Theology in the Raw - S8 Ep894: A Theology of Disability: Dr. Brian Brock

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

Dr. Brian Brock is a Christian ethicist and theologian who has become one of the leading experts in disability theology. What does it mean, theologically, to be dissabled? How much of the able-bodied assumptions about disability are misinformed and, potentially, dehumanizing? How do the Christian doctrines of creation, fall, redemption, and resurrection inform our understanding of disabilities? And what would it look like for the church to embody a robust Christian theology of disability?

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I have on the show today, my guest, Dr. Brian Brock. Dr. Brock holds a personal chair in moral and practical theology from Aberdeen University. He's been teaching there since 2004. Brian came in as a professor right about, I think, just after I came in as a student. So we crossed paths just briefly. And I remember hearing about his interest in a theology of disability. And since then, he's become one of the most renowned scholars who write and speak on a theology of disability. He's the author of several books in this area, Wondrously Wounded, Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ. He's also written Christian Ethics in a Technological Age. And the more recently

released popular level book, Disability, subtitle is Living into the Diversity of Christ's Body, published by Baker. We had a wonderful conversation talking about just kind of a 101 level discussion on what is a theology of disability. And already, I mean, I'm just kind of thinking and rethinking some categories that I thought I had when it comes to thinking through disability and creation and the fall and resurrection and all these theological categories. You're really going to enjoy this conversation. If you would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw support show for as little as five bucks a month, get access to premium content like once a month, Patreon only

blogs and podcasts and discussions. And you get an opportunity to ask me questions that I might respond to on the Patreon-only podcast or possibly the Public Theology in the Raw podcast. Also, if you are wanting to engage the conversation about faith, sexuality, and gender, we've got a few events coming up. I'll be in Plano, Texas at the Revoice Pre-Conference October 7th of this year. Also on October 20th and 21st here in Boise, we are doing an evening two and a half hour conversation, an introduction to the LGBTQ conversation, and then an all day training event on October 21st, the Faith, Sexuality, and Gender Conference here in Boise, Idaho. All the information is on the events page at centerforfaith.com forward slash events. Go check it out. Okay, without further ado, let's engage

this really important and yet often neglected conversation about a theology of disability. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I'm here with Professor Dr. Brian Brock. Brian, thanks so much for being on the show. My pleasure. Yeah, so we go, as I said in the intro, we go way back. We didn't really know each other very well, but we kind of connected just a little bit when I was a student at Aberdeen. And Brian, you were an incoming professor. And I'll never forget hearing about your area of research, the theology of disability. And at that time, man, I had no category for what that even meant. And over the years, I still, I've only read bits and pieces, but this is an area that I've wanted to talk about on the podcast for a long time. So

thanks so much for leading this in this conversation. Why don't you begin by telling us how you even got into this specific area of theology? Sure. I first came across disability when I was studying medical ethics, and I was in a healthcare setting and really learning the discourse of medical ethics. And disability popped up there as a theme that just caught my attention because it seemed to unsettle the assumption that medical ethics is a discipline designed to help doctors sort of smooth over difficulties they have with patients who ask for odd things, like Jehovah's Witnesses who don't want to do blood transfusions or people who don't, who irrationally don't like transplants or something like that. And disability just usefully raised question marks about the stance of that way of putting

the question of what medical ethics is about. But I didn't really follow it up much. I just noted that it was there. And after I did my doctorate in London, my wife Stephanie and I moved to Germany where I did a postdoc. And our first son, Adam, was born there in 2003. Adam was born there in 2003. And the first adventure he took us on was that he had a range of odd physical traits that they didn't really know what to make of. And we hadn't, my wife's a neonatal nurse, and I already studied medical ethics. So we had pretty clear view about what we wanted from medical prenatal testing and what we needed it for. And we got what we thought we needed it for, which is to prepare for the birth. And that meant that we hadn't done genetic testing in utero.

So when Adam was born, we didn't really know what his condition was, which turned out to be Down syndrome. And he was also pretty ill at the beginning from an unrelated condition. And he was hospitalized and had a little bit of brain damage in his first week. So we had a kind of welcome to parenthood with a bang. And so that's when I started thinking about disability more in earnest. I first attempted to kind of write some of this up in a book that John Swinton and I did called Theology, Disability, and the New Genetics, Why Science Needs the Church, where Stephanie and I just tried to tell the story of why it's probably not really accurate to think about genetic testing in utero as somehow firewalled off from the rest of the way medicine works. It has a lot of implications, and we found out the hard way that it unsettled doctors quite a lot, not that, that Adam hadn't been genetically tested,

even though he was already there and presenting as a, you know, as a patient with the illnesses of a patient, and they still were very unsettled by not having a genetic diagnosis. Is that, and I'm going to say all kinds of things that are probably wrong, way off base. I'm going to word things wrong. Is the assumption that if they found out in utero he had Down syndrome that they would recommend an abortion? Is that why they were unsettled? That's why there is an early cutoff for when they want to do prenatal testing, and it's related to the cutoff for legal termination. So one of the things that I've reflected on as my career has developed is what it means

that we live in a world where we, as a matter of course, don't accept a child to care for prenatal care after we've done prenatal screening. And that's infrastructurally the way every child in the Western world enters the world. But there are various ways, and the sociology is really quite interesting around this, the various ways in which that's hidden from us in the practice of prenatal care, right? Like nobody wants to say, oh, well, if you had a disabled conception, you'd want to get rid of it, right? You don't want to say that out loud. So you have to present it in ways that are sanitized. And because we knew what we were getting into, we didn't put ourselves in that position. And that meant we sort of missed the screening moment in the process.

