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I wonder if, in the west, we have been taught and trained to hold too many things in tension. We “balance” work and home life, career and family, and our abstract ethics along with what we know we can actually “get away with” in society. Our marriages are often described as 50/50 give-and-take partnerships. When the balance isn’t struck, the relationship falls apart. Our ideas are held up by a web of ropes and pulleys working against each other. We like to phrase reality as a dialectic between faith and science, law and gospel, conscious and sub-conscious, and we usually imagine ourselves to be somewhere between poor and rich, regardless of our actual wealth. Forces are always pulling us in many directions and we let them. The person who streaks off in one direction is considered all kinds of crazy. In contrast, the wise man is the broadly experienced and specially trained elder who has learned to navigate this sea of forces and hold himself together, despite all the cognitive dissonance.

But again, this is what life is like in the modern west. Primitive cultures are more straight forward. There is less noise in their philosophy. This is difficult to describe and I don’t think I can articulate it well in this post but I will try to give just a few examples.

I recently chatted with a man who spent four years in Indonesia leading a team of coal miners. He had to quickly learn their language and get these uneducated and untrained tribal men to operate bulldozers and other heavy equipment. They learned fast and were hard workers but abstract thought was not their forte. He recounted several interesting stories about how he had to learn to give them ridiculously explicit directions and not assume even the smallest detail.

I got the same impression watching an interesting documentary (in Spanish) on the Karo tribe in southern Ethiopia. They raise thousands of goats, cultivate sorghum by the river bank, and live in little thatch huts. Nobody reads or goes to school or leaves the village. Children help with the herds as soon as they learn to walk. We may think their way of life is completely backwards, but it doesn’t look to me like any of them were dumb. They know what they are doing and it’s simple. They aren’t pulled in a hundred different directions by everything they read at school, learned at church, had shouted at them on the news, were told at work, were told by their friends, heard their professor say, heard their new boyfriends say, etc. Everyone in their tight and relatively isolated culture is speaking the same word – day in and day out.

When people in these cultures come to know the gospel of Jesus, their conversions are remarkable. It literally changes EVERYTHING. Conversion experiences are dramatic and their religious fervor stays dramatic. They aren’t used to holding a hundred ideas and personas in tension and then learning to slowly incorporate their new-found faith into the mix. Instead, things go “boom!” and the difference is often apparent in all contexts.

And this changes what ministry and leadership looks like too. In the modern west, to even be considered to pastor a modest church congregation, you need to have a Master of Divinity or equivalent degree. That goes for all Catholic priests and all but the most low-church protestant groups. That means 12 years of school, 4 years of college, and then another 3 years on top of that, usually with a substantial amount of work in Greek and Hebrew. Then, FINALLY, you can have an entry level job preaching the gospel. That’s 19 years minimum. The situation is similar for missionaries. Why do you need all this education? To get your “world view” fully formed and held together amidst all the noise.

In contrast are the indigenous leaders that were encouraged and set up by groups like the Sudan Interior Mission in the early half of the twentieth century. They would baptize some new converts, teach them some really basic things from the bible for a few months, and then quickly send them on to preach at the next village. At one point in Rowland Bingham’s memoir, he describes how he visited a mission church that was flourishing in Nigeria. While he was there they took up an offering and raised about $60 (probably about 10x that by inflation today). What did he decide to do with the extra money? Pick four local guys and send them about 800 miles east to southern Sudan to start a new church there. Only two years before that, those men barely knew how to read. Now they were being sent out and would likely (by most accounts) go on to actually do a better job than most highly-education foreigners could do. They were just so gung-ho about Jesus in a way that WE have trained minds to never be about anything. We are weighed down by our riches.

Check out this passage from a Christian missionary expressing a few of his frustrations:

In Egypt and Sudan, in the Somalilands and in Eritrea, we have been denied our basic liberties [of religious freedom]. In all these years, whenever we have had opportunities, we have preached in Moslem areas without provoking a single riot. We are out to win Moslems, not to stir up their hatred.

What has Britain gained by this policy? Why is Egypt sitting back in this struggle and avowing her neutrality? Has Britain won any love by her pro-Moslem attitude there? She made her first step backward there, when Government stepped in and banned the Christian Scriptures in Gordon College and then made the Moslem Friday the official Rest Day in a Christian College, given by Christian subscriptions, in memory of the great Christian leaders, General Gordon. Why does officialdom still demand from Britishers a special passport and permit of entry? Why have they, in the last five years banned us from entering pagan tribes on the pretext that these people are in “the Moslem area”?

