesis. Thanks to the readers of earlier drafts of this manuscript for their incisive critique, and to the team at Baylor University Press for bringing this project to fruition.

This work has involved a journey of ruthless self-discovery, and I am grateful for those who have accompanied me on it with consistent love and grace, particularly my friends and church family at Equippers Church Timaru. Megan Tucker, you have shown me what it means to be loved without expectation, and I cherish it.

Special thanks to those who shared with me their personal experience of and personal perspective on living with a disability (or loving those who do) and their expectations of our future hope. Reflecting on the lives of persons with disabilities has allowed me to reinterpret what it means to truly flourish, and it has exposed many of the cultural constructs that distorted my inner and outer worlds. This work has brought me great freedom. Please forgive me for using your lives with a theological and a pastoral agenda. My hope is that this exposition of this eschatological possibility might go some way toward addressing the ableism that blights our lives together.

Introduction

What form will the human body take in the resurrection? What are we to expect will become of bodily features that ail us now or that society deems to be deviations from some imagined norm? Bishop Otto of Friesing, writing in the twelfth century, thought that he knew the answer to these questions. He wrote,

We must not suppose that giants are brought back in such great stature, dwarfs in such extreme littleness, the lame or the weak in a state so feeble and afflicted, the Ethiopians in an affliction of colour so disagreeable, the fat or the thin in their superabundance or their lack of flesh, to a life which ought to be free from every blemish and every spot.¹

Most modern Christians would quickly reject Otto’s description of African skin tone as an affliction of colour so disagreeable and recoil from his claim that the new creation will be populated only by white people. The body shaming inherent in characterizing the fat or the thin as in need of special corporeal transformation would also likely come under scrutiny—in theory, even if not in practice. It seems obvious that resurrection bodies need not conform to the culturally bound aesthetic standards of Otto’s time. But what about his assertion that the lame or the weak shall not be resurrected in a state so feeble and afflicted as that they currently experience?

For many Christians the resurrection body is pictured as perfect, and physical healing is assumed to be a fundamental component of the transformation of resurrection. However, this assumption is based on conflating healed bodies with normalized bodies and ignores the gospel accounts of the risen Christ with wounds intact. In contrast, some persons with disabilities expect that they will retain in their resurrection bodies those features of their bodies that contribute to their current lived experience of disability.² For these persons, certain embodied features are formative of their sense of self, and so it is difficult to imagine being themselves without them. Consider Nancy Eiesland’s reflection: Having been disabled from birth, I came to believe that in heaven I would be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God. My disability has taught me who I am and who God is. What would it mean to be without this knowledge?³ With Eiesland, I will argue that embodied features that currently contribute to disability might in some cases be retained in the resurrection body. For some persons with disabilities, their diverse embodiment is identify forming, and so the retention of those features safeguards the continuity of personal identity through the transformation of resurrection. However, these features are not identity forming for all persons with disabilities, and so I am not here arguing that the disabling features of our bodies will always be retained in the resurrection body. Rather, their retention in some cases presents no threat to God’s goodness nor to the eschatological flourishing of the person in question and the full realization of their humanity. The risen Christ presents his wounded hands, feet, and side as proof of his identity and resurrection, but also as representative of resurrected humanity, thus implying that fulfilled humanity need not exclude impairment.

This proposal is consonant with a return to the body in contemporary theology and the burgeoning field of disability theology spurred by the disability rights movement. I suggest that considering this retention view is a particularly penetrating approach to expose negative attitudes toward disability and to unlock a critique of ableist bias in Christian thought and practice in the modern church. However, this proposal is also of interest outside the fields of disability studies and disability theology because it speaks to the currents in modern Western culture that overvalue autonomy, independence, and agency. My personal interest in the topic was first prompted by this aspect. Most disability theologians are either persons with disabilities or have family members with a disability. I fall into neither of these categories, yet the prospect of a diversely embodied resurrection body has captured my theological and ethical imagination for the symbolic power it has to provoke cultural transformation and personal formation. While this positioning is problematic, my hope is that this book might do the same for you. I will present what I believe to be a cohesive and coherent defense of the retention view, suggesting that the prospect of a diversely embodied resurrection body is reasonable and in line with both philosophical and theological considerations. However, I am quite open to the prospect that in the new creation, I will be proved wrong. Perhaps all disabilities are eliminated. What I hope to achieve here does not depend on the ultimate eschatological outcome. My primary purpose is to provoke the question, Well, why not? Why couldn’t people with disabilities retain their disabilities in the new creation? for the reason that it forces the second question, Why did I think that was going to be a problem? These questions prompt us to reconsider our common assumptions about human flourishing, and whether disability and limitation are incompatible with fullness of human life.

