Is God disabled?
I am disabled—in fact I suffer from multiple disabilities.
I am very brusk sighted (my prescription is -5 diopters) and I too endure from astigmatism (inherited from my father—information technology prevented him standing his career as a airplane pilot in the RAF after WW2) which means I cannot part easily in everyday life without medical intervention in the class of optical correction.
I suffer from acute seasonal allergic rhinitis, ordinarily known as hay fever. Information technology made my teenage summers on the cricket field a misery (which had the upshot of excluding me in a large all-boys school where sport was everything), and is accompanied past asthma, which means I need medication when doing strenuous exercise.
In my gap year in Israel I picked up a bacterial infection from drinking unpasteurised and unfiltered cows' milk, which gives me intermittent digestive problems.
When travelling in the Far East in my twenties, a viral infection killed the nervus supplying my sub-scapular muscle, disabling proper motility in my right shoulder and to this 24-hour interval sending the other muscles in my shoulder into spasm if they are overused (for instance, past spending too much time using a figurer mouse). This also put paid to my cricket career in bowling.
Ten years ago I had a serious episode of sciatica, preventing me moving for four days, and leading to an ongoing weakness in my lower back. 5 years ago I ruptured my left achilles tendon, and the fibres did not properly reconnect, significant that my left calf muscle has never properly recovered. Information technology means I cannot run, and because I at present walk unevenly, I have continued vulnerability to back problems. I need to do daily stretching exercises to prevent farther back pain.
The reason I mention all this is non merely to garner sympathy (though of course that is always welcome!) but considering of reading a fascinating article on the BBC website a couple of weeks ago that explored the question of Christian faith, healing, and inability. Damon Rose lost his sight as a teenager, and quite often experiences Christians budgeted him and request to pray for his healing.
From time to time, without warning or encouragement, I get approached in the street past Christians who tell me they want to pray for me to get my sight back. Since I became blind equally a teenager this has been a regular even so annoying past-production of being an independent disabled person who can walk about on the street.
I had ever assumed that everyone knew these encounters are a fact of life for people who are visibly disabled. But when one day I told some colleagues most my latest brush with a would-be healer, they were variously fascinated or outraged that anyone would take the cheek to impose their beliefs on me about something so personal.
I have to say that he bears this with remarkable grace, and even though he is not a Christian himself, and mostly feels angry most this, at the terminate of the article he relates a quite different response:
The last fourth dimension this happened was on the London underground. The train was packed full of people all studiously ignoring each other when a man put his mitt on my shoulder and asked if he could pray for my sight to be restored. Normally when people offer to pray for me to exist healed, I say 'No'. But this man told me that he was a recovering drug aficionado and alcoholic who had himself been healed by prayer. I got the sense that he actually needed me to let him pray over me, and then I said 'Yes' and let him lay his hands upon me.
I tin't claim to exist cured of blindness as a result of his prayer, but I'll never forget how happy and grateful he appeared to exist. To me information technology felt very much like the roles had unintentionally been reversed, and that it was the disabled homo during the run across who had given out a dose of healing.
But what I observe interesting is that the whole commodity, and the theological issues information technology explores, consistently uses the common categories of 'disabled' and 'able-bodied'. So the question is: which am I? How much worse would my sight demand to become earlier I motility from one category to another? Or how bad would my back need to be? Legally, in that location must be a definition before you lot qualify to register equally disabled, for example to get a blue parking disc. But a friend told me many years ago that the threshold was not particularly high (and then to speak). The language of the disabled/athletic is also condign an of import category for those candidature for 'inclusion' of the disabled, for inability theology (which the article explores a little), and for the disability identity politics which is emerging.
I completely agree with the need for much improved disabled access, and there is a serious practical challenge for any church community to brand their building and their activities accessible to all—not least with an ageing church and national population. Just I am not sure I am convinced past the ground on which this is usually argued. If you lined upwards a representative grouping of people co-ordinate to their physical abilities, with the most obviously and visibly disabled at ane finish, and the fittest and most able-bodied on the other, I think you would find a continuum and not a sudden interruption separating one group from another.