[Earlier], we fought this thing through at the Foreign Office. We are not going to give us our liberties gained then. When Britain has actually proposed to make a grant of land in old London for the erection of a great Moslem center, it is time for Britishers to awake to the pro-Moslem bias of their Government.

Sound familiar? Egypt trying to look neutral to the international community while oppressing Christians on the ground. Christian prayers being banned in universities while Muslim holy days are officially observed. Substantial chunks of public land given build Mosques in large western cities. Is the passage above from an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal last week? Could be. But no, it was actually written in 1942, over 60 years ago, from Rowland Bingham’s memoir about the Sudan Interior Mission (p.90).

Some things have been going on for a lot longer than we may realize. Most of the things we complain about today we do so as if they just started up a few years ago when in reality they happened in our grandparents’ age, and perhaps, under their watch.

It’s been pointed out that nothing brings Christians together in unity quite like serious persecution. Minor doctrinal differences melt away in the face of great challenges. We don’t have time to argue with each other over the finer points of doctrine when we are just trying to keep our families safe. The same would seem to be true for missionaries working on the frontier as this passage from Rowland Bingham’s account of the Sudan Interior Mission in the 1920s indicates. Here we find mode of baptism (a oft-divisive idea since the reformation) becoming a non-issue with almost no overt ecumenical effort:

My Baptist friends were especially insistent that I declare myself on the form of baptism to be used on the field. I said it would be time enough to consider it when we came to baptizing our first converts. I preferred not to influence any of our pioneers in the early days. They were accepted without regard to their denomination. But a strange thing happened. The one denomination that was seeking to enter the Central Sudan with us was the Church of England. Their custom at home is well known, but on the Sudan field they came to baptize their first band of converts before we did. To the astonishment of every one, they decided to revert to the very early practice of their Church – baptism by immersion.

Our senior missionary on the field was Presbyterian, but when it came to the baptism of our first converts, he decided to follow the example set by our Anglican friends and immerse that first band of Christians. This became the general practice upon the field, so that we had no baptismal controversy and only one practice in the Central Sudan. Our missionaries have had minor doctrinal differences, but facing millions of people in the darkness of their heathenism, there has been a unity in presenting Christ as the Savior of sinners and “able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him.”

-Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee, p.115

When you are living in the jungle and working tirelessly to translate the bible, preach the gospel to hungry hearts, and not get malaria, comradery is stirred up between anyone even barely on the same “team”. We see this in other accounts of Christian missions among pagans where cessastionists find themselves taking up exorcism and folks from an acapella psalm-chanting tradition find themselves ministering during a 4-hour worship service with drums and dancing. What happened? They discover that certain things just don’t matter near as much as they thought, especially given the context. They need all the friends they can get.

I imagine that when the early Christians were thrown to the lions, they prayed alongside their brothers, be they dispersed Jew or newly converted Greek. In the comfort of their homes these men might have argued with each other about this or that, (I am of Paul, etc.) but that is far, far from their minds in the face of war or martyrdom.

What is the flip side to all of this? Prosperity breeds schism. When everything is fine – there is tons of food to go around, everyone is safe and the police can be trusted, then we are freed to… bless the world? No, apparently not. We are freed to hash out contentious minutia within our family. And that is why we have the Presbyterian Church of America (a healthy and growing denomination) spending hundreds and hundreds of skilled man-hours trying to (once again!) give Peter Leithart a formal slap on the wrist for not articulating the Westminster Confessions in such a way to make certain folks happy. The canon lawyers could be home playing ball with their kids or some such thing, but they need not since everyone is apparently fat and happy. The mighty prosperity of the modern west has given them the leisure time to get bored with their lives and turn to picking bones with their brethren.

Contrast this with the people of the Coptic church in Egypt who are just trying to survive amidst very real danger. This picture is of firefighters at a church in Cairo last year after it was attacked by after rumors circulated of a Christian man dating a Muslim girl.

