Profound Intellectual Disability and the Grammar of Baptism

Abstract

The author argues that how the personhood of those with profound intellectual disabilities is imagined often becomes a determining factor in whether those with disability are included in communities or whether their lives are affirmed. The author suggests that the grammar of the Christian practice of baptism is beneficial in communicating the full personhood of those with disability as well as their full inclusion in and gifting for the church-community. This task is performed through a reading of Luther’s 1529 treatise “Concerning Rebaptism” with the author relating it directly to those with profound intellectual disabilities.

Key words:

• anthropology
• church history
• ethics
• inclusion
• intellectual disability

Notes

1 Personhood refers to what affords humans the status of human dignity and the sacredness of life. What is considered the criteria of personhood, of course, varies between theologians and theorists. In this account, personhood is not reducible to the exercising of personality or conscious subjectivity. This article will argue for a theological account of personhood in the final section.

2 Luther may seem a strange candidate to utilize in disability theology based on some of his comments regarding the profoundly disabled. While others, such as Heuser, explicate Luther’s theology of disability in painting a fuller, but no doubt culpable, picture of the Reformer, this article attends to his theology of baptism per se, since this baptismal theology helpfully opens new avenues to explore the issue at hand. See Stefan Heuser’s article, “The Human Condition as Seen from the Cross: Luther and Disability,” in The Disability Reader (2012, pp. 184-285).

3 The question arises at this point: what does baptism ‘effect’ in Luther’s theology? On the one hand, Luther maintains that baptism cannot confer grace by simply being performed. This is because baptism is a sign of the promise, which awaits its completion in faith. “For unless faith is present or is conferred in baptism, baptism will profit us nothing” (1959, p. 59). Faith, however, is not a human work that ‘adds’ to baptism, since this, too, is a divine gift bestowed on persons by God’s Word. Baptism saves in Luther’s (2000, p. 458) idiom not through the water in itself, but by its being incorporated into God’s Word, which creates and redeems simultaneously. On the other hand, baptism is not a superfluous sign, since God’s Word is truly present in the baptismal waters, giving a material sign to God’s unchanging promise (Gerrish, 2015, p. 265). Luther walks on a tightrope, here, since he wants to affirm both that one does not need to be baptized to be justified and that Scripture speaks truly when it says that one must be baptized to be saved (Mk. 16:16). Luther (2000, pp. 459–460) navigates this by arguing that it is only by rejecting baptism explicitly that one denies God’s salvation in baptism, since God testifies that his command and promise come through the water. If one never has the opportunity to be baptized, then God can still justify them.

4 It is worth noting that such a position does not necessarily discount credo-baptism from being able to conceive of discipleship in similar terms. Amos Yong (2007, pp. 209–212) articulates a similar vision consistent with credo-baptist theology in Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity.

5 To say they are subjects is not to imply that they need conscious subjectivity. It is only to recognize that in being made in the image of God, they are not only addressed by God but called to trust and depend on God daily. The end of the final section further specifies how this trust and dependence can be fostered.

6 To expect to receive gifts from the disabled is different than the concept that the disabled are included because they offer a contribution to other members by receiving care. These are different because a contribution account views love in order to receive, whereas this vision based in baptism states that one loves another member in Christ and as a friend whether a benefit is received or not, but still believing that the baptized can and do contribute and that persons need “God’s eyes” to perceive what the Spirit is doing in and through them (cf. Reinders, 2008, p. 341).