Abstract
Wondrously Wounded is a marvellous book. Our first clue that this is no ordinary book is Brian Brock’s expression of its aim: ‘to give [readers] a sense of the wondrous beauty of [his son] Adam’s life’ (p. xii). This involves telling the story of his own conversion, but weaving personal experience into theological work in an academic register is a ticklish undertaking. Brock shows us how to do it well. In chapter 8, we find the reason for this: his son is a good teacher. ‘As Adam remakes me’, Brock writes, ‘he invites me to become a different sort of academic’ (p. 180). If we too take up his invitation, we are asking to be remade from the bottom up. Literally. Such a transformation involves the shifting of our gut reactions from embarrassment (or fear or shame) to wonder—and to love.
The introduction gives us a taste of the tone and style of the argument: eclectic and wide-ranging, relentlessly interdisciplinary and academic, and never far from the Bible or the teaching of the church. The danger in such an approach is that we might miss the forest for the trees. Brock protects us against this peril by italicising key points, and by building to a central thesis that is crystal clear: Christians need to accept the challenge to our self-understanding brought by people who bear the label ‘disabled’, and to live in communities shaped accordingly.
The book comprises five parts, each of two chapters. Part I considers disability in the Christian tradition and carries on a lively conversation with Augustine, Gregory Nazianzen and Martin Luther. Brock’s reading of Augustine’s City of God yields the ‘revolutionary thought . . . that an observer’s shame or embarrassment in the presence of nonstandard human life is an artifact of disunion with his or her Creator, a mark of humanity’s common guilt not easily overcome and certainly not by human powers’ (p. 26, emphasis original). Brock illustrates the contrast between human embarrassment and divine compassion by setting the human response to lepers (pp. 32–34) against the Good Samaritan’s response to the injured man at the roadside (pp. 49–51). Brock notes the use of the verb splachnizesthai in the parable of the Good Samaritan, an expression that means ‘to be moved deeply [in the bowels]’. Disciples of Jesus are called ‘to receive this heightened sensibility’ (p. 50, emphasis original). That is the level of transformation required, and Brock rightly insists that human powers cannot begin it, much less accomplish it. This conversation with tradition begins his interrogation of the label ‘disability’ and ‘the limits [it] places on modern assumptions about humanness and personhood’ (p. 53). The question that the sorts of human difference labelled ‘disability’ ought to raise is not ‘why?’ but ‘what hopeful word might God be speaking in this encounter?’ The answer unfolds only in relationships among those with differing abilities who share life together.
The second part of the book takes up the themes of sin and healing in relation to genetic testing. Setting fear against doxology, Brock considers ‘the full conceptual and ethical implications’ of the shift from Christendom’s attitude of welcome to ‘all nascent human life’ to ‘a conditional acceptance based on agreements about human lives worth living’ (p. 76). The two chapters in Part II outline the features of the wide but tacit agreement on the latter and offer examples of how it is lived out in practice. Brock makes use of an analogy with the Berlin Wall, which was not invented ‘by the guards who stood at the border with guns, nor by the officials who issued passports, or by the legislature that decreed the norms for entry and exit’ (p. 79). Yet these various authorities ‘all upheld it’ (p. 79). Similarly, a network of authorities—medical researchers who develop tests, legislators who enact laws based on that tacit agreement, sonographers who perform certain tests, and genetic counsellors who explain their significance—helps potential parents fudge the boundaries around ‘what sorts of lives are thinkable’—and, by implication, grievable (p. 78; see also p. 80). In this situation it is difficult to imagine how ‘any nonstandard lives can break into a cultural space that seems so emotionally and practically invested in resisting their arrival’ (p. 78). The genius of this section is a bold claim: the reason for Christian acquiescence in this situation is not a defective anthropology but an anemic pneumatology. To become the kind of community that welcomes nonstandard lives, ‘Christians must confess their sinful attraction to the promise of an easier life’ (p. 97, emphasis original)—and hope for transformation by the Holy Spirit.
Part III turns to questions regarding medical ethics and the concept of quality of life, drawing ‘attention to the drastic impact of problems in communication on the day-to-day lives of people labeled disabled’ (p. 137). Chapter 5 argues in large part that a core text in medical ethics (Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th edn, Oxford University Press, 2019) is not a ‘“neutral” ethical tool’, as is commonly assumed, but is in fact ‘built on an implicit anthropological grounding that is far from morally neutral’ (p. 115). The authors’ anthropology conceives of ‘humanity [as] autonomous problem solvers who are tolerant of others’ beliefs, and who simply need a technique for reaching what they consider the only worthy goal of moral deliberation: practical agreement’ (p. 115). In this situation the church is called to shift attention from the individual life in isolation to ‘the richness of that person’s life in community’ (p. 138). Along the way, Brock casually devastates accounts of sin that elide accountability to God in favour of horizontal accountability: ‘Only against the backdrop of human estrangement from God does inter-human estrangement become fully intelligible’ (p. 137, emphasis original).