And that really upset the medical care that followed from it. And, I mean, you wouldn't expect that, but that's how it is. The status quo is so dependent on thinking about getting the test first before you decide if this is a child worth caring for, if this is a child worth caring for, that it can't really handle the idea that one might think that's not the way to think about what it means to be a Christian and a parent. Yeah.

I mean, how is that not eugenics? Or is that why they have to sanitize the rhetoric around possible termination if this child isn't the kind of child that fits the majority i mean it's just you depend on how you word it it can get really eerie we live in uh in the old the way i put this in um a later book where i'm reflecting on these things is a difference between a kind of prohibitive norm and a statistical norm. So the old eugenics, you know, classically, with, you know, us English speakers think about the Nazis,

even though we did it as much as everybody else, is that you sort of decree, let's get rid of certain kinds of people, and you sort of force that on people by law, right? That's a kind of prohibitive version of law. But that's not the way law works today. Law works by incentive and disincentive. So you can choose to have a disabled child if you want to, but there's all kinds of subtle ways in which it will be conveyed to you all along the road that you're basically burdening the rest of us with an economic cost that was unnecessary.

So it's an efficiency argument, which, interestingly, if you look into the history of straight out Nazi eugenics, at the time, the argument was never we got to get the breeding levels up. The argument was never, we got to get the breeding levels up. The argument was useless eaters, right? So we have our version of useless eater arguments, and they're very alive and well today. It's stronger in places like the UK, which have socialized medicine, uh, it sort of raises the question of how, um, uh, care costs are distributed in a different way. Um, but I, I think, you know, in capitalist free market systems like America that it gets back, it's done in a different way. So let's go back to, um, so you had a child diagnosed down syndrome.

Um, I imagine that was a huge step towards you saying, I really want to understand this on a theological level. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because, you know, one of the conflicts that arose very early in his health care was, you know, Stephanie getting into arguments with the doctor when she would take him in for a cold and would get a sort of brow beating that he hadn't done genetic, he hadn't had a genetic test, which just seems like an odd dispute. I mean, how can you even have that kind of dispute, right? Like, let's handle the fact that the kid is like coughing and has snot coming out of his nose. That seems like an obvious thing for a doctor to care about. So why is it producing such energy, such anxiety around not having this other test? So at the back of this are questions about what's in a diagnosis?

How does diagnosis work? What does diagnosis give you? These are all very live issues, for instance, around autism. These are all very live issues, for instance, around autism, that people feel like I don't fit in here, and then they get the label autistic, and that sets them apart in all kinds of ways. And of course, as Christians and theologians, labeling and categorizing and separating people, we've got a lot at stake in that discussion. So it became clear to me as I was having these kind of experiences and because I was already trained in medical ethics and eventually, actually I realized studying medical ethics, I was going to have to do theology. I was going to have to do proper

full-blooded theology because I knew, I could sense that there were questions here that I just couldn't answer without knowing my own tradition better. So kind of one of the early things. So I came to Aberdeen and John Swinton is one of the really early figures in disability theology and he was here. And I just said, you know, I really need to do some homework on this. And this is obviously the place to do it. So he and I worked for some years just kicking these things around, and he taught me what he knew. And we ended up editing together a volume called Disability in the Christian Tradition, a reader, which was just a survey through the canon of the Western tradition, in the most traditional sense, what did Christian theologians say about disability? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when you guys were working on that. Why don't we start, or we've already started, but why don't we, can you, let's just step back and give us just a real

basic overview of what is theology of disability give us the kind of the the nuts and bolts the bones the structure of it and then i would love to get into maybe some of the the different approaches within people who are um disability theologians i would imagine like any discipline there's probably a range of different opinions and disagreements and would love to know kind of what are the main points of divergence within people who are studying this area? I think the place to start with that question is to point out that disability theology lives in the space at the margins around what's considered mainstream theology. at the margins around what's considered mainstream theology.

So one of my core impulses as a theologian is to say that ghettoization is hugely problematic. center and periphery in a way that means race and feminists and Hispanic and Asian theology is somehow kind of niche. And then there's real theology, mainstream theology, normal people theology. And I think that sort of normal particular dichotomy is hugely corrosive to both sides of the equation. So it's a type of dismemberment of the body of Christ. So there's a kind of general particular dichotomy that normally disability is one of those special conditions that some people have that somehow requires us to say a little something extra or different.

