![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
Abstract
As theological inquiry on disability has evolved over the past two decades, broad agreement appears to be emerging in four areas: 1) preferred model of disability; 2) epistemological standpoint; 3) overall assessment of biblical and theological traditions; and 4) constructions of God (when God is spoken of at all). After addressing each of these four areas, the author explores a growing edge in the dialogue, namely, how sustained reflection on ambivalent or aversive experiences of disability might be brought to bear on our constructions of deity. For persons who at times have experienced the body not as companionable friend but as unrecognizable foe, contemporary constructions of God as just, loving, and compassionate, now ubiquitous in traditional and progressive Christian communities alike, may seem unpersuasive. For such persons, it is suggested that a reclamation of biblical and theological traditions that testify to an experience of the sacred as indifferent or oppressive may not only resonate but prove beneficial as well.
Notes
*The title language “a dark and malefic sacred” is borrowed from Georges Bataille's Theory of Religion (1992 [1973], pp. 72–73).
1. The model traditionally has been predicated on a distinction between impairment, a bodily defect or deficit, and disability, the disadvantage imposed on top of impairment by exclusionary, oppressive social arrangements (Shakespeare, Citation2006, pp. 198–199). Recent theorists, however, who hold that no materiality exists independently of our language games, have begun to challenge this distinction. Impairment, it is argued, is not an essential biological characteristic, a “value-neutral” or “‘merely descriptive’” term, but a historically contingent effect of modern biopower (Tremain, Citation2002, p. 32–34; 42). Impairment, like disability, does not precede discourse but is its effect.
2. See, for example, Deborah Creamer's criticisms of S. McFague's “idealizing tendencies” as well as her failure to “look more closely at specific instantiations of embodiment, such as experiences of disability” (2009, pp. 67–68).
3. Such is the problem of evil as classical stated, the earliest extant version of which is traced back to Sextus Empiricus's manual of skepticism, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (see Larrimore, Citation2001, p. xx).
4. Quoted in Larrimore (2001, p. 220).
5. A few would take the added step of claiming that because the character of the Creator is unquestionably good, all of creation is intended to be good too. Life, then, is always to be received as a gift, under whatever circumstances, for “[t]he notion that life is good as it is does not turn on the ‘quality’ or conditions of our lives” (Reinders, Citation2007, p. 178). Compare Stanley Hauerwas's similar statement: “To be human is to learn that we don't get to make up our lives, because we're creatures. Christians are people who recognize that we have a Father whom we can thank for our existence. Christian discipleship is about learning to receive our life as gift without regret” (2008, p. 32).
6. G. Thomas Couser (2002), for example, highlights one of the potential drawbacks of accessing disability autoethnography to generate more positive subjectivities: “[T]he presumed advantage of firsthand testimony may be offset by the danger that candid representation of some aspects of a condition may serve only to reinforce the assumption that disability is necessarily, wholly, and universally a negative experience. Indeed, there is no shortage of narratives that may backfire in this manner… . Thus, the personal narrative of disability is by no means guaranteed to offer positive, progressive, and counterdiscursive portrayals of disability” (p. 111).
7. I know of no mainline Jewish or Christian tradition that would withhold this title from God.
8. Ground-of-being theists, as Wildman (Citation2007) points out, generally prioritize the “plausibility” of god-images rather than their “religious appeal” or their usefulness in promoting justice, tolerance, or ecological sensibilities (p. 277).
9. Gustafson's work is explicitly Christian in that he is deeply informed by the Christian theological heritage and reserves a prominent place for the figure of Jesus, who for him is the paradigmatic “incarnation of theocentric piety and fidelity” (p. 272).
10. Although I find academic theological inquiry enriching, recently I have come across the most memorable and arresting imagery for the sacred in both fiction and creative nonfiction and therefore offer examples here. While I still situate myself in the mainline liberal Protestant tradition, I do not necessarily prioritize the biblical writings or the Christian theological heritage; if more compelling or more illuminating figurations of the sacred may be found elsewhere, I am always eager to see what they might offer and what consequences a thoughtful encounter with them might have for communities of faith.
11. I employ the term cautiously in a Rortian pragmatist sense. To call a particular construction of the sacred “true” is simply to say that one finds it persuasive, that it resonates with one's own experience of the world or does a fine job accounting for certain phenomena in one's necessarily limited purview. “True” here is merely a commendatory term for well justified beliefs, one stripped of its traditional objectivist pretenses (Rorty, Citation1985).
12. Contrast, for example, James Crenshaw's (1987) position on such experiences as they appear in the Hebrew Bible. For Crenshaw, these experiences are exceptional and must evaluated within the context of the worshipping community as a whole. Presumably, the majority (whether early Israelite, Jewish, or Christian) have always experienced God as good and just, so the individual sufferer, whose experience is atypical (except, perhaps, in the immediate wake of a cataclysm such as the Babylonian exile, the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple under the Romans in 70 CE, or the Shoah), must capitulate to this majority at the end of the day. To invest negative experiences of the sacred with authority equal to that of the majority reflects, for Crenshaw, an “exaltation of the human ego” (see especially p. 115–117).
13. “For now I know that you fear God … ,” says the angel, importantly, not “Now God knows that you fear him” (v. 12). We know that a few later readers were troubled not only by Yahweh's demand for a child sacrifice in the opening verse but by his absence in the remainder of the story. In Jubilees, for instance, a book that rewrites several biblical narratives for a second century BCE audience, it is Satan who issues the command and Yahweh who explicitly commands the angel to interrupt the sacrifice. Yahweh is thereby exonerated from the inhumane request for a human burnt offering and portrayed as hero, who steps in at the last moment to frustrate Satan's plan and rescue Isaac. This is not so in Gen 22, where Yahweh is the one who demands a child sacrifice and his angel who intervenes as hero.
14. These constitute but a few of the many experiences of Yahweh as oppressive presence preserved in the Hebrew Bible. For further examples, I would suggest James Crenshaw's A Whirlpool of Torment (1987), where, among other aversive experiences of the sacred, he addresses Jeremiah's framing of Yahweh as traitorous seducer and rapist (p. 31–56) and Qoheleth's construction of an inaccessible deity who appears wholly indifferent to human happiness and wellbeing (p. 77–92).
15. Nature, argues Dillard, is silent and inscrutable, apparently bereft of any inherent meaning or purpose; we are the ones who, if we so choose, assign it meaning (1982, p. 85–94). All of her similes and metaphors for God, therefore, are anthropogenic; at no point does she profess to have provided a more “accurate” account of the sacred than anyone else. In short, she is engaged in a form of constructive, postmodern theology that has relinquished any pretense of penetrating beneath the surface to some deep hidden truth about the world.
16. Compare how Job perceives Yahweh, whom he believes will not give his case a fair hearing. Part of the problem for Job is that God is all-powerful and therefore accountable to no one (9:19); there is no mediator or “umpire” who might offer an impartial judgment (9:32–33). Even if Job is innocent (and readers know that he is; see 1:1, 8; 2:3), God has the means to make him appear guilty (9:30–31). Some in the ancient world sought a remedy to unchecked divine omnipotence by claiming that the creator, though author of the natural laws of the cosmos, elected to subscribe to these laws himself (see, e.g., Seneca, On Providence, 1.39–40).
17. Borg (Citation2006) prefers “character” and “passion” over the more traditional terms “nature” and “will.”