Holding Close Both the Wonder and the Wounds

Abstract

Brian Brock’s recent Wondrously Wounded is a welcome addition to the growing theology of disability literature. Despite its many virtues, I think Wondrously Wounded runs the risk of distorting the Church’s identity with regard to how it has responded to disability. Drawing on Hilde Lindemann’s work on ‘holding’ and ‘letting go’ of identities, I try to strengthen Brock’s call for the Church. Our collective work toward the realization of the gospel requires that together we hold the Church’s wounds, and not just its wonders, as part of the narrative we recount.

Keywords:

• church history
• disability
• moral theology
• intellectual disability

Notes

1 In addition to Brock’s book, I also engage with the Syndicate symposium dedicated to it, as I think the exchanges there are very helpful is thinking about his project in Wondrously Wounded.

2 For a treatment of how disability is and ought to be related to discussions of suffering and evil in contemporary philosophy of religion, see Kevin Timpe and Hilary Yancey (forthcoming).

3 Much of Brock’s book is clearly located within a Western approach to disability in a way that might be worth thinking about; but so too is my own work, as will be my comments here.

4 Brock recognizes, as proponents of social models of disability have long emphasized, that at least many of the difficulties involved are socially imposed on those who have a disability rather than inherent to the disability itself; see his reply to McFarland’s contribution to the Syndicate discussion.

5 Miguel Romero refers to this as a ‘double bind’ in his Syndicate contribution. Here is one way he puts it: “Would the argument in parts 4 and 5 be undermined if it could be demonstrated that there are problems with the historical and interpretive work performed in part 1?” Romero thinks that answer is ‘no’, but there’s a danger. As he puts it later: “The scholarly theological goal to wrestle with what it could possibly mean to ‘get Augustine right’ or to ‘get Aquinas right’ simply does not matter for the kind of argument Brock makes in Wondrously Wounded. Understanding Wondrously Wounded in this way helps us recognize and appreciate what it is and understand what it is not. It is not everything and it cannot be everything (Brock, 2020a).

6 See the discussion in Timpe (2014). I’m not saying that those with a vested intertest ought not contribute to the scholarship on the issue. In fact, as Elizabeth Barnes has pointed out, we all have a vested interest when it comes to disability: “

I used to think I couldn’t philosophize about disability precisely because the topic is so personal. But on reflection, that’s absurd. Disability is a topic that’s personal for everyone. The last time I checked, most non-disabled people are pretty personally invested in being non-disabled. The fact that this sort of personal investment is so easy to ignore is one of the more pernicious aspects of philosophy’s obsession with objective neutrality. It’s easy to confuse the view from normal with the view from nowhere. And then it’s uniquely the minority voices which we single out as biased or lacking neutrality. When it comes to disability, I’m not objective. And neither are you. And that’s true wither you’re disabled or (temporarily) non-disabled” (Barnes, 2016, ix).

See also the excellent discussion in Panchuk (2020).

7 In general, I think that the practice of ‘holding someone in personhood’ is neither necessary nor sufficient for personhood. (I say ‘in general’ because it may be that God’s holding someone in personhood is in fact both necessary and sufficient for their personhood, given what divine volitions entail.) However, given that here I’m more interested in ethics-y and social/political issues than metaphysics, I’m fine with that (even if Lindemann’s book doesn’t have as stark of a division between these issues: “human beings can be brought into or held in being [i.e., personhood] by how they are treated” (Lindemann, 2014, p. 3; see also 10–19). But at other times, she writes that the process of narrative construction isn’t all there is to personal identity, given that we can misidentify another’s personhood (Lindemann, 2014, 8f). She states (21) that her account isn’t “intended to supply sufficient conditions for personhood.” She admits she might be erring on the side of too social an approach on page 210.) For some related concerns about her approach, see Verkerk 2015.

8 I put it this way because of the history of testimonial injustice against people with disabilities, especially those with intellectual or developmental disabilities; see the discussion in Reynolds and Timpe (forthcoming).

9 For details of her view that that need not concern us here, see her discussion of the necessary conditions in Lindemann (2014), p. 53.