Do you think the folks from this church are sitting around in their bible studies debating the precise efficacy of the sacrament? I doubt it. Any port in a storm and that means that in hard times the walls that prevent our unity dissolve. Only in the ridiculously prosperous west do we have the time and energy to differentiate ourselves so much. When you are starving you will accept a cold glass of water from even an enemy. Only when you have a fat bank account will you turn up your nose at him.

I think that perhaps when we pray for Christian unity, we may be inviting war or at least economic hardship. That seems to be the most fertile ground for its growth. I guess I’ll take it.

I’ve been reading a book titled “Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee: The Story of the Sudan Interior Mission”. Published in 1943 (and somewhat hard to find), it is the memoir of Rowland Bingham, a Canadian who founded and worked tirelessly to send protestant Christian missionaries into sub-Saharan Africa in the early part of the 20th century. It’s been an interesting and enjoyable read, even more so when I think about what sometimes ISN’T being said. I’ve read a lot of history and analysis of these same regions during this time lately and sometimes a very different picture is painted. I still would consider this guy “on my team”, while at the same time realizing that his account is going to tilt a certain direction and gloss over facts that may not fit well in the story he is trying to tell. The following is an example of what I’m talking about.

This is a book full of miracles. But these missionaries are not charismatics, but rather mostly baptists and Presbyterians. Nobody gets suddenly healed, there are no prophecies spoken, no distinct tribes spoken to in their own languages via glossolalia, and no exorcisms. It’s not to say these things didn’t happen. In fact, if even a fraction of the more personal accounts of these deep inland African missionaries are to be taken at face value, then nearly all these things were in fact happening. Exorcisms and demonic confrontations in particular figure prominently into many accounts of attempts to evangelize pagans. This holds for Christians of all traditions and denominational backgrounds, even ones that technically dismiss this sort of activity. But, it wouldn’t be fit to report THOSE stories back to westerners that had categorically ruled out their possibility. They might begin to doubt the rest of the story as well and withdraw their financial support.

Yet the book is still full of miracles. What miracles then? Money ones. These missionaries repeatedly set out on trips with barely enough cash to buy a train ticket to their next league of their destination, let alone enough money to outfit an 800-mile trek into Niger in 1910. But the money kept showing up. Random people they met would give them a thousand bucks. Someone would die and donate their entire estate to the mission. Bingham would be asked to preach during an impromptu service on a boat across the Atlantic and the offering taken up from the strangers there would be just cover all expenses. Should we be careful and scale things back during the war (WWI) they asked? No! Full steam ahead. And the war years turned out to be some of the most fruitful. Some donated a bunch of money in stocks to them. The financial advisers all said they should carefully invest them for the future. No way! Sell ’em all now and use the money to send some guys to Darfur. The quality at the center of each story was trust – trust that God wanted them to do this dangerous and seemingly impossible thing and how they went and did it anyway, with his divine assistance.

Or didn’t do it. The number of team members Bingham lost in the early days – most of them to malaria, was rather shocking. On several of his trips, he returned home having buried his friends in the dirt and seemingly accomplished nothing. Talk about discouraging! God wants us to do this thing! We even got all this money out of the blue and used it to buy supplies and passage to Ghana. Then we sailed up the river to find this unreached tribe we had heard a rumor of and…. half the team got sick and died and some Muslim slave traders tried to kill us. We returned completely empty-handed. And…. then got our act together and tried the whole thing over again the next year, with only slightly better results.

After years of that, actually establishing several churches in the bush, translating several of the gospels into the local language and baptizing thousands of converts would not seem like “business as usual”, but rather just like what it was – a miracle of sorts.

Now, you may wonder if I have personally ever experienced anything like this. The answer is  yes. I won’t go into the details at this point but I will say this much: My wife and I have been technically broke or in debt our entire marriage. Two years ago we wanted to adopt our forth child. Nearly everyone, especially family told us it was a foolish and unwise idea. We decided to trust God that it was not in fact a stupid or misguided desire, but rather something He was asking us to do. In the end, it cost over $30,000. We didn’t do any fundraising and the naysayers didn’t give us a dime. We brought her home about 18 months ago. The bills are entirely paid off. True story.

From the Book of Kells of course.

The following is commentary from my wife and I on John Hull’s essay A Spirituality of Disability: The Christian Heritage as both Problem and Potential.

