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Jill Harshaw

Practical Theology 2010

Prophetic Voices; Silent Words

The Prophetic Role of Persons with Profound Intellectual Disabilities in

Contemporary Christianity.

If stories are the fabric of our lives, then questions are the keys that unlock the

interconnections between our stories. By asking questions of the other, we begin to

discover what there is to know of their story and to uncover those things which

weave together our lives and theirs. For most of us the questions change and

develop with the passing of time and the unfolding of our lives. What interests us in

a new encounter with the other at a particular stage of their or our experience differs

from that which intrigues us at another point. For Rebecca, though, one question

has dominated the entry to her life of almost every individual she has ever

encountered. Rebecca has complex intellectual and physical disabilities and has

been the object of countless medical interventions since her first seizure occurred at

the age of three weeks – she is now 25 years old. As the years have passed and

each new person, ‘professional’ or potential friend, has invaded her world and that of

her family, this question has shaped the foundations of every new assessment or

understanding of Rebecca’s being. The question: “Can she speak?” The answer:

“Not with words, no.”

Rebecca does not speak with words. She never has. Verbal language has

seemingly little relevance to her life. What of it she can understand, we cannot

know. In that sense, at least, we share a little of the ambiguity inherent in her life.

She may understand everything we say or nothing or something in between. There

is no way of telling.

Yet in answer to the question, “Can she speak?” those who know and love Rebecca

unwaveringly reply, “Not with words, no…but without words, unequivocally, yes.”

This fact requires no guesswork, no assessment or truth-stretching on our part for

her voice resonates loud and clear through each day of our lives. Rebecca speaks

to us of many things but most of all she speaks to us of God.

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It is more than three decades since Wolf Wolfensberger, in a paper to the Religion

Subdivision of the American Association of Mental Deficiency (AAMD) at the 100th

National Conference in Chicago,1 postulated the idea that persons who have

complex intellectual disabilities, persons like Rebecca, ought to be recognized as

modern-day prophets – as persons who speak to us of God. Although many of the

foundations on which Wolfensberger builds his case for the recognition of such

prophets are tenuous and many of his interpretations of what their message might be

are liable to serious challenge, his fundamental premise, echoed in the writings of

Jean Vanier2 and, latterly, Amos Yong, seems, particularly in the light of Rebecca’s

‘God-speak’ into our lives, worthy of deeper investigation.3

To begin to explore this extraordinary claim we must first ask ourselves who or what

within the broad spectrum of Judaeo-Christian understandings constitutes a prophet:

what did or do prophets do? What are the criteria by which they may be identified?

A typical response is probably centred on the idea that prophets are persons used by

God to speak specifically into the lives of others, particularly the lives of those who

claim to follow the ways of God. The idea that this might be true of Rebecca and of

other individuals, who have the most complex or profound disabilities, is at best

initially challenging, at worst highly speculative and possibly seriously erroneous.

Any attempt to substantiate such an idea must involve a careful exploration of how it

might be that those who have no means of verbal communication could speak the

words of God.

As evidenced by the basic Hebrew term for prophet, nabi, meaning ‘spokesman’ or

‘proclaimer,4 a prophet was fundamentally understood as “a messenger who spoke

on behalf of his God,”5 while other words associated with or translated as ‘prophet’

literally mean ‘one who is called or who calls’, ‘seer’, ‘messenger’ ‘man of God’6 and

‘servant of God’7 The prophetic message may have been referred to as a ‘prophesy’

but also a ‘vision’, ‘oracle’ or simply ‘the word of the Lord’. While some contend that

this message invariably comprised some form of prediction alongside that of

proclamation,8 others argue that its content was “not primarily predictive”9 and that

the key role of the prophet was to speak “whatever word was needed by the Lord’s

people at their moment in history.”10

An examination of the individuals whom God called to this prophetic role reveals

significantly that neither intellectual ability nor a gifting for verbal expression is a