10 Miguel Romero raises a good point about the difference between siblings and parents: “

There is a difference between Brock’s personal history and the history that frames my own concern with “disability,” analogous to the differences Brock acknowledges between his experience of Adam and the way Brock’s two youngest children (Caleb and Agnes) experience their older brother Adam (xiii). Here is one way to account for that difference, by way of something I share in common with Caleb and Agnus: long before we three had the concept “disability” and long before the moral and cultural significance of that concept had any articulated meaning, we had the knowledges and family rhythms of our respective lives with Adam and Vicente. For me, decades before I began any formal study of theology, philosophy, and ethics, I had the intellectual and moral formation that came from being raised to presume that our intimate family life with Vicente was normal….

The animating principle that gets the ball rolling on the question of “disability” would be a strange way of thinking and the challenge it brings to settled Christian presumptions, descriptions, judgments, and practices concerning a loved person. In other words, on Brock’s terms, we can imagine someone like Caleb or Agnes setting himself or herself to the work of dogmatic theology or systematic theology or historical theology on questions and puzzles generated by that strange 21st century way of thinking called “disability” (Romero, 2020).

As much as I would love Romero’s position to be the general default starting point, I don’t think we can begin there as a culture for contingent historical reasons.

11 One example that has been getting scholarly attention is the Church’s failure to address systemic racism, and specifically anti-blackness, in both itself and the larger culture, a failure that has kept the Church from full repentance. See Thurman (1976), Cone (2004), and Walker Grimes (2017).

12 Consider, for instance, Brock’s claim that “universities generally pride themselves in being the most accessible and equitable of public spaces” (2019, p. 230) in light of Dolmage (2017) and McMaster and Whitburn (2019).

13 “Just the Facts: Americans with Disabilities Act.”

14 “2019 Was Another Record-Breaking Year for Federal ADA Title III Lawsuits.”

15 “IDEA Data Brief: Written State Complaints.”

16 See, for instance, the excellent work by Eric Carter, Shane Clifton, Benjamin Connor, and Summer Kinard, among others. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, “People with disabilities are less likely to attend church regularly than are members of the nondisabled public. According to one survey, adults with disabilities in the US were almost 40% more likely never to attend a church, synagogue, or other place of worship” (Timpe 2018, 91).

17 In Brock 2012, he is less positive about Augustine’s evaluation of disability, there noting that Augustine “stands in a long tradition of conceiving of those with physical and mental challenges as residing within a hierarchy of wholeness, at a greater or lesser distance from what we take to be human perfection” (2012, p. 66) as well as Augustine’s rationalism that would seem to value cognitive disabled lives. See also the discussion in Timpe (2020). Relatedly, in responding to Ahlvik-Harju’s criticisms that his approach is insufficiently explicitly feminist, Brock admits that patristic authors, including Augustine, “are often not good on women” (Brock, 2020c). Brock mentions the need to “relieve the guilt of nun raped during the sack of Rome in the first book of the City of God” (Brock, 2020c). Calling Augustine’s treatment of the nun’s treatment as simply “not good” strikes me as a problematic understatement.

18 McFarland has raised what I think is a related concern about Brock’s book: “It’s not clear that ‘wonders’ are always good, in the way that Brock seems to suggest. … ‘[the] suffering of Christ in the world into which Christians are inevitably drawn in this life. It was precisely this linkage of pain and unexpected divine drawing near that the two words of my title, wondrous and wounded[,] highlight’…. ‘Wonder’ is a word with a range of connotations, and my worry is that Brian’s use of it seems at times to tend toward stressing its positive connotations in ways that goes [sic] beyond what is theologically prudent” (McFarland, 2020). Even if, as Brock suggests, wonder is something that must be lived into and not just thought about, McFarland argues that something’s being a wonder may be neither intrinsically good nor bad, but simply strange.

19 I discuss the conflicting strands of Luther’s thought on disability in Timpe (2020), section 1.2.

20 For a related argument engaging the work of N.T. Wright on these issues, see Timpe forthcoming.

21 Brock does talk about frustration, but I think this is distinct from anger. The latter, I claim, is both sometimes morally permissible and required to address social injustice and oppression.

22 Thanks to Medi Ann Volpe and Jana Bennett for helpful comments on an earlier version of this contribution.