The reason that the 'disabled' need to be included, is not because they are 'another' group, carve up from 'united states'—just because they are the same every bit usa. Nosotros are all express, and most of united states of america are, to some extent, identifiably disabled.
Moreover, from a theological signal of view, our various disabilities are all part of our creaturely finitude. I might be more than limited than other people in my ability to run, or run into, or lift heavy objects—but we are all limited in these regards, and my limitations are relative and not absolute. Some people might need a smooth ramp to access a edifice, only in that location is nothing absolute about the standard nine-inch riser in most sets of steps. If we could all jump like kangaroos, then having a two-pes high stride would be fine—simply being the humans that nosotros are, that kind of provision would make the edifice inaccessible for near of us. So why should our threshold of provision include only 90% or eighty% of the population, rather than 50% or 40%? Incidentally, this puts the lie to the mutual mantra 'You tin can do anything if you try/really believe you can/don't give upwardly' as a response to some extraordinary achievement by someone. We can all probably exercise more than nosotros imagine—but we are all express, finite creatures, and the idea that we can do 'anything' is just a wilful denial of our dependance on our creator.
This of course points to the important stardom between two ways of thinking virtually inability—the medical and the social. The medical model of inability postulates a norm of human performance in a particular area of action, and sees medical or physiological reasons why this norm is not attained equally needing medical intervention of some sort to event a healing of the problem. The social model locates the effect more in the expectations of others as to what is 'normal', rather than locating the issue in the 'disabled' person. Information technology seems to me that neither model is adequate on its own, and both are needed to brand proper sense of the issues at pale.
At that place is no doubt that Damon Rose suffers from a medical condition which has led to his blindness. The expectation that he should, normally, be able to come across is not merely located in social expectations; our bodies have evolved to perform sure functions, and the purpose of eyes is to run into, just as the purpose of legs is to walk. But there is also no doubt that many are regarded as 'disabled' because they practise to fit with social norms. I was challenged by this when on the staff of a theological college, and we had changed the catering arrangements and put the salad options on a shelf that anyone over five feet alpine could reach—forgetting that one of the students was only 4 anxiety tall. That student might (or might not) have had a medical condition—but the main trouble here was the supposition made by others of what was 'normal'.
In the BBC article, the source of the inappropriate behaviour by those praying for the disabled is traced dorsum to the gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry.
For Candida Moss, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, these stories can be alienating for readers who, similar her, are disabled.
"I retrieve the main problem for disabled people reading the Bible is that while Jesus does spend a lot of time with people with disabilities, every time he meets them, if they come across him with faith, he heals them so he's sort of like this cathartic scourge that wanders around eradicating inability from the world."
Another difficulty, says Prof Moss, is that disabled people are often used past the Gospel authors to beef up Jesus' credentials, showcasing his divine powers.
"When Jesus meets people with disabilities, he fixes them and that's a sign that he is powerful," she says. "That relegates people with disabilities to just being there to show the power of God. They're not really real characters or real people who have feelings and needs and personalities. That pushes them to the margins of the story."
I retrieve this offers quite a serious misreading of the gospel narratives. A classic instance is the story of the healing of the man built-in blind in John 9.1–41. The story is both carefully crafted (having an overall chiastic construction of personal encounters) but likewise includes narrative realism; you can employ it unedited as a play script. It begins and ends with a hit contrast between Jesus and his interlocutors. At the start this is with the disciples, and they are the ones who want to treat this human being as an exercise in theological reflection.
As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
"Neither this homo nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "just this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him." (John ix.ane–2).
And, similarly, at the end, Jesus' arroyo contrasts with the religious puritanism of the Pharisees. In the middle of the narrative there are 2 encounters between Jesus and the human being himself, in classic Johannine 1-to-i chat. The first time, Jesus heals him, and the 2d time he invites him into relationship as a disciple. The human is a existent grapheme, who shows courage, wisdom and wit, and who is certainly not at the margins of this story.