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Whistler:

Some long, but worthwhile quotes:

Quote
One of the most important aspects of the spirituality of disability lies in the challenge which it offers to hegemony. The world of the able-bodied usually conceives of itself as the only world. Those whose bodies are not able are excluded. As an example, let us take the situation of sighted people. Although sighted people know, with varying degrees, that they are sighted, it is unusual to find a sighted person who knows that he or she lives within a world which is a projection of the sighted body. In other words, although sighted people know that they know through sight, they seldom realise the epistemic implications of vision. Sight projects a world and sighted people are embodied within that world. They know that there are others but they seldom know that there are other worlds. Therefore they think of others as being excluded from their own world. Thus they unconsciously create a discourse of dominance.
When this ideology of domination is internalised by disabled people, as is almost inevitable in the first instance, the result is a loss of self-esteem, a loss of soul which is the accompaniment of identification with the marginalised and the excluded. In this way, the power of the present absolute world is acknowledged.
There can be no dialogue between the disabled and the non-disabled until the plurality of human worlds is recognised. As long as the non-disabled world retains its hegemony, the relations which it has with the world of disability will be those of care for the helpless, and of patronisation. The relationship will be that of charity, of condescension, and not that of mutual respect based upon acknowledgement of otherness.

Quote
What are the implications of this approach for the education of disabled children and adults? One of the controversies within special education is the question of whether disabled children should be educated for successful life in the larger society or whether they should be educated for successful life within the world they already live in. This controversy was particularly sharp in the case of those with profound hearing loss, and has only gradually been partially resolved in a deeper respect for the integrity of the deaf condition and the recognition that the culture of the visual has its own characteristics. In the history of the education of people with a visual loss, there has been a similar conflict. The predominance of embossed, punctilinear script over embossed shapes of the letters of the Latin alphabet is a case in point. Punctilinear script, the most widespread example of which is the type devised by Louis Braille, is recognisable by touch more easily than the embossed forms of printed letters, but is less convenient for sighted people. Braille only won the struggle when blind people got control of the agencies. The approach of this present study is a contribution to the growing tendency to recognise the integrity and distinctive nature of each form of disability, and lays emphasis upon the need to help each disabled child to achieve wholeness within the characteristics of that particular disabled state. The approach of this present study is a contribution to the growing tendency to recognise the integrity and distinctive nature of each form of disability, and lays emphasis upon the need to help each disabled child to achieve wholeness within the characteristics of that particular disabled state. For social and economic reasons, disabled people must also live in the greater world, but this can be achieved most successfully if the adaption to the larger society springs not from a sense of deficiency and loss but from a position that has come to realise the intrinsic character of the world in which one lives in the body.
I realised this in the course of preparing my project ‘Cathedrals through Touch and Hearing’, that set out to equip the English cathedrals with facilities for blind and partially sighted visitors. I found that most of the cathedral guides wanted to show the sighted person’s cathedral to the blind person, and did not understand that such knowledge must necessarily remain in words only. How can a blind person be interested in stained glass? Only by way of general information about the cathedral. Sighted guides would place the tip of my finger on a tiny rose bud, cleverly carved amongst the intricate shapes of the leaves and branches of a chair leg, something that would take the blind hand a long time to appreciate, while the loveliness to the hand of the cold brass of the smooth communion rail would not be mentioned. Gradually my project team realised that blind people must be taught to acquire first hand knowledge of the cathedral, and this meant teaching them to use their bodies in contact with the fabric in order to construct a distinctive blind cathedral. We realised that there are at least two cathedrals – one for sighted and the other for blind people. Each has its beauties and its needs.

My thoughts on this essay.

In a sense, this one had more that I felt was useful than the previous one. Often, I found myself nodding my head and thinking, “I hope that non-disabled people read this, really read it.” All the stuff about the sighted living in a single world that assumes anyone outside of that world is merely lacking is so true that I wanted to jump to my feet and shout “Preach it!”

