A couple weeks ago, the
World Council of Churches called for more inclusivity of people with
disabilities in churches. The coordinator of the Ecumenical
Disability Advocates Network apparently said this:
“The communion of the churches in unity and
diversity is impaired without the gifts and presence of all people,
including persons with disability.”
I haven't been able to stop thinking about this
statement since I first read it. There's so much to unpack here with
respect to my theological interests.
Ever since I started trying to do embodied
theology, theology that is in and of and about the flesh, I have been
compelled by the image of the Church as Christ's body. This is
already a powerfully rich and evocative image in New Testament
literature. The image is present in Paul's letters to the Romans,
the Ephesians,
and the Colossians,
but I suppose it gets its most extensive treatment in 1
Corinthians 12.
I often think about taking this image quite
seriously. Given what we know about bodies – from queer theory,
from crip theory, from critical race theory – what does it mean
that we the Church are, collectively, Christ's body? And what does it
mean to call this body, for whatever reason, impaired?
On the social
model of disability, “impairment” usually refers to a physical
fact about a specific body, while “disability” as such is caused
by social and environmental factors. Any disability theory worth its
salt from the last five years or more will, of course, note that this
distinction is as necessary a step and as unsustainable a dualism as
the sex/gender distinction: one can no more conflate these things
absolutely than one can separate them entirely. Impairment (/sex) the
physical fact and disability (/gender) the social construct are
hopelessly entangled, to the point that even what we call “the
physical fact” (of impairment or of sex) is itself a social
construction.
Deborah
Beth Creamer proposes a model of “limits” to displace or
supplement the social model's inadequacies. Limits are not identical
with either “disability” or “impairment,” and are inherently
value-neutral. As a society we naturalize some limits (a person who
cannot fly is normal) and pathologize others (a person who cannot
walk is defective). As in Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson's concept of “misfit,” our understanding of
limits tends to be circumscribed by the relations between human
bodies and their environment, but attention to the limit or misfit
can enable us to interrogate the “default” bodies we construct.
Disability becomes
“an intrinsic, unsurprising, and valuable element of human
limit-ness” (Creamer, Disability
and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive
Possibilities,
96).
So
far, so human; but what of God? What about the limits of God? The
classical theological notion of kenosis,
self-emptying, proposes that God took on limits in the incarnation;
but, traditionally, this was in order to overcome said limits through
glorification and resurrection. But if the Church is Christ's body –
a body of bodies, human bodies, defined by the having of limits –
is God, then, not still flesh? Still material? Still limited?
The
Church is Christ's body, but it is also a (or many) human
institution(s), and as such it is deeply flawed – perhaps even
impaired,
in the most negative sense – and never more so than when it
practices the exclusion of those whose bodies are too disabled, too
queer, the wrong color. The Church is the communion of saints, but it
is also a temporal coalition of temporal bodies, and as such it has
limits – limits that are not necessarily intrinsically good or bad,
but limits that are constitutive of it as
a
body.
I
wonder what that means.