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prerequisite in the biblical prophetic tradition. On the contrary, prophets were often

the most seemingly ill-equipped, inadvertent and unlikely of characters. The record

of the call of Moses in the biblical narrative merits particular scrutiny as a case in

point. Moses disputes God’s choice of him as the one who should challenge

Pharaoh on the grounds of his ineloquence, “I am not eloquent either heretofore or

since Thou hast spoken to Thy servant; but I am slow of speech and of tongue.”11 It

is obvious that Moses feels that if God wants someone to speak on His behalf, He

ought to choose someone who would make a better natural orator. On the other

hand, if God is determined to appoint him to this prophetic role, Moses hints that he

might have expected God to have taken the trouble to fix whatever his particular

speech defect is, not so subtly drawing God’s attention to the fact that his ability to

speak was no greater following God’s direct intervention in His life than it had been

previously. Yet God’s response makes it clear that His prophet’s speaking ability is

of no consequence, since the crucial factor here is not human ability or disability but

the accompanying presence of God. “Now, therefore, go and I will be with your

mouth and teach you what you shall speak.”12 Moses remains unconvinced. God

graciously offers Moses the assistance of his brother Aaron who, He tells Moses,

“can speak well.”13 “You shall speak to him and put the words into his mouth and I

will be with your mouth and with his mouth and will teach you what you shall do.”14

Lest Moses should fail to grasp the reality of his total dependence on the One who

has called Him to this role, God again emphasises that the indispensable element of

Moses’ prophetic ministry is not human intervention but divine presence. Despite

Aaron being evidently well-equipped for public speaking, he will still require the

active presence of God to be “with his mouth”15 just as much as Moses will. Moses

is to receive the word of God; Aaron is to pass it to the people; but the indispensable

element, equipping them both for their roles, is God with them.

A further detailed examination of God’s choice of particular human beings to carry

out his purpose as recorded in the biblical narrative confirms that He invariably

chooses the startlingly improbable to enact the seemingly impossible so as to

achieve the virtually unimaginable, as evidenced by the biblical narratives of the

lives of, for example, Jonah, Jeremiah and Elijah, all of whom demonstrated, at

various points in their prophetic ministries, overwhelming fear, despair, evasionary

tactics and even blatant escape-strategies in relation to the role to which God had

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appointed them. The text reveals that the crucial factor in establishing the capacity

for a prophetic role to be exercised by any individual was not human ability but the

accompanying presence of God.

It is interesting to note, in addition, that not all prophecy was delivered exclusively

through the use of words. God often communicated by means of more arresting

methods. Hosea’s message of God’s distress over the unfaithfulness of Israel under

the reign of Jeroboam II was delivered by means of Hosea’s obedience to God’s

instruction to take an adulterous wife.16 “Gomer’s subsequent unfaithfulness to her

husband Hosea became an object lesson of Israel’s lack of commitment to her

‘husband’, the Lord.”17 The prophet’s life became a “symbolic metaphor”18 for what

God wanted Israel to remember, in a similar sense to that in which the lives of

persons with intellectual disabilities might, arguably, speak to His people today. In

this regard Chisholm argues that utter synchronicity is not necessary for the symbol

to work in the prophetic context, “It is not necessary for a symbol to ‘walk on all

fours.”19 A basic symbolic integrity is sufficient for the message to be deliverable.

Turning to the New Testament text, in the most comprehensive of Paul’s teaching

on prophesy, 1Cor.14, he makes direct reference to a striking passage in the

prophesy of Isaiah, “Very well, then, with foreign lips and strange tongues God will

speak to this people.”20 Again, the implication of these words is that God, in His

wisdom, can and does choose whomever he wants to act as His messengers.

How, then, might we extrapolate from these biblical and theological insights their

significance for the potential prophetic role of persons with intellectual disabilities? It

may be pertinent to begin by asking whether there is anything here that would

preclude us from envisaging them exercising such a role. Obviously those within the

broad theological landscape who cling to the dispensationalist perspective on the

possibility of the prophetic role continuing following the establishment of the early

church, will refute the possibility of any person, disabled or not, holding such a role.