At the same time, I think the verbiage used can so easily be misinterpreted as to obscure the entire point that Hull is making, quite excellently, I might add. The trouble with the “plurality of worlds” as Hull readily admits, is the Christian notion of singularity, and the danger of the pluralism to fall off the cliff into relativism and mushiness. I don’t think that is at all what Hull intends. I would humbly attempt to clarify his verbiage by replacing “world” with “lived experience” or “perception.” Hull is not advocating for relative Truth, but differences in perception, differences in lived experience, differences in conclusion based on differences in culture. Just as different races experience different cultures based on geography, tradition, language, food, socio-economic status, appearance or clothing, so a marginalized people group like people with a certain disability might also experience an alternate culture even while residing within a non-disabled community. This difference is what Hull seems to be saying by “world” and my own experience supports such a notion. Both the experience of a parallel, rich, beautiful, but alternate culture, and the disempowering rejection by the mainstream sighted world of the validity or existence of that culture. Because of the widespread prevalence of the insistence that the sighted experience is the only valid experience, I have struggled for years with defining my own experience only in terms of lack, which led to intense depression and problems with self-identity and self-esteem.

I loved the description of the journey that Hull and his colleagues took when deciding how best to present a tour of a cathedral to blind guests. Instead of presenting the aspects of a cathedral that sighted guests find most stimulating and trying to awkwardly translate it for blind guests, to instead present a different but equally valid set of experiences.

I also sympathized with Hull’s conclusionary statement that our culture, so long entrenched in ableism (disablism in the UK) has so far to travel before any significant change is effected that to view such a wold seems merely like foolish idealism. Yet, I still hope, and dialogue about this because I believe that words and ideas have power. Doing nothing will bring nothing. Doing something as small as joining in these discussions and dialogues may someday bring society shuffling closer to this kind of respectful thinking that we today can only dream of enjoying.

—–

Minus 5 points for the phrase “phenomenological epistemology”.

I like that he begins with a difficult abstract concept (The transfiguration of the body and the transcendence of the body) and then goes onto to give good tangible examples of what his actually means.

In particular, the fact that technology transcends our bodies and extends our reach beyond ourselves and draws distant information to us. This is just as true of a blind person using a GPS device as it is of a sighted person chatting with someone on the internet, or either of them reading a book.

The body is transfigured by the loss of a sense. But in doing so, it is opened to the possibility of other worlds when before it seemed that there were only one. It is a powerful kind of “forced empathy” you could say. Once you realize there are at least 2 worlds (seeing and unseeing, it is much easier to make the jump to their being 3, 4, 5, 500). At the same time, there is still only one world. Hyper-individuality is no good either.

I enjoyed his account of the blind person regaining their place in a new world, “gradually built up, put into place with innumerable fits and starts”. To the degree that we “deny citizenship” to this person in their world, we are not loving them. As Christians we have historically done this unwittingly by treating people as charity cases or sinners.

The blind person is, (hopefully I might add!) “No longer confined through the deception of everyday experience within an absolute world”. This is a good thing and another way to say that throw a particular narrowing of their senses or reach (in the case of, for example, a wheelchair-bound person) they are no longer so narrow minded. Their disability has transfigured their body and now they are aware of a wider world.

His point about how Christian tradition treats blindness in 2 ways was interesting to me and something I hadn’t considered. That it was a negative thing, yes, but I had forgotten about how it was sometimes used as a metaphor for faith (positive).

His line of reasoning about how there were no disable people among the disciples was really quite interesting to me. It seems that it would be very helpful if there were.  That the early apostles were accompanied by signs of healing seems to aggravate this problem. I think that one problem for this is that Acts records only the really cool stuff that happened in the first few years after Jesus ascended. There were likely tons of people with disabilities (major and minor) that were part of the Christian community but that did not get healed in any sort of miraculous sense. When one considers how many people probably had fairly severe myopia in antiquity with no vision correction, this has to be the case. Then again, that was the norm, so not worth mentioning. Only fancy stuff made it into the written account.

It’s a really challenging passage, but it’s also a case where I think we need to not be so much of a biblical literalist that we don’t consider other sources. That there were people of all social standing and economic class among the early Christians is clear from lots of 2nd century accounts. I think disabled people were definitely in there too, whether they were written about a lot or not. Also, as he mentions in several cases, Paul definitely had something going on which he alludes to on a couple occasions.

Finally, at the end, his example of the Cathedral made me think of the last time I was in a Cathedral. I noticed the stained glass and the high arches, and even the roughness of the stone, but didn’t think about the ornate carvings on the legs of the pews. I realized, in a bit of shock, that if I were building a Cathedral, I might have left that detail out! Terrible idea.

