Abstract
At the beginning of the global COVID pandemic, I had a hope that perhaps we might begin to treat ourselves—collectively and not just individually—with more compassion than I typically noticed people doing. I noted more than once that the categories of conditions that put people at high risk for COVID ought to make us all more aware of our limited bodies, and of the ways many more of us are disabled than we are taught to expect. Two years in, I can't say my hopes were fulfilled. We have not learned to be more inclusive of all people; we have not learned to rethink disability. Indeed, I have despaired at the number of times I have seen people be dismissive of the thought of wearing a mask or responding with compassion to people with autoimmunity or other needs. A key focus has been on individual freedom more than communal care.
This is one, among many, reasons why a book like Brian Brock's is so important. In this book, Brock aims to school Christians into a church that truly inhabits the Body of Christ because disabled people are seen as valued, integral members of the Body. Each of the book's five chapters focuses on a particular misconception or question that Christians have about disability: ‘Nobody with Disabilities in Our Church’, ‘Jesus Heals Everyone He Meets’, ‘God Chose You Because He Knew You Could Handle It’, ‘Disability is a Tragic Effect of the Fall’, and ‘We Don't Know Where to Start’. By the book's end, readers will have therefore grappled with several important concerns for thinking about disability.
Throughout, Brock uses stories from people with disabilities in order to highlight the problems or concerns with a chapter's theme as well as to call attention to a particular point in disability theology. In the first chapter, for example, Brock describes a time when he injured a finger and found himself temporarily disabled. While many people do not think about injured fingers, broken bones, or illnesses as disabilities, Brock suggests to his Christian audience that we embrace a broader view of what it means to be disabled. Better yet, ‘we must learn to relinquish from the outset the assumption that most people are “normal”’ (p. 20). By cultivating the sense that some people are merely temporarily able-bodied living among multiple people with a variety of disabilities, readers can begin to see disability as less a problem and more a gift for the church.
Understanding that disability encompasses a much broader group—indeed, all humans—enables readers to grapple with the rest of his chapters. In chapter 2, Brock confronts the idea that in the Gospels, it seems that Jesus heals all disabilities—and therefore eradicates them. This common view in Christian communities has led many so-called normal people to patronize those with disabilities and presume that their disabilities must be healed, in a physical way, because that is what God wills. Yet Brock tells the stories of several disabled people who read the Scriptures and find in the Gospels affirmation of disability as well as a distinctive way to understand Jesus’ healing acts. First, Jesus does not heal people who do not ask him for healing. Second, Jesus’ healing acts connect directly to what the petitioner has actually asked for. Third, Jesus is not merely healing individual bodies, but he is healing people and their communities. For example, in reading the story about Jesus healing a man with leprosy (Mk 1:40-42), we find that on close attention to the words of the story, the man with leprosy is not asking Jesus to remove his leprous condition but rather to make him clean. The man wishes to ‘come back into full fellowship with the community of faith’ (p. 47) and to be isolated no longer. Jesus makes him clean. That does mean removing his leprosy, so that the man can now receive what he wishes for: restoration to his people.
Each subsequent chapter is similarly infused with scriptural reflection and insight from the beginning, often based on the work of noted Scripture scholars whose field is disability theology. For example, Brock opens the third chapter with discussion of the book of Job by reflecting on Jeremy Schipper's disability hermeneutic. For Schipper, Job encounters his friends saying things similar to the platitudes disabled people may often hear: ‘Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar try to convince Job that his own bodily suffering and his grief at lost family and social status are both signs of God's justice at work’ (p. 64). Schipper and Brock reject that divine justice is at work in disability. Rather, Brock argues that people with disabilities can be ‘fully worthy, righteous, and favored by God’ (p. 65). Later, Brock discusses Acts 8:26-40, in which the apostle Philip runs after an Ethiopian eunuch riding a chariot, preaches the Gospel, and the eunuch seeks to be baptized. Eunuchs would have been seen as blemished, but Philip ignores this, welcoming instead the eunuch as a brother of Christ. Brock also writes about Paul and his temporary blindness that ‘display[s] how a sensory impairment can become a context for spiritual maturation’ (p. 86). God does not, in fact, reject disability or see people with disabilities as the ones who can only receive God's charity. God instead sees people with disabilities as disciples working alongside the whole church.
In chapter 4, Brock discusses a common theme for Christians related to disability, which is to see disability as a sin. Brock provides two historical theological (and heretical) positions on the body to help readers think through the problem. A Manichean view would see disability as a physical problem that can make us tend to see the world itself as not good. A mindset that holds that existence itself could be an evil can lead people to believe that euthanasia or abortion might indeed be better for disabled people. The other view of sin and disability is a Pelagian view that sees ‘the world is not so broken that we cannot fix it’ (p. 105). Yet this view emphasizes an idea that all disabled people should be fixed as much as possible so as to appear normal. Neither view accepts the possibility that disabled people are wholly God's people and made in God's image. Brock goes on in the chapter to consider what this insight means for our bodily resurrection in Christ and how we might become more fully church, together.
In the final chapter, Brock offers insights for how Christians might be more welcoming and inclusive toward those with disabilities. First, he tells a story of utter lack of welcome: A Christian community that ignores the plight of Meghan, a woman with cerebral palsy who could have used help finding correct pages in the hymnal and help turning off her phone when it buzzed. She left the church service and cried, not because of her disability, but because of her ill-treatment and isolation. Brock then articulates that a welcoming church will not be one with the right programs or the best activities but it will be a church where all of the people are seeking to build relationships with each other. The path of building relationships is a path that will probably involve missteps as people painstakingly learn to be in community with each other. That will mean the church will become a community that involves reconciliation and discernment, among many other characteristics Brock describes.
Brock suggests in his Afterword that he does ‘not have a reputation as an accessible writer’ (p. 167), yet his personal experience with his son Adam, as well as his concern for disabled people, have compelled him to write this book. I find that Brock has done an admirable job of making his writing accessible to all, especially because he shares people’s stories. Yet I am also grateful that the tremendous academic work he has done in other books (for example, Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019) leaves some impressions in this book, for readers are treated to a robust introduction to Scripture and theology as well.
I can easily see this book being used for an adult class or book group, or as an aid for a pastor preparing sermons on some of the several Scripture texts that Brock exegetes. I also envision using it in the Disability Theology course that I teach for my graduate students because I think Brock succinctly writes about key themes in disability theology that will provide students new to thinking about disability an opportunity to both learn as well as reflect on how they might, in their own ministry, enable their churches to become more focused on disability. This book deserves to be widely read, discussed and embodied, especially in a post-pandemic world in which, as I said at the beginning, more of us must realize we are disabled than we might previously have thought.