For those who take up a different position, the issue hangs on which model of

prophet one chooses to adopt as the defining standard. Some will have difficulty in

perceiving persons with intellectual disabilities as prophets in the most strictly

traditional Old Testament mould – as those who, having received a direct and

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specific word from God, usually pertaining to an event which is yet to occur at a

particular place to a particular person or people, personally and verbally articulate

that word to those for whom it is given.

The early church image of the prophet as one who speaks the previously-revealed

truth of God into a given situation is perhaps more akin to the sense in which Vanier

and Yong use the term. Like Wolfensberger, Vanier and Yong significantly refer not

to individuals who have intellectual disabilities but to such persons in plurality,

advancing the idea that the most important aspect of their prophetic activity centres

upon the role they hold in common and not specifically as individuals.

Fundamentally, the ministry is not perceived as something which is given individually

from outside of them but is intrinsic to who they are as intellectually disabled

persons. Such an understanding by which the prophetic role is identified in the life

and being and not simply the external message of the person who exercises it

resonates with Heschel’s comment on the Old Testament prophets in which he

argues that “the prophet’s task is to convey a divine view, yet as a person, he is a

point of view. We must seek to understand not only the views he expounded but

also the attitudes he embodied: his own position, feeling, response – not only what

he said but also what he lived; the private, the intimate dimension of the word.21”

At this point it is perhaps important to consider the other biblical texts which, though

not specifically prophesy-related, nonetheless reveal something of God’s unusual yet

purposeful choices of those whom He entrusts to make a major impact in the world.

In radical contrast to secular strategies, His choice is of the foolish, the weak, the

lowly, the despised and things that are not.22 The parallels between the experiences

of persons with intellectual disabilities and those of whom Paul is writing here are

almost irresistible to anyone who surveys the history of the treatment of the former.

They might be easily recognisable as those who have been and continue to be often

despised, lowly, considered foolish, even deemed not to be, as they have been

hidden away from society in institutionalised care settings. Perhaps even more

poignantly, it is not difficult to relate them with “those things that are not” since many

of them would not exist, had they been subjected to the consequences of

‘progressive’ genetic engineering and increasingly prevalent pre-natal testing with a

view to abortion, in societies which routinely question the ‘wisdom’ of allowing them

to survive. Sarah Williams recounts the opinion postulated by a physician involved in

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her care as an expectant mother whose child was pre-natally diagnosed with severe

and life-threatening disabilities: “To fail to abort in the case of proven foetal

abnormality is morally wrong because in so doing one is deliberately and willfully

choosing to bring avoidable suffering into the world. It becomes an ethical

imperative to abort in the case of suboptimal life.”23 This was also our experience

when, following an initial erroneous diagnosis of Rebecca’s condition as a genetic

abnormality which had a one in four chance of re-occurring, we were told by an

eminent geneticist that, should any future child of ours prove to have the same

condition, he would “get rid of it for us.”

With specific reference to further significant Old and New Testament texts and to the

biblical material as a whole, it became clear that there is considerable ambiguity

surrounding the criteria for and nature of prophetic ministry. It therefore became

more useful to move forward by acknowledging that the essence of what is at the

core of this discussion is not appropriately to be understood as a concern with

establishing the prophetic credentials of persons with intellectual disabilities for their

own sake but with having them recognised as those who have something important,

even vital, to say to the church and to individual believers who seek to live an

authentically Christian corporate and personal life in an increasingly volatile world.

