Abstract
Standing with his son Adam as a parent, Brock brings his expertise in pastoral theology to bear on an interrogation of his professional interests and disciplines and their worlds of practice. He probes how disability in his professional fields reveals the dissonance between words and practice. His thorough examination of prenatal testing and genetic counseling serves as a disability-informed, theological “ultrasound” on the fields of medical ethics and health. It alone is a must read for pastors who are counseling expectant parents.
Unusual for most books in pastoral theology and disability, Brock starts with patristic leaders like Augustine and others who had quite a bit to say about children born with disabilities and health challenges, including lepers. Augustine saw anomalous births, or more graphically, children sometimes seen as “monsters,” as part of God’s mysterious and wondrous creation. Our duty then is to understand what God reveals through these forms of humanity and their “strange vocations,” paralleling the love and mercy of God through the surprising and wondrous revelations in the crucifixion and resurrection.
In many instances, the early church did not just talk, but it acted. Faith motivated the care and adoption of children with disabilities, who were often abandoned or killed as symbols of shame in Greek and Roman culture. The church’s embrace of these slaves, lepers, and marginalized others proclaimed Jesus as a Lord who implicitly challenged an imperial ethos built on power, honor, and perfection. In the Middle Ages, however, that theology and practice were frequently replaced by the cultural equation of congenital disabilities with demons and other precursors of evil. The growth of science and medicine in the Enlightenment then countered those supernatural explanations of disability, leading to remarkable benefits in knowledge and treatment as well as the pitfalls of scientific hubris blended with cultural fears, e.g. eugenics.
In Part II, Brock begins again with the birth of children, particularly those with disabilities, through the experience, ethics, and ethos of prenatal testing, genetic counseling, and medical ethics. He uses biblical interpretation and theology, infused with his experience as a parent, to detail underlying currents of meaning. He asks whether prenatal testing, for example, is the way we should welcome a child as a gift of God, but also a stranger, into our world? Does the birth of all children become a time of “doxology,” praising God from whom all blessings and creatures flow? Or does testing, and subsequent genetic counseling, have the undercurrent of “anti-doxology,” which assumes that some lives mean only suffering, and that any rational, responsible adult would control that possibility out of existence?
The analysis broadens into health systems, norms, and medicine, highlighting the historical irony that medical ethics was born in church history by the development of hospices and hospitals modeling the care of the Good Samaritan, but was replaced by a secular rationality, exemplified par excellence in Principles of Biomedical Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1979) by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, the theoretical “bible” of this current field. A “professional” becomes someone who can navigate and negotiate the particular values of patients faced with normalized universal values of systems. Enter disability as an interrogator that “exposes the tension between medicine understood as technical expertise and medicine understood as care for the flourishing of individuals in their diversity” (p. 124).
Brock then outlines health and faith as being in “right relationship” with one’s whole self and with God, drawing on Jewish theologian Franz Rosensweig to explore faith as a way of living that expects to find wonder in relationship with others and the world. Current “quality of life” models based on objective measurements leave no room for narrative and meaning. Our encounter with people with autism is reframed as an invitation to share in God’s loving and merciful gaze as we listen deeply to behavior as a form of communication. The surprise and wonder that comes through these “agents of annunciation” can be an inbreaking of the kingdom, an eschatological moment in which our “vulnerable interdependency is acknowledged and embraced” (p.196). This exploration of eschatology includes a fascinating discussion of what resurrection might look like for people with autism and other disabilities.
In his concluding section, Brock asks what the church could be if we were to see people with disabilities not as people to be included (usually on “our” terms) but as people whom God has created and already included, with the result that we are not the church, or the body of Christ, without them. A detailed exegesis of 1 Corinthians 12 highlights that the body is a medium of communication about the gifts of the Holy Spirit through each of its members.
One of the multiple “Aha! Of course!” moments in the book came for me in the discussion of gifts of each part of the body. “Gift” has been increasingly used in the arena of disability to balance diagnoses that imply only deficit and defect. But a gift is not a gift until it has been received, thus making all of us just as much receivers as givers. Our sin in excluding people with disabilities or other marginalizing conditions is that we are depriving the church of surprise, wonder, and discovery that the Holy Spirit may be trying to give through each one to the whole body, enjoining us to “fear not.” Beyond welcome and tolerance is, again, a deep presence and listening to what the Spirit may be saying. This discussion provides a helpful theological framework for anyone in direct, loving relationships with people with disabilities to understand those “Wow!” moments—moments of surprise, wonder, mystery, and gratitude for suddenly having experienced what Brock calls, in a paradoxical phrase, an “assault of grace.” The final chapter is a benediction that calls readers to “fear not!” through a profound theological exegesis of what he has learned through a number of experiences with Adam in public and in the church.
I want to be clear. This is not a book solely for those interested and involved in theology and disability, in whatever form. For one thing, it reframes all discussions about disability and sin, helping us see sin as the limited illusions by which those who think they are “able-bodied” or “normal” understand disability. If you start with creation as good and as the gift of a God of love and mercy, then how does disability help us understand ethics and health care, but also faith, hope, and love, especially within the church, as a context and channel for finding and sharing the love of a merciful God through the Holy Spirit and Son? One of the treasures readers will find is precise line after line that will cause them to think “Oh, that’s quotable!” in talks, writing, and sermons that may or may not have anything to do with disability on the surface.
There is so much more to say, but reviewers, like human beings, are called to recognize and live the grace of limits. Wondrously Wounded is not an easy or quick read. At times, the reader needs to pay very close attention to the precise argument the book is making, somewhat like its call for us to listen deeply and carefully to whatever the Spirit is saying through Adam and other people who challenge us to understand different forms of communication. But if you read it carefully, it is mostly hard, because it is also an exposure and indictment of so many assumptions we make about what it means to be a person, to be faithful and to love, that get embodied in prejudice, illusions, and values of this world, and then are acted out in confining theory, dogma, and practices in healthcare, society and the church. Those “behavioral challenges” need just as much theological and biblical understanding as ones we might find in people assumed to be “disabled.”