He ends on a downer. Can Christianity be rescued from us always considering blind people as alien? Oh ye of little faith. Yes, I believe so. Always reforming.

Oh, and this quote is good:

“It is the very provinciality of disability which enables it to grasp the territory of the human, while the city, looking out upon the provinces, thinks that it itself is everything. So a spirituality of disability not only pluralises the human world, it extends it.”

—–

Whistler:

As Walt Whitman says, that I may contribute a verse.

O ME! O life!… of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; 5
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

My wife and I have had discussions lately on the topic theology and disability. It a topic that is, I believe, more important than you might think and one that has certainly been neglected by most or perhaps all of the best Christian thinkers.

One person that has written about it is John M. Hull, an English theologian who went blind in the middle of his life. We aim to read through a collection of essays he wrote related to disability and Christianity and try to comment on and further develop his ideas a bit. We decided this would be the best venue to post them at.

This is the first round. Please read the original essay, The Broken Body in a Broken World: A Contribution to a Christian Doctrine of the Person from a Disabled Point of View.

Our comments, with minimal editing, are as follows:

—–

Whistler:

I am initially put off just by the title. The word “broken” implies the kind of negative connotations I am trying to reject. While I appreciate that the Fall has created a reality of brokenness, and also that the broken Body of Christ is celebrated, and not scorned, my search lately has been to discover whether a legitimate, orthodox theology of disability can support a view of disability in which the condition and experiences of the disabled person is different than that of the comparable able-bodied person but not inferior or negative in any way.

This is important for a philosophy and a theology of disability because it enables us to postulate the existence of several worlds of human knowledge. The experience which a blind person has of the world is so significantly different from that of sighted people that we can speak of it as a constructed world. This emphasizes the independence and integrity, the wholeness of the blind world, and sets blindness free from being interpreted merely in terms of deficiency. Blindness is not just something that happens to ones eyes; it is something that happens to ones world. This enables us to also relativise the hegemenous assumptions of many sighted people, who do not always realise that they live in a world which is a projection of their sighted bodies, but make the mistake of thinking that the world is just like that, the way they see it. Such people are never able to respect or understand blind people, but will always regard them as being merely excluded from the sighted world, and not as having a more or less independent world of their own.

As far as we are concerned, these controversies are long since dead, but a significant point remains, and one which is hardly ever commented on in the interests of a theology of disability; the Man who stands at God’s right hand is imperfect. The broken body on earth corresponds to the broken body in heaven. Moreover, the broken body on earth is to be found not only in the eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper, but also in the church, which is the broken body of Christ, and in the broken body of suffering humanity. When people are hungry or thirsty, or naked, or sick, or in prison, it is Christ who suffers these things, and because only a body can suffer thirst, hunger, nakedness, illness and imprisonment, it is not the Spirit but the body of Christ that suffers (Matt. 25:31-46).

Several points in Hull’s essay have caught my attention. The first is choosing to deal primarily with the theology of the body as a direct contrast to Imago Dei.

I fail to understand why these two concepts must be mutually exclusive. Hull goes on to conclude later on in his essay that Jesus exists corporeally in heaven at the right hand of the Father, and yet Jesus is consummately in the image of God. He is God. The scars and wound (what Hulls refers to as the “brokenness”) did not alter the image of God or remove Christ from the Trinity. If Christ is still a member of the trinity, but the corporeal body bears the imperfections and scars even in heaven, then bodily imperfection therefore must not reflect on the perfect Imago Dei that Christ still shares.

I suggest that the “Kingdom of God is within” idea solves this dilemma in that the Kingdom of God does not rely on the state of our physical bodies. This, of course, directly denies Hull’s theology of the Body, but to me better addresses the dichotomy of the problem of imperfection and Imago Dei.

The next point that caught my attention is the idea of the High Priest who understands our weaknesses. Of course, the Old Testament priests had to be physically perfect, and specific guidelines were written about certain disabilities that would remove the eligibility of a man from serving as high priest. Still, if Jesus exists in heaven with the scars and imperfections now, and yet can serve in the role of High Priest, does this speak to a certain perfecting of imperfections or sanctifying of brokenness that results in requalification for service?

Hull briefly addresses the role of the disabled Christian within the Body of Christ: specifically that the awareness of the body, the empathy and compassion that the disabled naturally develop needs to exist within the church, and is an integral part of the Body of Christ.