Attributing to persons with intellectual disabilities even this revised prophetic role,

however, requires some recognition of divine appointment or, at least, divine

approval for their part in this task. Yet attempting to define the nature of such divine

approval raises the problematic issues in relation to the idea that these persons hold

their prophetic role in common and intrinsically. These difficulties emanate from a

single source: that of framing the discussion of persons with intellectual disabilities

exclusively in collective terms rather than also as individuals. Such a framework

provokes hard theological questions: Does the identification of divine approval for

their communal and intrinsic prophetic role infer that all such individuals have a

naturally occurring and peculiar relationship with God which makes them automatic

conveyers of His truth? If so, what are the soteriological implications of this

inference? Are they outside of what Protestant theology terms the ordo salutis?24 Is

the ordo salutis outside of them?25 What does such an inference bring to an

understanding of their theological anthropology? Does it place persons with

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intellectual disabilities in a different category of human being than the ‘non-disabled’?

Do they belong in “the anthropological minor league,”26 as Reinders suggests is the

view of some, or perhaps theirs is a higher league, which is positioned closer to God

than the non-disabled human being?27 Finally, are there not inherent sociological

dangers in the overwhelming tendency, implicit in identifying for persons with

intellectual disabilities a common prophetic role, to categorise them as a ‘special’

group, thus leading to the diminution or denial of their individuality and consequently

their perceived worth?

In many respects these are questions to which there are no definitive. Their impact

in this research was to heighten theological sensitivity, to emphasise the need for

caution when tempted towards categorical assertions and to remind us of the

pervasive element of mystery inherent in dealing with matters whose source and

explanation belong in and with the unfathomable God. Nonetheless, the proposal

here is that, in the widest possible sense of the term, a prophetic ministry may be

being exercised by persons with intellectual disabilities in contemporary society and

that biblical references should not leave us overwhelmingly surprised at such an

occurrence. The possibility, for example, that such persons are embraced by God in

a unique way is raised by Jesus’ words in Matthew 25 by which He enigmatically

identifies those who might be considered ‘the least of his brothers and sisters’ with

Himself. If, as this research argues, there is space in which to understand those to

whom Jesus is referring here to be the socially and ecclesially marginalised, an

experience undoubtedly commensurate with that of those who have profound

intellectual disabilities, there are grounds to believe that an encounter with them is

an encounter with Jesus, so that as we spend time with such persons, we do not

merely meet God walking beside them; rather in the meeting of them we find

ourselves spending time with God. The conclusion therefore that they have

something important to share with us becomes inescapable.

Biblical scholarship makes it clear that a prophetic message does not necessarily

consist in predictive language expressing new revelation but in embodied reminders

of previously-revealed truth which has been overlooked or under-emphasised or is

particularly pertinent to a current situation or need in the life of an individual, the

Church or society. Weber’s definition of a prophet, for example, resists pressure to

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draw any “radical distinction ... between a ‘renewer of religion’ who preaches an

older revelation and a ‘founder of religion’ who claims to bring completely new

deliverances.”28 This is not, however, to diminish the potential impact or import of the

message. Brueggemann reminds us that earlier texts may once again come alive in

a contemporary context through “an imaginative re-utterance [which] makes

poignant, astonishing, compelling and illuminating ad hoc contact with the present

moment of experience.”29 It is just such an imaginative re-utterance that persons

with intellectual disabilities offer to the Church, so that “in that moment of re-

utterance, the present is freshly illuminated, reality is irreversibly transformed.”30

So of what might believers, individually and corporately, hear these prophets speak?

What is Rebecca’s message to those who know her and to the Church at large?

Primarily her and her fellow-prophets’ embodied message consists of what it is to

be authentically human and highlights how subtly the prevailing culture has infiltrated

the consciousness of the Church with its falsehoods about what constitutes true

humanity - a culture which elevates normalcy and conformity; which equates health,

prosperity, autonomy, self-sufficiency, economic productiveness, intellectual

achievement, freedom, and power with what is good. Of course, as those whose

physical body and/or behaviour is assumed to render them incapable of making such

a contribution to the common good, persons with intellectual disabilities present an

unacceptable challenge to the community in which difference or deviation from the

normal is understood as a corruption of the good, a perception powerfully identified

by one woman who ironically described her experience of limb-amputation as her

“fall from grace.” 31

The biblical perspective argues that to be human is to be loved into being in the

image of a Creator32 who exists in relationship33 and whose design for those He

created involves the intrinsic dependence on Him and interdependence on one

another that mirrors the mutuality of relationship within the Godhead. It is to be freely

different, non-conformist, (in the broadest possible sense of the term), individual and

unique in every possible way without any concomitant loss of intrinsic value or worth.