This kind of humane treatment is plant all over the gospel healing narratives. When Jesus meets blind Bartimaeus outside Jericho, he does not presume to know what he wants, but asks 'What do you desire me to practice for y'all?' (Mark 10.51, Luke xviii.41 where he is unnamed, and Matt 20.32, where he is in a pair). Ability and decision have been handed dorsum to the person in demand, who becomes quite key to the whole episode. Something similar happens in John 5, where Jesus heals a man at the Pool of Bethesda—but after asking 'Practise you want to get well?' (John 5.half dozen), a question that is completely redundant, unless Jesus is seeking to empower by his healing. On other occasions, Jesus sends the crowds away, or takes the person he is dealing with aside on his or her own; this is no healing circus for others to exist entertained past. Surprisingly, at times Jesus even tells people non to brand their healing known; his activity is driven past compassion for the individual.
Information technology is certainly truthful that Christian prayer for those who are 'disabled' can be crass, even offensive—merely I think this arises from confusion about power, equally we are broken-hearted well-nigh the power ofour prayer, rather than focussing on the power of God. It certainly does non arise from the example of Jesus in the gospels.
Moss draws on another image from scripture, one that has been of encouragement to 'disabled' readers, of God apparently in a wheelchair.
"Nosotros don't get many descriptions of what God is actually like but we get i of them at the beginning of Ezekiel," she says. "The Prophet has this vision of the Heavenly throne room, where God resides and God is sat on this throne that is pretty much on fire.
"But it's also described as having wheels within wheels attached to it. And following this scene, if you lot recall of all the scenes of the Bible laid out chronologically, God is always saturday in this wheeled throne and in fact moves – leaves the city of Jerusalem – on the wheeled throne and returns to it later on the wheeled throne."
Although God is depicted walking in the Bible, Prof Moss says this happens earlier – in the Garden of Eden. "It seems like God is a wheelchair user perchance a m years before man beings themselves accept idea about wheelchairs."
So is God disabled? "That is certainly a way to read it" says Prof Moss, admitting that for many, this is a jaw-dropping and theologically challenging idea.
The difficulty with this reading is that the text is really communicating precisely the opposite. The throne is itself an image of ability, and the fact that is has wheels implies that God was not dethroned when Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed by the Babylonians who took the people of Israel into exile. In other words, the epitome is an affidavit of the standing ability and reign of God despite appearances. We exercise not demand to project our anthropomorphic understandings of ourselves on God, no matter what the degree of our disability—not least because God has experienced our creaturely finitude in the incarnation, when the Give-and-take became flesh.
This issue then connects with whether nosotros will be healed of our disabilities in the life to come (described in the article as 'in heaven', but mayhap better described as 'in the new cosmos'). Mention is made of the pioneering writing of Nancy Eiesland'sThe Disabled God, in which she comments:
The resurrected Jesus Christ in presenting impaired easily and anxiety and side to exist touched by frightened friends alters the taboo of physical abstention of disability and calls for followers to recognize their connexion and equality at the point of Christ's physical harm.
Candida Moss then extends this to the disabilities of the believer.
Prof Moss says the fact that Jesus retains his scars after the Resurrection suggests that disabled people might likewise retain their disabilities in the afterlife – something she hopes for herself.
"I think that if I'thou not disabled in sky, I'm non myself and then I certainly hope I'll nonetheless be disabled in heaven. I certainly hope that I don't feel pain in sky – that seems antithetical to what heaven is. Simply I even so want to be me. And I don't think that I would be me without the atmospheric condition that I have. It'south shaped who I am, how I think, what I do. Everything almost my life involves this part of myself, which is integral to who I am."
Merely if disabilities lie on a spectrum, rather than being something absolute, does this even so make sense? Again, at what indicate of being disabled does my disability become 'part of who I am?' I wonder whether this claim is in danger of making a category error, mistaking means for ends. It is certainly the case that my disabilities and limitations tin grade in me a greater cocky-awareness, a sense of humility, perhaps a quality of patience that I did not have when I could do things more than easily, and even a greater consideration of others. They shape me in a manner that I might not accept been shaped without these disabilities. But these things have but neededto be formed in me by my limitations because my sinful, fallen life did not manifest these things already.
The hope of the life of the new creation, when we raised to life, is that nosotros volition be 'perfect' in the sense of having reached our full potential as the creatures God intended the states to be—to 'become mature, attaining to the whole measure out of the fullness of Christ' (Eph iv.thirteen). If that involves a healing of my 'disabilities', so I shall be content.
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