And unfortunately, I think the way that dichotomy has played out, we're seeing a kind of flipping over of the dominant discourse. It used to be that there was normal theology and these marginal niche discourses. And just in the last five or six or eight years, that quote-unquote marginal discourses have become the dominant discourses. And the old center is now finding itself rootless and not knowing where to go. But the dichotomy between center and periphery is very much in place. It's just that the periphery is now where people think all the fun stuff's happening. That's super interesting. I'm curious how to avoid that like as you're talking i'm thinking rather than say a theology of disabilities it just was just theology like what

yeah and that's but how do we if someone says yeah but what kind of theology like how do you avoid validating that kind of assumption that this is just on the fringe by the very language we use, and yet how do you actually communicate specifically what you're doing? Or is that the tension that is always there? I think that's the whole shooting match. If you want to stop talking in us-them terms, you have to have a different theology. That's just all there is to it. And that's not easily done. But if you want to say the church has to do better than saying you and me are white, able-bodied guys, and we're kind of normal people, and then there's abnormal people then you just have to face that question right yeah and and of course you will be fully aware that um

there's going to be a lot of self-reflection involved on people who formerly thought of themselves as as the normal and baseline and standard, recognizing that maybe that whole construct didn't work. So I think the way that discipline is put together, a center and periphery model, is related to and cognate with what's called a normative bias, the idea that there's kind of normal people, and then there's people who are different, who can't do things, right? Disability is, for many disability activists, already a sign of the problem, because there's like, able people, and there is disabled people, right? And that's right in the label of pejorative sort of grouping and

they're entirely right to raise the question of what that positioning disallows them from doing and the way it sort of downplays their role in what it means to be a Christian or what it means to do theology.

Do you have a better label than disabled disability? Well, I think you need to take a term like that apart to get anywhere. I mean, practically speaking, we can't avoid it. And the reason we can't avoid it is it's the term we use to say some people deserve social support, political support. It's a political term that can be applied to some people that we say, as a society, we agree people with this condition can have a good parking space, let's say, or special health care. But the fact that that label can be applied and taken away from any given physical condition points out that it cannot be an ontological designation. And that's why in the church, we can say things like be the male, the female, slave, nor free, disabled, nor abled.

We can say that and mean it. Ontologically, we really are the same, but we need to find a way to say that that recognizes, of course, particularity demands different social recognition. today in the church is that we don't have the native language anymore to say that we're the same ontologically, but we are clearly different practically and that we deserve different practical considerations, right? Like we, in practice, we recognize that a parent, you know, gets privileges that a child doesn't get, a child deserves care that a parent doesn't get. And we don't think that that means the parent is more valuable or ontologically different than the child. But we tend to think that way in terms of other social groupings. And that's just a sort of loss of theological machinery and insight. Right.

I feel like we could spend this whole conversation just on language. I mean, that's how it always is, right? Language is so crucial. And I mean, I mentioned offline, you know, I've been engaged in LGBT conversation for a while now. And that's, you get the language down and the importance of language and why certain terms send certain signals and reveal certain presuppositions. And it's just that, that's's just that's a huge part of the conversation. I imagine there's a ton of carryover here. I guess what are some of the basic theological questions that, and again, now I'm nervous about the language,

that people who specialize in disability theology, what are the main theological questions? The basic ones. If you're in first year Seminary 101, you're taking a class of disability theology, what are some of the main things we're wrestling with? We talked offline about the fall. If there's any kind of atypical feature in one's human experience, it's, well, that's the fall. Is that just a popular level question or is that actually a more academic question that people wrestle with, the role of the fall in atypical human experiences? I mean, already to put the question in those terms is a reflection of the center periphery framework, right? Because any human experience implicates

all Christian doctrine. So it's a sort of obvious instinct if you understand how the tradition works to recognize that, of course, disability has implications for every single doctrinal locus, right? It means something about the fall. It means something about redemption. It means something about resurrection. It means something about how the body of Christ functions, right? So that's part of what I learned going through the tradition in preparation for this reader is that we moderns have a drastically impoverished set of images about what counts as a human life worth discussing, first of all. I call that best case scenarios. For us, we really think of the human as the human being in this window when they're at the pinnacle of their powers, if they make it there. And everybody else is a kind of somehow downhill and a special case and not definitional of what we're talking about when we're talking about humans.

Well, that's just not the case in much of the Christian tradition, which ask substantive questions about, say, for instance, what age and weight we're going to be when we're resurrected, or should somebody who's an epileptic get communion, right? There's a far broader sense that the human we're talking about is not the best case scenario. It's the full diversity of how human life runs. And that raises questions at every point in all kinds of angles. So the fact that modern Christians, I think it's a reflex of our especially modern Protestant embedding in enlightenment rationality that the only question we ask is essentially the theodicy question right

how do we deal with the fact that some people have to live a life that frightens us and our answer to that is well the fall so there's like broken stuff and accidents in the world and i mean and the way i put this in my kind of provocative version is who wants to um get the hint when they come into church that their life is explained as you know adam and eve sinned and therefore the world's broken and that's why how you are the way you are i mean that's just not that's not a useful thing to say pastorally or at any other level now we that that might be true at some basic level, but the fact that our imaginations don't go any further than that is a real indictment. So you're not denying the theological credibility of that as a possible question to explore,