Before going further, I wish to acknowledge the difficulty I have in coming to this exercise as a person without a disability and with only minimal personal involvement in the lives of people with disabilities. As the slogan nothing about us, without us suggests, the contribution of people with disabilities is of primary importance in these discussions and has too long been neglected. If the only or the loudest voice heard is that of the nondisabled, then ableist biases are inevitably advanced and can easily go undetected. I have been careful to pay attention to the voices of those persons with disabilities and those who live closely with them as much as possible.⁴ These efforts are inevitably limited, however, as I cannot fully escape the ableism that has shaped my ways of being in and interpreting the world around me. Ableism provides structural privileges to me that I cannot completely identify, despite my best efforts to do so. Even if I were able to discern such privileges and their influence upon me, I know that within the brokenness of my humanity there is an unwillingness to relinquish them. Despite this limitation, I am throughout attempting to adopt a perspective that is shaped by a consciousness of disability. Methodologically, my engagement with the lives and perspectives of people with disability has been limited to the existing literature and my relationships and conversations with friends with disabilities, both physical and intellectual. It is important, therefore, that this work is read in concert with others produced by persons with disabilities, and those works that are informed more directly by ethnographic studies of the wide range of lives that this people group encompasses.⁵ It is also important to recognize the diversity of experiences and perspectives of persons with disabilities, particularly as they are shaped by intersections with other forms of systemic oppression such as race and poverty.

Though I lack the epistemological privilege of personal experience of disability, I am encouraged by Deborah Creamer’s assertion that the common experience of embodiment and limits means that theological reflection on disability is open to the nondisabled also.⁶ I am following the lead of nondisabled philosopher Licia Carlson who argues,

The philosophical questions that emerge in connection with intellectual disability are matters that not only are worthy of scholarly interest but speak to the deepest problems of exclusion, oppression, and dehumanization; and . . . one’s proximity to persons with intellectual disabilities should neither be assumed as a basis for participation in this conversation nor grounds for disqualification when speaking philosophically about this topic.⁷

This has always been an uneasy space to occupy. The resounding question in my mind is whether I have anything to offer, and whether it is valid for me to do so. Out of this emerges a twofold temptation: either to say nothing for fear of saying too much inappropriately, or to over-confidently say too much and cover the deficiencies with bluster and thoughtless ignorance. Instead, I take the posture of one who is offering something that is inevitably flawed—and not just flawed at a surface level or in a discrete part that could be isolated from the whole; instead, it is systemically flawed by privilege that is structured both in society and in my body. But I am offering it nonetheless, in the hope that it will be received as one contribution among the many made by those more qualified to speak, and that it may add weight to those voices.

Defining Disability

Persons with disabilities are present in all societies and cultures in every place and time in human history.⁸ Disability is a key social category, but the minority group it defines is not a homogeneous social group. There are vast differences between the kinds of disabilities that occur: physical versus intellectual, congenital versus acquired, tremendously painful versus functionally limiting alone, and conspicuous versus so indiscernible that the person can pass as normal. Even the same impairment with the same history can produce a different lived experience of disability for different people. This makes it difficult to draw general conclusions about the nature and experience of disability, though there are overarching themes to be explored.