Inevitably it involves being vulnerable to the other, subject to the contingencies that

being open to the other inevitably brings. Moreover, this vulnerability to the other is

not an aspect of the so-called corruption of our original humanness, the impact of the

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downward journey from that which we were created to be. Crucially, the creation

narrative tells us that when God spoke His creation into being He adjudged all of it to

be good34 except for one aspect – the aloneness of the first human being. Isolation,

self-sufficiency and autonomy were not part of the original design. This is reinforced

by Gospel narratives of the incarnate experience of Jesus in which He demonstrated

that even being God did not remove his need of God and of other people. Jesus

experienced vulnerability, fragility, weakness as intrinsically part of the perfect

human condition.35 These aspects of our humanity are what draw us to God and to

one another and so enable us to become in reality that which we are by design.

The embodied message of our own ‘prophet’, Rebecca and those with whom she

shares the label, ‘profoundly intellectually disabled’ is clear and reminds us of what

are often uncomfortable truths about ourselves. In her way of being she speaks

penetratingly of our self-seeking relationships, saying, “You choose whom to love on

the basis of the love they might be willing to give to you. You spend time with those

who will affirm the pleasure of your company. In disobedience to the words of Christ,

you welcome into your homes people who will invite you back - all this in a search for

the priceless jewel of being accepted, liked, loved - the jewel you rarely seem to

recognize as the object of your search, a search you seem not to be conscious of

taking part in. You perceive words as the key to communicating with one another

when often they are simply bricks in the barriers you erect behind which to hide who

you really are. How often do you say what you really mean or really mean what you

say?”

Secondly, persons with intellectual disabilities manifest the prophetic message in

their conscious or subconscious refusal to recognise and conform to the social

barriers that make the unambiguous revelation of our neediness and of our intensely

human desire to be in relationship with the other unacceptable. In disregarding the

constraints by which we bind ourselves, they open to us the possibilities of liberation

from pretensions to self-sufficiency, expose our meaningless attempts to impress

God and others by what we are and can achieve in ourselves and hold before us the

promise of the obliteration of our loneliness by inviting us to join them in admitting

our need of one another. Even without the ability to communicate with words, they

have found a way to say, “I need you” and they are willing to share it with us, who so

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often use our vast vocabularies and impressive articulacy to conceal from each other

what is most profoundly true of us.

Again Rebecca’s life says, “When I need people to show me love I reach out to

them. When I cannot accept your embrace I withdraw and so you can be clear about

that too. My needs are complex, as your words describe them. Aren’t yours

complex too? Perhaps the contrast between how each of us lives are is that I don’t

hide my complexity from you or from myself, as you often do.”

This often disturbing openness on their part calls on us to consider whether how they

behave might be a reflection of the way in which they inhabit something of the

freedom and abundance promised by Jesus36 and of which we ironically assume

them to be deprived by the limitations of their minds and bodies. Our experience of

living with Rebecca bears out this dimension of her prophetic message. Her voice

continues,

“How often do you live to the extremities of who you really are? I do this. I live a full

life, my life to the full, though it is a life described by many as pityfully limited and

disabled. Do you? I am and that is enough. I am who I am and all of the time as I

am. I do not understand pretence. I have never sought a mask to hide behind, I

don’t even know where I would go to look for one or why. I do not discriminate

between those I believe will give me something to prove to me my worth and those

who have little in the way of affirmation to offer me. I see each as the other – a

person, like me. It’s not that I don’t recognize love when it is offered; but that I don’t

manipulate people to feed my need of it.”