but practically, ethically, pastorally, relationally, that's just not typically a helpful way to go. I would say if that's the only question you have to ask, the sin question you're not asking about is, why do I think of myself as normal? And that's how in my kind of main academic work, Wondrously Wounded, Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ, which is, I don't know, two years old, I really do go through all the doctrines. And I think that, you know, to take it up to a higher level, the Western imagination is focused on the material and the physical in a way that probably is not defensible in the end. So we don't ask. We really think the question about the resurrection is, will I look different? Will I be

the weight I wish I was? Will I get to eat as much as I want? All very physical questions, and that has a long tradition from the beginning of Western theology. When in fact, I think there's a good argument that that's just not an interesting question compared to the question of what I'll be like when I am not a sinner, which I only glimpse in the most momentary experiences and moments of sanctification. And if I don't have to sort of fight back against my sin, what is my personality going to be like? Why isn't that the question that we ask about sin? It would help us deal with the fact that we see people as substandard and disabled and, you know, aberrant in, in thousands of ways.

And that's part of what it means to be a center and who we would be if we didn't have those sorts of reflexes seems to be much closer to that important theological question. Then can you eat all the cookies you want when you're resurrected? That's wow. That's interesting. I got to, I got to marry it on that for a little bit, but the show must go on like that. That, that, that,

wow. Um, let me give you, um, let me, let me, let me lay myself out and give you a, maybe a pattern of my thinking as I've reflected on this on a tiny minuscule level and see if, and I would love for you to pick apart my, my logic if I'm kind of not even thinking right. But so I was born deaf in my left ear. Um, I, uh, we don't know why, um, my, um, back then. So I was born in 76 and smoking wasn't, um, seen as it wasn't widespread knowledge that smoking was bad and my mom was a smoker and so there is there is a suggestion that you know her smoking caused a and i'll use the term birth well birth defect let's uh cause this part of my head which in most people receive sound and in me it doesn't receive sound now if i go back and just reflect on design and

human nature i'm gonna say that this my left ear was originally designed to hear and so now it's not it's not operating according to its design like i don't think this is just like most people this thing hears but yours is just an appendage for looks like i know this in human nature it seems like this little flap on the left side of my head was designed to capture sound and it doesn't do that it doesn't work the way god i hesitated bringing god the way god originally designed human nature and i'm hoping that in the resurrection when i get a resurrected body that doesn't have that will operate according to god's original design even greater possibly that this side of my head will receive sound

therefore it's not where it's not like it's it doesn't work like there's something wrong with it i'd hate to use the word wrong and i'm using it in the real lightweight here it's not like i'm at fault or whatever but like is it okay for me to hope that this will receive sound in the resurrection because i mean it's and this is a tiny example and i i don't even want to map this on everybody else's experiences that are way more significant but this is all i've known i don't know what surround sound sounds. I don't know what it's like to have earbuds in my ear, go on a run and have the bass and the guitar, you know, interact with each other.

I don't know what that, I would probably fall over and start throwing up if it did. You know? Um, so, so this is all I've known as a human experience. So my humanity does, will be slightly different in the,

in the resurrection in a way that doesn't even correlate with a certain aspect of my life experience. So I don't know. Like, I don't even know where I'm going with that. But is that, like, I have no problem saying because of Genesis 3 onward, like, if I was living in a Genesis 1 and 2 world, this flap would operate according to its design. Is it right for me to think about it that way? And is that like, when I think of things like, you know, autism or Down syndrome, other so-called disabilities, that pattern of thinking would be similar or are those categorically different? Yeah, I think that's a very common question and an important question. And I think it's not easy for me to give a straightforward answer because I think there's so much wrapped up in it that we could unspool that would lead us in different directions.

So I'm just going to start to pull some of the threads there and come back to me if it doesn't make any sense um the first thing is uh um there are different ways of describing the perfection of the human uh and and i think what you've talked about is very close to um one of the default imaginations in the western tradition which is the platonic right so there's there's like one perfect human that has five fingers and five toes and that's the plan right god had that that model and everybody is made on that model in their own particularity um so you know everybody looks different and, uh, everybody's slightly different height and not even twins are the same. And, um, I, as I was writing my chapter in the disability reader on Augustine, I, you

can see this all in Spain. So, you know, he's, he's trying to work out disability as a question of how much deviation from the perfect human do you have to have for it to matter theologically? So he'll say it's like, you know, having six fingers, that's not really much of a deviation. And I think he would say having one ear being deaf is not much, but, you know, it's not relevant. But what he insisted on saying is God created everybody just like they are. And I think that's really important to say, because if you don't say that, then you intrinsically devalue the work of people who might have both of their ears that don't work as they would like them to. as they would like them to. And those people have a whole lifetime

of having to figure out how to communicate, joining a community of people who are deaf. And often they can become quite connected with, embedded in, part of that community. And that's a way we have to recognize theologically. And I think this is one of the first places where Christians lose track of where this is going. We don't recognize that a deaf community

is an embodied embrace of the way God created these people. And they've taken that to heart. For me, this question really came, hit home hard when I was thinking about what should I expect when Adam is resurrected. beginning to end with no interruption masked by a kind of accident of a fallen genetic palette and that he will in essence be totally different than the person that lived in this world because every cell will be different than he then he actually was and that seems to me the type of sin that Augustine is constantly pressing back against, which is to disparage how God has made people as they are. That's a few pieces. There's more pieces to go. No, that's so good.

