Disabled are not to be Un-disabled: A Theological Appraisal
In a nation like India where anything
could easily be relegated to taboos there even disability cannot evade the
stereotypical apprehensions. We might sound accommodating when we resort to the
use of euphemisms like ‘differently abled’, ‘special child’ etc. but that is
not true. Nancy Eiesland,
pioneer of the Theology of Disability opines;
Euphemisms
for persons with disabilities have abounded in recent years, including
‘differently abled’……These people maintain that Euphemisms deny the fact that
disabilities do exist and reinforce the idea that disabilities must be
camouflaged to make them acceptable for public.[i]
Our tendency to sanitize disability through euphemisms
itself is the clarion call that there is absolutely no space in this world for something which is not ‘normal’. The ‘abled’ are
engaged in the imprudence of making the disabled feel accommodative
reprimanding the fact that the disabled are already an integral part of the
diversity of God’s creation. It is not the benevolence of the ‘abled’ but the
fundamental right of the disabled to feel inclusion tangible. The disability of the ‘abled’ to see the
ability of the ‘disabled’ is the root cause of all the existing
misconceptions.
Christians have prototyped Jesus as someone who
Un-disables the Disabled. Heather Kirn Lanier through her article entitled “My
daughter has a disability. I don’t want Jesus to ‘fix’ her” critiques Jesus for his act. She writes;
On the subject of
disability, I found a Jesus that is, frankly, disappointing. He usually does
precisely what disability advocates rail against. He reinforces the idea that
the disabled body is broken, damaged. He treats the disabled body as something
to fix. “Take up your mat,” he tells people who could not walk and suddenly
they walk. He spits into his hand, touches a deaf man and the man can hear. The
sick and lame touch the “fringes of Jesus’ cloak,” and, like that, they are
“fixed,” transformed into the likenesses of their able-bodied brethren. I’ve
got a bone to pick with Jesus. Why does his primary miracle have to be
un-disabling the disabled?[ii]
With
all due respect to her polemics, I would say that Jesus does not cure but
heals. There is a massive difference between the two. Curing is treating a physical ailment but healing is a
radical endeavour of reclaiming and reaffirming ones space and dignity hitherto
unacknowledged in the social sphere. Jesus was a healer and not someone who
simply cured. Ghettoizing Jesus as someone who only cured would be undermining
his Christness.
Having
said this I take the liberty to make a critical theological appraisal
concerning the paradox of disability.
Theology in our contemporary times has crept into the
vicious circle of elitism. It has become a domain wherein which ‘normal’
cognitive faculties and ‘abled’ discourses serve as prerequisites. K.C.
Abraham reckons “Theology is a discourse carried out by able bodied people for
the able bodied.”[iii]
Therefore disability and its various facets have no space in this realm.
Theology still continues to be a space where Reason as a formative factor of
theology is given priority over against Experience. Theology has been relegated
to the superimposition of prefabricated ideas and propositions onto a situation
when it should have been faith articulated from a context. Academia, Church and
Society are in dire need to discover new metaphors, symbols and images which
are emancipatory and transformative per se. Nuanced attempts ought to be made
to redefine the rudiments of theology and its various trajectories from the
vantage points of people with disabilities.
Disability Theology
Disability and people with disabilities are
indubitably objectified. To the most they are considered to be a resource for
theology but not a source from which theology could be derived.
John Swinton describes
Disability Theology as;
Disability
theology is the attempt by disabled and non-disabled Christians to understand
and interpret the gospel of Jesus Christ, God, and humanity against the
backdrop of the historical and contemporary experiences of people with
disabilities. It has come to refer to a variety of perspectives and methods
designed to give voice to the rich and diverse theological meanings of the
human experience of disability.[iv]
This invites a new dimension of
contextual theology. Theology of disability becomes
a contextual theology only if it takes into consideration the uniqueness of the
experience of people with disabilities. A mere and naïve generalization of the
experiences of people with disabilities would end up in contextualism and not
contextualization of theology. To be
precise the experience of each person with disability is unique and therefore
valorization and generalization of these experiences might not cater to a sound
theology of disability. Theology of disability cannot be static but it should
discover new methodologies and hermeneutics according to the time and context.