While this is observably true, I would argue that this barely scratches the surface of the possible roles God might have in mind for the disabled within the larger Body of Christ. It would seem to me to be merely a poor start, as it is once again focused only on the negative, the experience of suffering and neediness that give the disabled such a one-dimensional persona to society in general, and the Church in particular.

To extend this, I’d like to bring a reminder that the disability that society so scorns often creates opportunities within the lived experience of the disabled person to develop skills that otherwise would likely stay latent. Fanny Crosby might have written 6,000 hymn had she not been blinded as a young child, but without the experience of learning orally, of having her grandmother read the Bible aloud to her until she had entire books of it memorized, and the time to compose verse due to a lack of other stimulation and activity, I highly doubt she would have been so prolific.

Beethoven might have written the Ninth symphony had he not been deaf, but the social isolation and introspection he experienced may have contributed to the intense power we find in the Ninth. Such speculation is impossible to prove, of course, but the contributions of people who have disabilities should never be limited to compassion for others or inspiration of the non-disabled, as nice as these things are. To really acknowledge the disabled as equally contributing members of the Church, their positive accomplishments need to be lauded, and not just as exclamations of shock or sentimental anecdotes of “overcoming.”

—–

“due to the persistent tendency to infer inner sinful states from outer imperfections”
Yes, this is a problem, but not actually the actual case, just a tendency.
We are the image of God, but we do should not reinvent him in our image.
I still think, if phrased properly, the image of God can still be an OK starting point. I think most of the intuitive implications from this though are indeed problematic (God as perfect body, perfect intellect, etc.) and considering disabled people does a good job of bringing these problems to light.
With Dorothy Sayers, I would tend to emphasize the image of God being some sort of creative energy, something still observable in even some of the most mentally disabled.

Agree on physical disability, mental disability, and sensory disability being essentially the same thing, with the possible exception of some of what we in the modern secular west call psychological disorders. Some of these are better described as simply sin or the work of demons. The man who does not fear God begins with the assumption that neither of these exist, but we should not and no saint or writer of scripture thought anything of the sort.

Social aspect most alienating. Yes.

I like the “relative disability” thing on walking to get water in Africa. This is what I’m always sayin’. We are ALL disabled in some sense, to varying degrees and from various standpoints. It’s not an either/or.

Be careful treating everything as a construction inside someone’s head creating new worlds. This is a common technique to ignore nature and especially scripture. Empathy does not require multiple universes, but one.

Baggage muddies the waters of our understanding. For example, the fact that most blind people live in poverty makes blind people seem more different than they really are. They share many things with wealthy blind people, but much they do not. Don’t confuse the two. This is a good point.

Careful saying the economics is unnatural. That’s probably too big a bite to chew.
I would qualify it as being largely contrived and unjust, but not necessarily wholly unnatural.

Some examples of disabilities in scripture…

• Jacob limped because he fought with God. This isn’t presented a bad thing.
• Moses had a speech impediment, but this was not presented as a substantial problem.
• Paul was blinded on the road to Damascus, but it was simply to get his attention.

“Your Best Life Now” self-help “You can do it!” theology is poison to disabled people. (And everyone else for that matter.)

Christianity is not part of the problem, but one of THE major forces in history that does advocate for disabled people. Marxist China euthanizes them. So did Pagan Rome. India relegated them to an established bottom class, and African tribal people largely neglected them. Christians, and ONLY Christians started nudging and pushing things toward anything even close to what we have today. So some people are angry at Christians that oppressed them. So what. That is short sighted. The big picture says otherwise.

Gosh my heart is warmed when I read a blast of scripture. It’s like someone opening a window and the cool oxygen-infused breeze rushes in! Then back to the stifling ivory tower.

I totally dig his study on the breaking of bread and how often it appears. Especially about how the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. “he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread”.

The body that stands at the right hand of God is imperfect, but in some sense, fully fulfilled in it’s brokenness. But it is also incorruptible.

I agree that unambiguous perfection is an “oppressive monolith”. It’s like the weight of the law. But Jesus is always keeping the law intact while blowing it to bits with a love that comes crashing through it like a train through a paper barrier.

The image of God, and Man in Eden is not the same as “the images of perfection which are found in our present culture”.

