Abstract
Neither the Hebrew Scriptures nor the New Testament refers to persons as possessing an ‘autistic condition’. Nor does Shakespeare, much though he understood the human heart. The naming of the condition and our better understanding of it as a ‘spectrum’ is relatively recent. It follows that a number of people are diagnosed or self-diagnose late and we are at an early stage in our appreciation of their needs.
All of this raises a number of new questions and requires the charting of a distinctive approach. If autism is unknown to scripture, in what ways may the Bible help us to understand persons of such a kind? How may the church enable such persons not to feel overload but instead to know that they are at home within the Body of Christ?
Professor Macaskill gives us six chapters. Though based on considerable research, they are very readable, honest and not defensive. In an opening chapter, he describes historical and recent research on autism. In chapter 2, he considers how the Bible is read in relation to autism and he points to certain positives and certain negatives. In chapter 3, he considers autism and the Body of Christ. This takes account of how ‘the marginal’ are shown as manifestations of God’s providential care, and that the moral vision of the New Testament is not one of simply following Jesus (imitation) but one of living more fully in him (participation). Importantly, and thus avoiding a patronising attitude, he says this is all as true for the neurotypical as it is for the person with autism (p.96). Chapter 4 looks at autism in the church, and awareness of ‘a sensory space for all God’s people’. He takes account of how exhausting and even painful the noise, smells, lights and handshakes of church can be. In chapter 5 he refers to problems which can co-occur with autism: anxiety, depression, addiction and questions of gender identity. In a final chapter, he looks at profession of faith, prayer, habits and improvisation, leadership and reading the Bible differently.
This is a profoundly theological book. In the last three decades in the debate concerning gay people (another category we perhaps now understand better), we have seen ‘liberal’ scholars either bend scripture into the most unpersuasive shapes or desert scripture entirely and instead seize upon civil rights arguments. In fact, we need scripture and an awareness of rights, and the incarnational theology of weakness which Professor Macaskill brings so effectively. It is no accident that he has already given us a study of Union with Christ in the New Testament (OUP, 2018) which forms the basis for his understanding of ‘participation’. As I read this further study I was reminded of Gregory of Nazianzus’ critique of Apollinarianism [the notion that the Incarnate Logos did not assume a human mind] and his insistence that ‘that which is not assumed is not healed’. What is at stake, then, is the breadth and depth of the incarnation, and such a belief affirms the autistic and the neurotypical in exactly the same way.