At first glance it seems as though it should be easy to define what is normal, but when we investigate the matter more closely, it turns out to be far more difficult than first anticipated. The definitions of normality that we end up with differ from person to person, and from society to society, because our ideas of normality are culturally conditioned. The notion of ability as normal was first critiqued by Lennard Davis, who explained that normalcy is a culturally constructed concept that has emerged only recently in history, but its implications now extend invisibly throughout modern culture.⁹ The cultural concept of normal developed within the distribution of measures of human functioning, and statistical outliers of all kinds experience alienation. However, as Brian Brock explains, "the fact that large numbers of people’s bodies work one way establishes no normative claim about how any one body should be.¹⁰ It is actually no easier to delineate normal in scientific terms; human persons are subject to a wide range of biological variation within the scope of healthy and unsurprising human bodies. Where we might expect crisp black-and-white categories, we find blurred distinctions. The terms normal, able-bodied, or even the more innocuous sounding full function assume that there is a clear level or standard of functioning that human persons usually achieve. The reality is that full function is a relative term: there is no bright line for what is normal. The functioning of each person, in each kind of capacity, is located on a spectrum of phenotypical expression—we are either low, high, or somewhere in between when it comes to IQ, flexibility, strength, coordination, and so on. Consider the concept of neurodiversity that is becoming part of common parlance. It challenges the conventional normativity that elicits prejudice against those who exhibit behavior and thinking that is perceived as disordered." There is no normative human experience, just as there is no normative experience of being disabled.

Disability has been described primarily through two models that sit in opposition to each other, the medical and social models. The medical model looks at disability through the lens of functional limitation as deviation from a normate human body. It describes the disability in medical terms and locates any limitation within the body (including the mind) of the person with a disability. When used exclusively, the medical model ignores the role that society plays in disabling the experience of those with impairments and provides little motivation for social change. It is for this reason that the disability rights movement rejected the medical model in favor of the more progressive social model. However, the attention that the medical model gives to the inherent limitations of impairments is valuable. There are objective experiences produced by impairments, such as pain and functional limitations, that are the direct results of those bodies and not only the society in which those persons live.

The social model locates the disability not within the individual’s body but within the society which she inhabits. It commonly distinguishes between an impairment as a characteristic of a person’s body and a disability, which is the experience of that body in the world. It is the social factors that supposedly turn persons with a disability from a minority group into an oppressed group, excluded from full participation in society. Society produces disability in a number of ways: the objectifying gaze, social stereotyping, stigma, architectural obstacles, governmental policies, and economic structures of exclusion.¹¹ All these negative attitudes and practices are socioculturally conditioned and so are open to change without any reference to the body of the person with a disability. In this way the social model has been an important tool in mobilizing the disability rights movement to push for social change and practical solutions to alleviate the oppression and exclusion of persons with disabilities. However, while the social model has motivated an ethic of social activism that has been beneficial in gaining rights and justice for many persons with disabilities, it tends to do little for those with intellectual disabilities. The impairment of profound intellectual disability cannot be ameliorated by social changes, and protecting the moral rights of the intellectually disabled does not attend to their social and cultural isolation. In addition, if the social model is exclusively employed, it fails to give sufficient weight to the objective realities of pain and the lived experience of limitation that many persons with disabilities face. For example, fitting ramps the world over would improve accessibility for a wheelchair user but would do little to ease the physical pain that a person’s impairment might entail.

