Being the Body of Christ d2 (original) (raw)

People with disabilities embody essential aspects of access to divine equality and justice in church-communities enacting the sacraments’ invitation to God’s passionate inclusion. We illuminate the theological reality that Jean Vanier calls the “way of the heart” (1998). Through our alternative episteme, or mode of knowledge (Isasi-Diaz 2012), Christians with disabilities testify to baptism and Holy Communion’s summons to the symmetrical sharing of power. We demonstrate vital human interdependence and difference by living out what Miroslav Volf calls “double vision” (1996). We show how the Church can address diversity and post-modernity by displaying the “power made perfect in weakness” that Jesus reveals through his ministry, his Cross, and his Resurrection (1 Corinthians 12:9). My presentation, a distillation of my dissertation proposal that will require audiovisual aids, will confront the Church’s acceptance of Western societies’ normative ableism: people with disabilities are excluded from the Church’s life, and so we often refuse to accept its compassionate welcome (Betcher 2007, Block 2002, Eiesland 1994). I will engage this dilemma by proposing a transformative and sacramental ecclesiology of disability. First, I will outline a radically-Christocentric theology of embodiment, based in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Second, drawing on Brett Webb-Mitchell’s and Jennie Block’s insights, I will show how the Church has both succeeded and failed to embody this theology in its role as Christ’s earthly Body that includes disability. Third, through Kathy Black’s and Webb-Mitchell’s assertions, I will explore the theological facets of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual access to churchly communities for Christians with disabilities; fourth, calling on Volf and Vanier among others, I will describe the practical and pneumatological aspects of this multifaceted access. Finally, explicating Amos Yong’s pneumatological paradigm, I will create an embodied eschatology of disability.