I would even say that there cannot be one theology of disability; we need
theologies of disability for that matter.
Critique of Systematic Theology
Systematic
theology is strictly an abled discourse making sense only to the abled people.
The theological metaphors, myths, symbolism, rhetoric, language, genre and the
like it uses exemplify an Elitist attitude. Its philosophical appropriation,
the way it chooses to define the concept of God i.e. the Ontologization of the
Divine is highly metaphysical and abstract. The tangibility and concreteness is
absent to an appreciable extent. Christian theology is an amalgamation of
Jewish theology and Greek Philosophy.
According to Tetsutarao Ariga, a Japanese theologian pertinently a
religious scholar, speaks in Japanese Review of Japanese Religions as cited by
Panikkar; there are two kinds of thinking. A hayatheological thinking
and ontological thinking. The former would be the property of Hebrew
mentality (which is now fostered by Process theology) and the latter of the
Greek. It is fascinating to note that the Hebrew word hayah is not
‘being’ but ‘becoming’, ‘toiling’ and even ‘occurring’.[v] It was only after the intellectual and
theological invasion of Greeks, Christians in their Hellenistic arena started
to attribute this hayah with the Greek so called equivalent Theos or
to be specific ontology. That is Being = God. Actually Theos in
classical Greek is a common noun, properly denoting an event, a divine fact. In
Hebrew redaction, God is still given the proper name – Yahweh but Christians
used this name bearing a personalistic connotation to designate the ‘Father’ of
Jesus Christ.[vi]
What we Christians have done and in fact very much derogatory de facto, we have
anthropomorphized the dynamic realm of Theos into a word of personal
connotations. We have projected all are intentions, desires and all that we
lack to, on this ‘God’. This has led to various trajectories like, Divinization
of Being which includes; Anthropomorphism, Ontomorphism, Personalism and
Deontologization of God.[vii]
The Becoming or the Evolving realm of the Divine was relegated into an
immutable and static one.
In systematic theology, theology
is not simply a God-talk but the talk pertaining to the dominant and ‘able’
attributes of God. Burton Cooper in his reflections on the idea of a disabled
God puts it this way,
Our
tendency is to think of divine power in the same terms as our power, except to
extend God’s power unlimitedly. That is, there are limits to our power; there
are no limits to God’s power. If we can do some things, God is able to do
anything. Thus, human ‘ableness’ provides us with the image to think about
God’s power. In this context, the image of a disabled God is not simply a
shocker but also a theological reminder that we are not to think of God’s
powers or abilities as simply an unlimited extension of our powers or
abilities.[viii]
This calls for a re-imagination of the
power of powerlessness and the ability of disability. This also challenges our
efforts to identify God with human attributes. God is not an extrapolation of
human attributes of power but rather the fulfillment of human powerlessness and
disability.
I would now solicit your attention to The Pelagian Legacy.
Pelagian Legacy
Pelagius was
a morally rigorous monk who rejected the doctrine of Original Sin and
emphasized the human works for spiritual perfection belittling even the
redemptive purpose of Christ. He eulogized the concept of ‘Perfection’ as
quintessential for salvation. Though he had to bear the ignominy of a heretic,
Pelagianism gained momentum. In its modern and secular manifestations the
emphasis shifted from perfecting individuals to perfecting humankinds.
Perfection had nothing to do with metaphysics but task-performance. The
confidence in human intellect gave rise to Eugenics. What ventured in the minds
of people was, if humankind could not be perfected through legislative reforms,
then at least disabilities like ignorance, ill-health etc could be ameliorated
if not eventually eliminated.[ix]
Thus we see that disability was considered to be an impediment in the process
of perfection. More than a condition to be acknowledged it was considered to be
a vice that needs to be eradicated for the spiritual and moral progress of
humanity and society.
Critique of Liberation Theology
It is quite a
known fact that liberation theology gives preference to the orthopraxis domain
of theology over against orthodoxy. Its hermeneutics of freedom, pathos,
re-imagination, resistance, protest and many more indubitably mobilize the
people at the margins to disrupt and shackle the very foundations of
theological and political perspectives and actions that cause pain and distress.