And I didn't realize Augustine had interacted with this. Oh, yeah. I mean, a ton. Super interesting ones. I love to tell the story of a guy that he talks about in a sermon who he said would rain stones down on people when the gay crowd sort of used the Lord's name in vain because they knew it would wind him up. So this guy was a Christian, obviously had learning impairments, and when people blasphemed, he would tell them to stop to the point of violence. And the crowds thought that was really funny. of violence and the crowds thought that was really funny. And Augustine holds this up in a sermon to his congregation as an example of what it looks like to take the second commandment seriously.

So he's constantly interacting. Like he talks about Siamese twins. He talks about, I mean, I think the city of God actually begins with a decent discussion of what were at the time called monstrous birth deformities. Because back then people thought, is this a human or not? So there's way more in the tradition than, I mean, modern Christians are basically impoverished by their assumption that we're the first ones to ever think about and ameliorate disability. I mean, that's – the kind of parochial arrogance of that shows up very quickly if you read beyond modern theology. if you read beyond modern theology. So within people in your discipline, is there a debate about whether, for instance, somebody with Down syndrome will be resurrected without that condition?

Is that kind of a lie? Yeah, it is, yeah. Can you give us the arguments for each side? You kind of hinted at your approach to that, but maybe... Yes. Nobody says you'll be made normal because that's absolutely repellent to people with disabilities who've done – I would say they've done the spiritual work on themselves coming to terms with who they are that most Christians haven't done. spiritual work on themselves coming to terms with who they are that most Christians haven't done,

right? So they don't want to be told, oh, you know, you were just kind of gutting it out in this life and you're going to be made like you wish you were your whole life, like everybody wants you to be in the end, right? So you just, you can't say that. And that's a lesson, that's a rebuke to contemporary Christianity. So if you don't say that, what are you going to say? There's two main lines of response at this point. One of them is, takes the Irenaean line, Amos Young's famous for that. You know, we'll all be being slowly altered toward perfection as we travel infinitely into the life of the Godhead, right? So none of us are ever standing still in the resurrection, and we're kind of being rebuilt one piece at a time to perfection. That's one answer. The other answer, which I think is probably the dominant answer. Real quick, Brian, I'm sorry to cut you off. But when you say perfection, what does that mean?

Like the ideal six foot four, chiseled, able-bodied? I mean, what is perfection? That's the Achilles heel of that position. Oh, okay. Defining what perfection is? You can't. It gives a kind of apophatic final answer to that. How could we know what human perfection actually looks like?

And it's something beyond, you know, everybody's going to be David Hasselhoff or Pamela Anderson, right? You're showing your age, bro. I know. I know. Sorry about that. There's some gross projections we we always make about what human perfection looks like um uh and surely whatever it would mean to be progressively infinitely perfected would be to go beyond anything we can imagine as i i don't want to

get too hung up on this because you're in the middle of your thought but perfection in those terms like western beauty to me that's not even it shouldn't even be entertained but human bodies that are operating according to what seems like the original design humans are bipedal so it seems like both feet

would be able to move eyes are designed to see so two eyes working my left ear would be able to move. Eyes are designed to see. So two eyes working, my left ear would be healed. But whether you're tall, short, thick, thin, whatever, it seems like not just health in the Western sense, but like operating according to design. Wouldn't that be a or is that a legitimate category? or is that a legitimate category? You can be not attractive according to Western standards of beauty,

but that's a categorically different question. It depends on... I think, unfortunately, if you have these discussions in any detail, they almost always end up with those sort of projection accounts surfacing. Because it's actually very difficult for us to imagine what resurrection life and embodiment is going to be like.

And so when push comes to shove, after the first or second layer of, okay, tell me what it's going to be like, it ends up, all my parts are going to work, I'm going to look like I want to look right and and there's a that becomes pretty quickly transparently a projection okay of what we think of our our best selves basically uh so you know that the projection problem is all over the disability discourse not least because disabled people know very well that the things that they actually suffer from are not what able-bodied people ascribe as their suffering. So, you know, Helen Keller, famously blind and deaf. Yeah. Everybody thinks of her – I mean she rankled at the reality that she represented a blind charity as the public figure for essentially her whole career because that's all the public wanted her to talk about because that's the thing that they thought was most disabling from their perspective. But she said very explicitly it's deafness that was her greatest sort of limitation.