Thus, when Rebecca is sad or in pain, she shares it with those who love her and

when she is happy, she shares it with anyone within hearing distance of her shouts

of joy. She accepts her own neediness and opens herself to the gift of support and

care from others without shame or loss of self-esteem. In return she offers us the

most precious opportunity to give to her freely, as Mary did in hosting the unborn

Christ, without the need for reward.

Perhaps it is this integrated embodiment of vulnerability and openness that is the

essence of the prophetic message – the truth that we are all limited in what we are

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and can achieve and that undue reliance on our own abilities, intellectual or

otherwise, serves only to drive us away from the Source of life and truth. In their

intellectual disability these prophets speak to us of things that are so precious, so

mysterious and so profound that we are liable to miss them if we rely, as we are

prone to do, on the workings of our rational minds37 for the apprehension of all that is

true. They challenge the over-intellectualising of faith that can undermine spiritual

experience and the over-reliance on words to mediate our understanding and

experience of God, causing us at times to forget that words are merely signposts to

the reality to which they refer. Theirs is a message of liberation, calling on us not to

diminish who we are to ourselves and to others by concentrating primarily on the

intellectual and physical aspects of our being but instead to embrace the integrated

physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual creational realities of our lives.

Thirdly, their message is not merely a conceptual but an essentially practical one.

Ecclesial personhood does not consist in relating to God and to others in any

abstract or detached sense. The church community is as organic in its integral unity

as a human body38 and, like a human body, it requires a healthy environment in

which to survive and thrive. This community needs a currency by which its

transactions and interactions might be continually accomplished, and this currency is

love. So Witherington argues that, though 1Cor.13 is “an epideictic piece exalting

love, it is used in a deliberative argument to exhort the Christians to let love be their

guiding principle in all that they say and do.”39 Yet, transparently, it is not always the

case that this love is the atmosphere in which communities of Christ live and breathe

– perhaps because ‘capable’ human beings may be inappropriately satisfied by the

use of the false currency of superficial cognitive engagement which leaves their inner

selves profoundly unmoved yet protected from the need to expose their personal

realities and so from the risk of internal injury.

This is often not true of persons with intellectual disabilities who so often willingly

offer themselves without inhibition or pretension and instinctively know how to

receive, through the power of their weakness, the love and compassion to which

they call us – the Christ-like love of compassionate activity articulated in the

Deuteronomic prophecy of Moses and reiterated in Christ’s answer to the question of

what God really requires of those who purport to live in relationship with Him. This is

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love that meets human need in all its exigent, discomfiting, demanding aspects.

Such love is not an adjunct to the identity of members of Christ’s body but an

expression of it. They are not called to be merely with but for one another.

During one ten-week stay in hospital during which Rebecca underwent extensive

surgery and was, at times, close to death, she became an unambiguously prophetic

presence in the ward. Her fellow-patients who occupied the beds around her were

women (most undergoing surgery for cancerous tumours) whose inner and outer

lives were in turmoil. During that period there was not one minute, night or day,

when Rebecca was not accompanied by a family member or friend, each bringing to

her their own particular gifts of compassion and prayer. There was such a palpable

sense of love around her that it became the subject of debate in the large ward. On

one occasion an obviously very sick woman struggled to Rebecca’s bedside to tell

me, “Your little girl has saved more souls in here than you’ll ever know. Everyone is

talking about the love that surrounds her.” A prophet indeed!

Early in Rebecca’s life we discovered that to attend to Rebecca’s all-encompassing

bodily needs, far from being a chore, is the embodiment of such an authentic act of

love that it becomes a constant source of blessing. Each time we minister to her in

these intensely practical ways, we find ourselves participating in a godly and

mysteriously loving encounter which is the hallmark of the lives of those who live the

gospel in relation to one another.