Neither the medical nor the social model alone fully addresses the experience of disability, and so a number of other models have been suggested. Some models are integrative, adopting the strengths of the medical and the social models and uniting them into bio-psycho-social approaches that recognize that the experience of living with a disability is shaped by both the impairment itself and the social attitudes and constructs regarding disability. Another middle way between the social and medical models is provided by Kahane and Savulescu’s welfare model, in which a person’s biology or psychology is a disability if that state makes it more likely that a person’s life will get worse, in terms of his or her own wellbeing, in a given set of social and environmental circumstances.¹² While this model does attend to the objective harms that an impairment poses to a person’s lived experience, it also suggests that the difference of disability is inherently bad, rather than merely different, which is problematic. Elizabeth Barnes has defended the view that disability in itself is neutral with respect to well-being on philosophical grounds. She distinguishes bad-difference views of disability, whereby having a disability would still be a bad thing even if society was fully accommodating of disabled people, from mere-difference views of disability, where having a disability makes you physically non-standard, but it doesn’t (by itself or automatically) make you worse off.¹³ Note that according to Barnes, while the mere-difference view does not deny that disability might involve the loss of intrinsic goods or capabilities, such as hearing or seeing, it does assert that disability is not only the lack of these goods as disability might allow you to participate in other goods (perhaps unique to disability).¹⁴ In addition, there is the cultural model, which attends also to the ways in which cultural conceptions of disability produce unique values and expectations within that culture’s identity and organization.¹⁵ This framework is particularly important for biblical scholarship on disability, as the distinctive cultures of the biblical texts must be taken into account when reading those texts. Neither the medical nor the social models can be used independently in examining biblical references to disability, as it is often difficult to identify the biological condition in question, and the social norms are poorly understood—instead, everything is seen through the lens of culture. For these reasons the cultural model is most commonly used in biblical studies, and I use it as my primary frame of reference, while recognizing that the complexity of disability requires a plurality of perspectives.

The terminology around disability has changed greatly over time, reflecting changes wrought by the disability rights movement and the shift from the medical to social models of disability. The vocabulary is charged with meaning, and so one is wary of making a lexical misstep. It is obvious that terms like the retarded are no longer acceptable,¹⁶ but what about disabled person? Throughout this work I am adopting a person-first approach, preferring person with a disability. However, for some people this too is problematic as it suggests that their disability can be separated from their personhood in a way that reflects neither their aspiration nor their experience.¹⁷ I am using the term nondisabled to distinguish those persons without a disability for simplicity’s sake, though the term temporarily able-bodied does have merit in acknowledging that able-bodiedness is a precarious state that cannot be guaranteed.

A final and important note on terminology: in much of disability studies, impairment is distinguished from disability, where impairment is a physical or mental condition that an individual experiences in their body, and disability is the effect of a negative societal response to that condition. This distinction loosely maps onto the medical and social models of disability. However, it often falls short in suggesting that the physiological phenomenon of impairment is neutral and that bodies and persons are only harmed by the social contexts they experience. I have chosen to use the term diverse embodiment to refer to the difference of bodily features that a person with a disability possesses.¹⁸ Often this diverse embodiment limits flourishing in the physical experience of the person, and this I term impairment. Added to this is the experience of disability, which is the effect of a negative societal response to an impairment, which can include experiences as varied as social stigma and physical accessibility. Teasing out diverse embodiment as a neutral characteristic of the bodies of persons with disabilities is an important conceptual step, and of particular relevance as we look forward to expectations of the post-resurrection body.

Disability in the Bible and Theology

In discussing disability in the first two gospels, Candida Moss writes,

A great deal of the limitations of earlier scholarship on disability in Matthew and Mark is grounded in a failure of imagination that springs from mild ableism. If we put aside our assumptions about the kinds of bodies that are desirable to God, we start to read the Gospels afresh.¹⁹

I suggest that the same is true of the Bible as a whole, both the Old and New Testaments. The accounts of disability throughout the Bible can make rather depressing reading—disability appears as a curse or a consequence of disobedience, it is associated with both sin and demon possession, and people with disabilities tend to appear as only flat characters, there only to act as a foil for the action of the story or as metaphors in moralizing tales. Ableism seems to be deeply embedded in the text, rendering it at best discomforting and at worst abhorrent to those seeking to advance a more positive view of disability. However, if we come to the texts with different assumptions, without our ableist and normate biases, we discover different themes emerging, ones that are more hopeful for a positive theology of disability.²⁰ It is no easy task to set aside the ableist biases that have long shaped surface readings and interpretations of Scripture, in fact, it is impossible to do so thoroughly, as the invisible structural privileges of ableism inescapably color the interpretative lenses of the able-bodied. We all must continually work to cultivate a healthy suspicion not so much of the biblical text as of our traditions of interpretation.²¹ Reading the Bible from