So that disabled people are very aware that what able-bodied people think about them is almost exclusively tied to what able-bodied people think they would experience if they had the condition that the disabled person has. So someone got a friend who was burned as a child, has a kind of facial disfigurement from that, and he doesn't remember having any other face. So for years he won't even think about it, but everyone who runs into him will kind of have an inner recoil of a certain type. And so one of the phenomenological experiences of being disabled is trying to figure out why people are reacting to you the way they are. And hence the centrality of the problem of projection in disability discourse.

reveals how massive and powerful the trajectory is for a body body people to think of themselves as normal and it's not just a kind of conceptual thing it's a lived reality i i hear everything you're saying part of this part of me that is turned off by that and disturbed by that. And yet part of me, if I step back, is also like, but what else? It's almost like, isn't that... That's not shocking that people would be kind of that initial kind of...

I don't know if that would ever change, nor could we even require it. And again, the only thing I could compare it to is like, I just got back from Africarica from kenya and tanzania and like so i'm a you know white person walking around kenya and it's not like i don't when people are kind of like you know you know whatever they're like look at you they touch my hair touch my skin or like people are staring at me right and left like i don't i'm not like why are you staring at me you know like like of course i'm a minority and a majority like i look different i i it's it's kind of shocking a little bit to even see me especially in certain villages and stuff so um like when

there is a majority experience it's not i know it's kind of this weird tension because at the on the one hand i'm like no i don't like it when people with a minority experience or minority whatever look or situation have that kind of relational encounter over and over. I hate that. But it's like, well, is it unrealistic to expect anything different? Or I don't know. Am I even – is that offensive? I mean, it's not unrealistic that in the resurrected life that won't be the case.

Of course, walking around with a down kid, people look at him all the time. He's out of the ordinary. He's always the white guy in Africa, right? So, okay, point one. And that maybe we can imagine as Christians a social order which is less obsessed with maybe let's make him look like everybody else and is more obsessed with why do we think that being out of the ordinary is so unsettling?

And I think if we can't handle that question, the way that I deal with this, I've left off the other answer to that. Yeah, I know, I know. We'll get there. I wrote a popular book over the first part of lockdown for Baker called Disability Living into the Diversity of the Body of Christ. And there I start out by talking about cutting my hand with a power saw, you know, typical embarrassing middle-aged woodpile accident. But it happened to be my middle finger on my right hand. And so I, I reflected on that as the opener in the book, because as a writer, right hand, my identity is

tied up with the functionality of my right hand. And I realized after I cut my finger and now it's, you know, scarred and doesn't quite work the way it used to. I do have an aesthetic of full hand versus a kind of disfigured and uncomfortable and unsightly hand. to highlight how in most, you know, the most plain possible language that, um, if I can't accept my own body when it's not quite how I imagined it should be, what makes me think that I'm going to be able to accept this people in the social body who are not like I imagine imagine we should be like yeah that and that that game is right like there is a spiritual work of coming to to to terms with being a bald guy or uh you know having a finger you know i could have lost the finger very easily

um or not being able to use a hand at all. There's spiritual work involved in saying, OK, this is this is my body and this is who I am. And disabled people do that work from day one or they live their life in unbelievable frustration. And that does happen, right? There are people, they're all bald guys who go around with sort of plugs from the hair on the back of their head on their foreheads and there's a kind of um there's a fight against givenness that that displays that i think disabled people can help us all help to relieve us from and if if we say, yeah, really, come to church,

and there you're going to find out you guys are all going to be like us, that's pushing away our own redemption. Well, we're talking about broader society, and even the question I raised is more like a societal one. But if we turn it into ecclesiology, then that's where it seems like the church should be the location, the social sphere, the new polis, where there's loads of people with disabilities running around, leading, teaching us. There's people, obviously, people struggling with gender dysphoria, people attracted to the same sex, opposite sex, both sexes. There's tall people, short people, fat people,

Western beautiful people and non, you know, whatever. Like if the church could actually embody the kind of society where these things aren't head turning or abnormal, there is no us and them, there's only a we. And that's, so we still have to get to your second, but your second approach to this question, but a good friend of mine here in Boise, he's a pastor. He has two adopted kids with Down syndrome. And so the church is obviously, you know, if the pastor has two Down syndrome kids, that's going to say something, right?

And so there's actually several people who bring their kids with their with some kind of disability there because and they come to the church weeping because they say every other church i go to either x explicitly or implicitly my kids are a burden yeah and they're weeping saying i don't know what it's like to experience a church where my kids are not a burden where i don't get the looks where if they make a weird noise or something people don't kind of look around and give me the evil eye whatever I come here and I'm able to just come and worship and my kids are able to worship like that that's um that's the way it should be and it's it's it's shocking and disturbing that you know this is like one church in a decent sized city where

people felt like they could actually come and have a part. Yeah, I'm totally on. That's exactly what I'm after. And I think it's theological work to narrate that as the default setting, because it is practically speaking, not default setting so i think church is like the one you're describing oh what i'm after and it takes they're totally underserved in the theological academy to describe why uh that is actually how the church of body the church of christ should look uh right and that so that's what that's what I'm trying to do. And I think it takes the whole toolbox of Christian theology to do that. Because most, again, if the logic of right belief is, here's the creed, this is the true things we believe, here's how it applies to how we think about anthropology, for instance,