Footnotes: Disappointed that he didn’t mention Pope John Paul II’s “A Theology of the Body”, which is a MAJOR work on this topic. It’s a Catholic thing though and might not be on his immediate reading list. It’s impossible that he hasn’t heard of it though.

Article got better as it went along.

In the end I agree with his conclusions.

I think the adjustment I would make is that I think the traditional perfect Eden and perfect eschatology view can be clarified and amended to reject modern ideas of “perfection” and still stay intact. I don’t think they must be tossed entirely. They are important for other things.

—–

Whistler:

Regarding our “perfected bodies” in heaven, where do we get the supposed standard of perfection that God plans to give us in our heavenly bodies? Matt mentioned a Ken doll, and while it made me laugh, what IS a perfected body? Is it a certain height? Certain musculature? Certain hair or skin color? Will someone with dwarfism be taller and have a “normal” body? How about a person who is proportioned in more of a typical manner, but who is as short as a person with dwarfism? Will the body with dwarfism change, but the person who is merely short stay the same? How about IQ? Will we all be geniuses?

I still wonder if more of our difference are deliberate by God than we realize, and my in fact be a perfection just as they are.

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CoffeeMatt:

When you start asking questions about what our redeemed bodies will look like, then some of these things fall apart. It is conjecture of course, but one that can bring out where you stand on a lot of things and challenge them. Will a dwarf person still be incredibly short in the new Jerusalem? Will he stay short? Will he begin to grow? Will a blind person be instantly seeing? Will they grow to see over a 100 years? Will then stay blind but not actually care anymore? A person who died of cancer will no longer have that, but what WILL they have? Do you come back as a 20-year old? 40-year old? What happens to all the aborted babies? Do they get to be born and then grow up as children? I’m afraid that we can’t go very far down this road without just making things up. It’s tempting but probably best to do our best with the information we have a clearer picture of.

In the city of Gondar in northern Ethiopia is a 17th century church Debre Birhan Selassie.

In 1888, Muslim raiders from Sudan sacked the city and burnt down all the Christian churches. This one, though, when they approached it, they were chased off by a terrible swarm of bees and decided to move on to pillage a next village.

The church remains to this day and features hundreds of brilliant angel faces painted on the ceiling.

C.S. Lewis, speaking through Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comments on the red-breasted robin: “They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read. I’m sure a robin wouldn’t be on the wrong side.” It strikes me that, in similar fashion, if the robin is a good bird, one parallel is that the bee is a good insect – perhaps the best of bugs.

 

I’ve cleaned up my sidebar links to other blogs for the first time in quite a while. I’ve also added a few local friends and acquaintances I’ve been meaning to mention for a while.

• The Creator’s Mark, Bart Budwig, thoughts on art and the creative process, particularly songwriting
• Forever and Ever Amen, Gunn Wilson, history, literature, and pipe smoking
• Strong Sails, Luke Taklo, mostly poetry
• Mark Beauchamp, Tumblr, original cartoon artwork among other things
• I’ll be on that Hill, Brendan O’Donnell, Tumblr, Rural Wendell Barry-esque miscellany

Three cheers for proximity and community and all that!

 

I recently read through the bulk of the Lonely Planet travel guide for Ethiopia and Eritrea. The many fun anecdotes made it an interesting read.

• Want to drive to Kenya? You can, but be sure to take at least two spare tires for you 4WD. The road is really bad.
• Many cheap hotels in some parts of the country double as brothels so bring earplugs if you want to live cheap.
• If you want to travel any further east of Jijiga toward Somalia, an armed guard is compulsory and you should find a convey to be part of. Experienced travelers only.

And finally, my favorite, a description of how to (not) get into Sudan:

Unless you’re using the services of a registered Sudanese tour company, then obtaining a tourist visa at the Sudan Embassy is a mission impossible if ever there was one. Prepare for a lot of sweat, tears, headaches, and then a big, fat ‘No’. All applications are sent to Khartoum for approval, so the process of being told you can’t have one can take over a month to complete. However, don’t go changing those plans just yet as there is one way in. Transit visas, allowing up to a fortnight in Sudan, are issued fairly easily. For this you require a letter of introduction from your own embassy, an onward visa for Egypt, a couple of photos and, for most nationalities, $100 cash. [Congratulations!] Americans, you get to pay $200. It normally takes two days to issue.

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