Theology of disability proposes a new metaphor of God i.e ‘Disabled God’. This
inevitably makes us rethink our traditional metaphors but on the other hand it
is problematic. This theology portrays the resurrected Christ as disabled which
is not true. His resurrection itself shows his ability; he could walk through
walls and disguise himself and then appear. To speak about the disabled body of
Jesus on the Cross makes sense but not in terms of his resurrection.[x] The resurrected
Jesus is identified as disabled by the theology of disability because of his
scars. But disability is not only a physical feature but a social stigma.
Resurrected Christ indeed had the scars but he was not victimized, stigmatized,
ostracized, oppressed, excluded and dehumanized based on the scars. On the
other hand his scars were perceived as a source of hope and salvation. Jesus’
scars are marks of redemption and hope and not of oppression or disability.[xi]
Another
problem with this re-symbolization of God as Disabled by the theology of
Disability is that it would result in a much wider exclusion of people with
disability. This theology would have the intentions to counter the existing
theologies which are abled-bodied discourses but its ramifications are
dwindling. If God is disabled in a way that is anything other than
metaphorical, then presumably God can’t be able-bodied? The danger here is either that we end up with a form of
theology that is as exclusive as the theology it is trying to replace or
challenge, or we find ourselves lost in a mass of impairment specific God
images which may do political work but end up deeply theologically confusing.[xii]
Here we have a genuine dilemma. On the one hand we
need to respect the methodological exclusivism of the theology of disability so
that it does not get coopted into other strands of liberation theologies but on
the other hand keeping in mind the intricacies and uniqueness of the experience
of people with disability, we need to question the veracity of this theology of
disability. We also need to ponder on whether it’s credible to have a single
theology of disability or do we need multiple theologies of disabilities.
I conclude with a work by Karim Okiki. This man
presented a symbolic sculpted cross to Pope Francis on
his visit to the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva.
This
cross represents the people with disabilities across the globe. Three
disability symbols carved on the cross represent the blind, visually impaired,
the physically impaired and the deaf. At the centre of the cross is the sign
language symbol for the inclusion of persons with disabilities in all aspects
of the church and the society. He intriguingly remarks;
I would like this cross
to speak to Pope Francis and the churches worldwide on the need to embrace
persons with disabilities especially the deaf and hard of hearing as part of
the church today. Being disabled is part of God’s diversity in creation. I would like to see a world where
persons with disabilities’ spiritual needs are met just like those of any other
person. They too thirst for spiritual nourishment but because there is no
conducive environment for them to be part of our churches, they remain in their
homes.[xiii]
Prayers
Dn. Basil Paul
[i] Nancy L.
Eiesland, The Disabled God: Towards a Liberatory Theology of Disability
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 26-27.
[ii] Heather Kirn Lanier, My
daughter has a disability. I don’t want Jesus to ‘fix’ her, https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/03/07/my-daughter-has-disability-i-dont-want-jesus-fix-her. Posted on March 7, 2017.
[iii] K.C.
Abraham, “Theology and Disability” in Sprouts of Disability Theology,
Christopher Rajkumar Ed. (Nagpur: NCCI, 2012), 4.
[iv] John Swinton, ‘Disability
Theology,’ in Ian McFarland, David Fergusson, Karen Kilby, and Iain Torrance
(eds.), Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, (London: Cambridge
University Press 2010)
[v] Raimundo
Panikkar, The Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha (New York: Orbis
Books, 1989), 112.
[vii] Raimundo Panikkar, The Silence of
God, 110.
[ix] Brent
Waters, “Disability and the Quest for Perfection: A Moral and Theological
Enquiry” in Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church, John Swinton and Brian Brock eds. (London: Bloomsbury Academia, 2007).
[x] John Swinton, “Who is the God we
worship? Theologies of disability: challenges and new possibilities” in International
Journal of Practical Theology. 14/ 2, 2010, 284, 285
[xi] John Swinton, “Who is the God we
worship? 285.
[xii] John Swinton, “Who is the God we
worship? 285.
[xiii] “Pope Francis gets WCC gift cross
symbolizing disability, carved by Kenyan artist with a message”, https://www.oikoumene.org/en/press-centre/news/pope-francis-gets-wcc-gift-cross-symbolizing-disability-carved-by-kenyan-artist-with-a-message. Posted on 21 June 2018.
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