then it's very easy to end up with what I think is the – Bethany McKinney Fox, I was sort of looking at my shelf, has written a good book. There's – I was slipping my mind at the moment, but she surveys churches, and she empirically substantiates that most pastors in most churches, evangelical churches, think of their, they think of themselves as responsive to people with disability who come to church. And they also think of when somebody comes into church that sets up a responsibility for care, in other words, a demand. So the way that most pastors think about disability in church is as a cost. And what you described is not understanding it that way. But I do, I'm using strong language here,

but I do think it's a different theology to say, no, actually, we need difference. We don't understand ourself without difference. That's one of the punchlines of the whole discussion we're having about what it means to be the normal human. If you want to play the game of there's one plan of what human looks like, there's one template, then you have to ask, okay, well, does that mean all the people who died in utero what what size are they going to come back and um what skin color are they going to be and um you know you have to kind of parse through all of the particularities that make up the diversity of the body and the human the human body as a as a kind of global phenomenon you have to somehow boil that down to the one plan of which there's greater or lesser divergence from it

in the way that each of our lives get cared about. And that the resurrection is being topped up to perfect conformity to the plan. And the problem, of course, with the platonic imagery is that then we'd all be identical uh because we would have all conformed to the perfect human whatever so okay so you gave well a while back the amos young kind of approach to in the resurrection will all be progressing towards the perfect um what's the other kind of general approach that i think you said you take you've already i mean hit on so many parts of, but maybe pull it all together in a tight sense.

Yeah, sure. No, thinkers like Candida Moss and there's a couple others emphasize the fact that Jesus isn't resurrected with a perfect body. He's resurrected with the marks or the scars. Funnily enough, the kind of discussion ends up marks or the scars funnily enough the kind of discussion ends up turning on the fine point of do we how do we translate that greek term uh is it marks is it wounds is it you know is it open wounds is it healed scars that's a i think a kind of a footnote to the more basic point that if we're going to be resurrected without any divergence from perfection, I mean, Jesus embodies resurrection that is not the erasure of all imperfection, right? A scar is by definition an imperfection, whether it's a mark or an open wound. perfection, whether it's a mark or an open wound. And the way that I developed that idea is to say,

of course we will be resurrected with all the bodily features that were part of the vocation that we, to the time in God's story that we were assigned. So we, we, to the time in God's story that we were assigned. So if we're created good, and therefore our particular bodily form and our mental form and our sensory palate are good in some respect, even if the fall has impacted the causality of how that came to be. Nevertheless, we still find everyone is good simply because they exist, and in the way they exist. Then we can also, in a subsequent move, say, in the resurrection, that goodness will not be erased as if it was irrelevant.

So I don't have to think anymore. I don't have to anticipate in heaven, I'm going to get to meet an Adam who looks totally different and has a different personality than the Adam that I lived his whole life with. I fully expect Adam to be recognizable in some respect because of the way his face looks. And I would not be surprised if, um, his, um, personality was also recognizable.

Um, and weirdly, I think his personality might be closer to the way it is now than mine is. So anyway, those are all ways of saying most Christian imaginations of the resurrection are just too simple. And that wouldn't matter, right? too simple. And that wouldn't matter, right? Like theology, oversimplified theology doesn't really matter except as it plays out in how we treat those around us who seem to, to use Augustine's language, diverge more from the norm. Yeah, it seems really blurry. Like what does does that even mean? Diverge one person's divergence from the norm is going to look different than somebody else. And somebody is going to draw that line in different places.

conversation, you know, what about like things that are, I would say, let's just say obvious and clear health issues. So for instance, I've got, I talked to a couple friends of mine who have an intersex condition. One kind of would take more the view that you're articulating there, that my intersex condition is different than the platonic ideal. And yet this is all I've known. It's who I am intrinsically, you know, very much in my embodied existence. I know nothing else. So who's to say that this is a problem? It's only a problem for other people, you know. But another friend of mine says, well, no, like my, because of my intersex condition,

I'm on meds. I'm on all kinds of medication. I have other health issues that are related to this. Like, I hope that's kind of sinister to think that God single-handedly did this and there was no outside kind of whatever evil force that had a role in this like that. Why would God make me like, like, this is not a good, I'm longing for a rescue from these things that are actually not fun at all. It's, it's part of suffering. So, um, and I don't know. Yeah. And I hear both and I'm like, wow, you know, is it, is it a difference?

Is it a problem? Is it going to be fixed? And what does that even mean? And, um, uh, so I, my question is, is it legitimate to say if it is causing kind of serious suffering and it's a health issue that needs kind of medication to be addressed could that be evidence that in the resurrection that will no longer be or yeah i'll be thinking about simplistic terms yeah yeah don't don't take me um to be suggesting that healing is not part of resurrected life. What I am suggesting is that Christians, modern Christians especially, have a particularly horrific inability to distinguish what needs to be healed from what is good.