Where does this lead us as those who desire to listen to God today, individually and

corporately? It might, perhaps, guide us into an instructive exercise of the

imagination by which we conceive of the Church as a place where this prophetic role

for persons with intellectual disabilities is recognised and their message listened and

adhered to. What does such a Church look like? What is its mindset and how has it

travelled from where it once was to where our imaginations tell us that it is now?

What questions has it had to address? Here are a few suggestions:

This transformed and reoriented Church began the process of transformation by

confronting head-on the question of why these prophetic messengers are so

noticeably and overwhelmingly absent from the life of the Christian community. It

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had to admit that recent attempts to address the issue of physical access were born,

not of a self-stimulated and repentant resolve to welcome those who have long been

excluded on the basis of their physical impairments but of external pressure exerted

by secular, legislative equality initiatives.40

More fundamentally, it had to grapple with the assumption that access to the Church

is primarily, if not exclusively, a matter of the physical environment in which ecclesial

communities meet, when the reality is that the format and content of such gatherings

have the potential to be equally exclusive to those whose capacities to understand

and adapt to what is taking place are limited. It admitted of the possibility that

intellectual high-jumps and narrow mindsets can contribute to a deeper

inaccessibility than stairs and narrow doorways.

Acknowledging these questions required the Church to demonstrate a level of

courage and answering them, an honest and reflective openness which allowed it to

genuinely subject its attitudes to the spotlight of truth and, where necessary, address

its underlying prejudices towards persons with intellectual disabilities who, if they do

make themselves present within communities of Christians, are commonly treated in

ways which simply tolerated them as permanently and irreconcilably different or as

tragic objects of pity.

Essentially the Church had to embark upon a deep-rooted deconstruction of

mindsets grounded in its long history of exclusion, inequality, misunderstanding,

prejudicial hermeneutics and neglect in relation to persons with disabilities, with

particular reference to the issues of initiation, participation, sacrament and ministry.

It admitted that there was little sign of ‘honoring’ the weakest41 (those with intellectual

disabilities) in contemporary ecclesial communities.

Its new understanding of genuine welcome within ecclesial communities implies not

the attributing but the recognition of worth practically embodied in mutual reciprocity

of love and care. This understanding emerged from the Church’s preparedness to

confront its own its conformity to the values of the secular society in which it is called

to be a radically contrasting and confronting presence – one to which Jesus referred

as the light of the world and the salt of the earth42 and to embody the immanence of

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a very different Kingdom in which can be found love, dignity and welcome for all and

particularly for the weak, poor and disabled.43 Committed introspection, balanced

with an authentic engagement with external analysis, made the Church deeply alive

to the dangers of prevailing and pervasive secular attitudes, thus admitting of the

possibility that, even in the extension of well-intentioned welcome, it is possible to

replicate deeply-flawed societal values which contribute to the perception of persons

with intellectual disabilities as problems to be rectified by sufficient normalization as

to enable them to be present in the church’s worship and fellowship gatherings in

‘non-disruptive’ ways rather than to consider a radical re-think of its theology or

practice as advocated by Swinton.44

This renewed Church recognised that welcoming persons with intellectual disabilities

is, first and last, to receive them as individual, unique and equal human beings; in

the space between is where the Church works out how to receive from them what

they have to give and how to give to them what they need to receive. This has

included discovering for them and for all members of the ecclesial community a

loving space for and a means of worshipping, participating and sharing their

particular gifts as indispensable members of the ecclesial community. This raised

challenging issues: How could the Church practically enact the gospel imperative to

value welcome, affirm and honour them as human beings, equal in God-given dignity

and worth? What would worship in which all present are afforded the opportunity to

participate look like? How could persons with profound intellectual disabilities be

met and known personally within Church communities? Wrestling with these

questions empowered the Church to respond faithfully to the re-utterance, through

these modern-day prophets, of God’s design for human and inter-human behaviour

in the power of His Spirit.