Brock takes seriously the doctrine of sin and it comes to the fore in a different way in Part IV. Brock appeals to Franz Rosenzweig and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in putting forward the provocative claim that sin is, in its ‘essential form . . . captivity to the idea that satisfaction will be had in being somewhere else—if somehow reality can be bent to conform more closely to some imagined fantasy of normalcy’ (p. 152). Allowing Rosenzweig’s account of sin to inform his own brings sin’s psychological effects to the fore, ‘highlighting the need for release from obsessions that do have certain adaptive functions and yet keep people from being open to the reality of their lives’ (p. 152). The discussion of sin, which is woven throughout the book, is a particular strength. Brock shows how sin is both a psychological phenomenon and a dis-ease that only Jesus can heal.
On this reading, freedom from sin ‘is not gained by admitting dependence. Freedom is received by concretely depending on God’s enlivening Spirit’ (p. 159, emphasis original). The legacy of Brock’s patristic interlocutors shows up here: modern Christians have been influenced by the concept of freedom of indifference—which includes the freedom to sin, if that is what we choose. Brock’s account of freedom, forged in conversation with patristic theology as well as with Rosenzweig and Bonhoeffer, rules out this possibility by aligning freedom with the work of the Spirit.
Brock also shakes up ideas of what constitutes health. After delineating his son Adam’s various medical interventions and persistent conditions, Brock insists that Adam is ‘the healthiest person I know . . . [He] is more than his illnesses’ (p. 168). Although ‘he lives in a more precarious relation to the well-functioning of his body than do many . . . his capacity to fight off disease is little different from others’ (p. 168). What sets Adam apart is not his ‘disability’ but the way he lives. ‘He is a friend with time, his body, and the people with whom he shares his days. In theological terms, it is clear that he is content to be a creature’ (p. 168).
This shake-up continues into the second chapter in Part IV. Brock begins from Frances Young’s realisation that she could not really imagine what it would mean for her son, Arthur, ‘to be “healed”’. Because his disability is so intertwined with his personality, ‘“[h]ealed” would be a different person’ (cit. p. 172). Brock implies that ‘healing’ is not just for the person who bears the label ‘disabled’, but for the one who perceives the disability. ‘Jesus . . . intentionally founds his kingdom by calling forth a new gaze, by fostering a new way of looking on the world . . . The gaze Jesus gives reaches out toward others without desiring to own or manipulate them’ (p. 185). This leads to an inversion of our traditional eschatological perspective. Rather than a predominantly future-oriented doctrine, ‘eschatology’s most prominent feature is its beginning in this age in the overturning and reformulations of human certainties and viewpoints. Eternity is a domain that reaches into and shakes up the present’ (p. 188, emphasis original).
The coda to Part IV prepares the reader for Part V. The analysis in the first eight chapters shows that, to be fit for purpose, a ‘theological response to disability must go beyond defining what disability “is”, to negotiate the psychological, spiritual, and interpersonal complexities involved in the revealing of sin’ (pp. 194–95). Disability gives us the opportunity to confront our own sinfulness, and adopt Jesus’ way of seeing; ‘to experience someone as disabled is not to recognize, but to misrecognize them’ (p. 196, emphasis original).
Part V returns us to the Bible and patristic sources ‘to describe how the Christian tradition offers a rival understanding of the roles those called disabled in modern societies might play in God’s own story of his people, as commemorated by and enacted in the worshipping community’ (p. 195). The final two chapters focus on the community that Brock’s understanding implies: one characterised not by tolerance or inclusiveness but by ‘taking responsibility for one another’ (p. 232). He draws from 1 Corinthians 12 an account of the body of Christ in which no single member makes sense without the others. Partly on the basis of this reading, Brock criticises a sermon of John Chrysostom for limiting the spiritual gift of the poor to the mere fact of their poverty, in effect restricting them to the margins of the church’s life even as they take their physical place at the door. Spiritual gifts must ‘be discovered “in between” the bearer and recipient’ (p. 221), and every believer takes his or her turn in each of those roles.
I am entirely sympathetic to this proposal, as a fan of patristic theology and the parent of a young adult with Down Syndrome, and I would recommend the book to anyone who is ready to accept the invitation to become a different kind of Christian. My reservations are few, and I will limit myself to two brief comments here. First, I wonder whether Augustine is really ‘pushing toward the modern world’ (p. 30) as Brock suggests. I raised an eyebrow at the claim that ‘Augustine’s wider aim [in City of God 16.8] is to normalize human diversity as a natural part of God’s story with creation’ (p. 17). Augustine seems most concerned to expose the folly of supposing that God ‘erred in allotting the number of human fingers’ when a person has been born with too many. It seems like a minor point, perhaps, but we must allow our premodern interlocutors to be wholly premodern (with all the faults we see with modern eyes) in order to allow them to speak clearly. I also wondered about what Brock means when he refers to ‘the church’, because sometimes it seems to be the universal church but not always. The ecclesiology Brock envisions is enticing but underdeveloped. Nevertheless I am better for having read Wondrously Wounded, both as an academic and a Christian, and I am grateful to Brian Brock for writing it.