Right? Like, so again, one of the ways I talk about this, my popular book has, every chapter is a kind of wrong belief about disability. But each chapter title is a wrong belief that I'm kind of refuting in the chapter. And one of them is Jesus heals everyone he meets. So we think about Jesus healing in the way doctors heal and as essentially bring the resurrection, meaning if he ever ran across somebody with a disability, he would, of course, have healed them because every disabled

person wants to be healed. That imagination is running so deeply, and there's several issues with that, but it runs so deeply that if it's very common experience, and I hear about it on a regular basis, if people are in churches where healing happens, especially charismatic type churches, even if they would go up and ask for healing for a condition like a cold or cancer, they would be healed of their, what they'd be offered is healing of their disability. That's a recurrent theme. So that's the projection again, right? Like we all think, gosh, being in a wheelchair would be terrible. So that person coming down to have hands laid on them at a healing service clearly wants to walk. But we cannot typically imagine that that person would come down because they had a bladder infection and had been nagging them for a long time.

they had a bladder infection and had been nagging them for a long time. Um, that's, that's the, that's the kind of projection stands in the way of our asking seriously what it means for pain and suffering to be taken away in the resurrection and not identity. Wow, man,

that's so good. the projection, you keep coming back to projection it seems like that that is a huge problem the majority projecting their own kind of assumptions about what this person needs what this person wants is that that would be it seems like a fundamental starting place where people need to kind of rethink some of these things, assuming that everybody wants to be like this kind of ideal. Wow. So the way I get at that in my sort of popular book is to try to, well, I'm using the injured finger story to turn the question away from

how do we think about disabled people toward how do we negotiate the disabled experience? How do I negotiate the disability experience? Which, of course, if disability is in the most basic terms, the loss of ability, we're unlikely to get out of life without that experience. experience. And I think the able-bodied majority hasn't even begun to ask the self-critical questions about, am I prepared for that? So we can compare it to something like the memento mori tradition, the meditation on the fact that I'm going to die and be judged as a monastic discipline of self-assessment. We can ask the same question about the kind of aging, the process of dying, and say,

am I really prepared to live out being an embodied particular creature? And able-bodied people don't really have to ask that question until they get into a bind and that's why a lot of times the disability discussion is so badly foreshortened by something like emergency cases there's no sustained reflection on the fact that we're all mortal we're all limited we're all particular we all we all fall short of some perfect ideal um and that's that's the apparatus that yields the center and periphery right disability is marginal cases for some people with special challenges whereas theology doesn't ask those questions at all that's that's how that distinction arises so good brian thanks so much for uh yeah i just have my mind unfortunately i got another podcast

i gotta record because i'd love to sit here and just take notes and just reflect on this um but another show must go on but tell us really quickly where people can find you and say your um give us maybe two or three books that you've written that you would like to recommend to the audience. Obviously, the popular level book. What's the name of that one again? And give a couple others that you've written. Yeah, that one's called Disability, Living into the Diversity of Christ's Body. It's in the Pastoring for Life series with Baker Academic Press.

And I'd say that's where I'd suggest people start. That's a kind of popular, accessible book. where I'd suggest people start. That's a kind of popular, accessible book. And then, but I don't, to some people's consternation, I don't talk about my life with Adam there because that's a difficult thing to do. For no other reason that one of the mantras of the disability theology discourse,

for good reason, is nothing about us without us. So as an abled person i think it's it's very tricky to to speak for someone who doesn't speak adam's non-verbal which doesn't mean he's non-communicative but that means he'll never tell his own story in ways that you would be able to hear so that that question is very close to the heartland of the real conceptual problems that theology needs to deal with. And I think all theology needs to deal with.

And I deal with those issues in Wondrously Wounded Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ, which is published by Baker University Press. Those are my two main texts. If you just want to do your homework, I definitely recommend Disability and the Christian Tradition, which goes through the whole, like I said, traditional canon, the main well-known figures. And there's an introductory text that explains primary text.

So you can read the primary text, but also introductions from experts that sort of tell you what you're going to read. Okay. I'll put all this in the show notes. And then are you on social media? Do you have your website? I know you have your Aberdeen website. I just have my Aberdeen website i'm i'm uh unfortunately just uh spattered about on google yeah are where's your office at what building is it in at the university uh i've always ironically been in the exact same office um you know you know where john swinton is yeah yeah the one hole at the far end. I'm on the Cromwell Tower end of that hole. Oh, gosh.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So I can pick up the crown. Oh, man. Walking down those cobblestone roads in the early cold morning. Oh, man, the memories. I was in a – my office was in the old brewery. Okay.

Which is cool. It's an old building where the monks used to brew their beer back when they were you know um they would go up walk up walk up hospital road and spittle yeah the spittle yeah the spittle yeah yeah and get medical training come back brew their beer and that's where my office was that's well the the seagulls have put on classic performance which is the aberdeen songbird. Oh man. Oh yeah. Gosh. Oh, the memories. Well, thanks Brian for being on the show and appreciate your time, your work. And yeah, thanks for just challenging us and giving us so many great questions that

probably half of us didn't even know we had. So thanks for investing with our minds and our hearts and we'd love to see the church embody the vision that you've, you've given us, man. Seriously. That's, that's, that's the ultimate question. Thanks for the great questions, Preston, and for inviting me on. All right. Take care. Thank you.