Disability's Challenge to Theology

We know who we are as human persons only in light of God’s action toward humanity. In opposition to contemporary secular debates about personhood, a Christian ontology of the human person points us toward the value of life beyond its capacity or abilities. From the creation narrative, we know the lives of all human beings are gifts, which constitutes the donative nature of the human being. Through the incarnation we can recognize human nature (in all its fragility and limitation) is good, even though our sinfulness directs our wills away from God. To despise our nature would be to despise what God has given and the very nature to which God has promised ultimate communion through Christ’s redeeming action. Finally, Christian eschatology leads us toward communal care as a witness of God’s Kingdom in the here and now. Living as witnesses to the Kingdom means recognizing all human persons are worthy of dignity and kinship. As sinful human beings, we tend to pervert our kinship with others and the earth. In response, the Church must work to represent God’s Kingdom to the world by first relinquishing power and control over our fate and turn towards being with God and others as its primary task.

By welcoming and including all persons into their communities, Christian churches have the opportunity to declare something vital about the worth of human life in its material and nonmaterial aspects, as well as in its actuality and potentiality. Against those who would situate God and the “supernatural” outside of mechanical human life, Christians know they are ontologically determined by a God who took on human form in order to be with humanity in its very nature. The church must assert our genes are not the essence or defining feature of who we are, and even if genes contribute to what we are, we ought not reduce all human whatness to genetics. We are finite material beings, but we are also creatures of God, which means we are more than mere material, and our DNA is no more sacred than the whole of human life. Christian churches have an opportunity to declare humans are more than molecules, more than their particular capacities and deficiencies. Our genes are not the key to who we are: Christ is.

Within our current culture, genetic engineering presents itself as a double-edged sword, promising to relieve the suffering of many while simultaneously obstructing deeper conversations about the complexity surrounding genetic diseases and disabilities within human life. The geneticization of all physical difference may hinder our acceptance of persons with phenotypic variation. By focusing on curing abnormality, Christians often neglect the hospitable and patient care that is required of them. All too often, we deploy our techno-medico projects upon the bodies of those we assume suffer as a result of our cultural configurations and assumptions about personhood. If we allow ourselves to be carried away with the achievements of genetic testing and medicine, our good intentions may become weapons against persons with genetic variation (or their parents) when they consider options within health care institutions.