This led to even deeper questions, for the Church recognised that this was not

merely a matter of addressing the exclusion, by various and subtle means, of

persons with intellectual disabilities but, additionally and intrinsically, the issue of

how the Church lives and exists in conformity to its own identity, as expressed in

biblical and theological terms. By engaging meaningfully with Paul’s imagery of the

Church as the “body of Christ” (1Cor.12), the Church was inescapably confronted by

the absolute necessity of the presence of those who are “weakest,” and “least

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presentable”45 to the remainder of the body. The implications of this were

acknowledged to be overwhelming. The thrust of the text is not merely that the

Church must afford a place to such people in a spirit of compassionate obedience to

a God who loves and welcomes the marginalised but that the fact of the

indispensability of such persons must be taken seriously, thus revealing that startling

possibility that the Church is not the Church if they are absent. Such an implication

was heard to ring resoundingly with the truth expounded by Jesus in Matt.25 - that

He is in some way mysteriously present to, in and with such persons. The inevitable

impact of accepting this hermeneutic was that the absence of persons with

intellectual disabilities implies the absence of Christ. The disturbing, if not terrifying,

question that then arose was: if Christ is not present in His Church, His body, in what

sense can it be the Church at all?

And if Christ’s presence is to be found with and for the poor and the outcast, then it

was recognised that His body must be constructed on paradigms of weakness,

vulnerability and humility rather on secularly valued foundations of strength,

independence and power. The contrast between this ideal and the actuality of the

hierarchical structures of ecclesial communities and institutions became

unavoidable. Yet if this perpetual orientation towards the marginalised was the

direction of Christ’s incarnated human body, why should His ecclesial body choose a

different path? Is this not the meaning of the body image - that the

interconnectedness of Christ as Head46 and the body members creates the mutual

indwelling which is the ultimate expression of love, welcome and acceptance as well

as the sharing of all experiences whether joyful or painful,47 as if the experience of

one were the experience of all? As each part shares in the suffering of the other,

then the condition of any individual who has intellectual disabilities cannot be a

personal tragedy but a shared experience. Grasping and embodying this profound

truth caused the walls of division built by the misunderstanding of difference, to

crumble under the weight of interdependent body membership. Unity within the

body, for which Jesus prayed so fervently on the night of His betrayal,48 meant

something – it was no longer an abstract concept but a visible and practical reality.

Finally, the body assembled together in a new consciousness of its true identity. No

part could be excluded here. At last the contemporary Church had seriously

engaged with this type of inclusive ‘body theology.’

16

The difficult questions, however, were not appropriately addressed in a spirit of

negativity and accusation but in one of serious and hopeful theological reflection. It

was recognised that an absence of love is not most often due to the presence of

hate but of fear. What was needed was an admission within the individual and

corporate lives of believers that often the deepest need is also the greatest source of

fear – fear that the need to be loved, have meaning and belong will not be met.

Paradoxically, though, the absence of such fear in the lives of many persons with

intellectual disabilities is at the heart of their being and thus of the prophetic gift to

the Church. Lovingly receiving and welcoming them unlocked the possibility that

their gift might be shared with the whole church community.

The biblical and theological imperatives uncovered in this process were intensely

and unwaveringly practical and as the Church took them seriously, it found that

seeking to implement their truth in the lives of their communities raised ever more

intense and practical issues. What would appropriate pastoral care to persons with

intellectual disabilities entail? How much effort would need to be exerted to grapple

with these issues at a sufficiently deep level to exact real understanding of their

lives? What impact would taking the time needed to properly get to know these

persons as individuals and recognise their gifts and needs have on the frantic pace

of Church community life? How could worship and sacrament become accessible to

persons with intellectual disabilities as participants, not merely spectators? What

was the place of intellectual assent in relation to the sacraments? How could such

assent be assessed or measured among those who do not communicate verbally?

How else might faith and spiritual life be recognised? What were the forms and

qualities of authentic participation? What should be the place of the community’s

faith in the life of a member of the community who is perceived to be incapable of

making a cognitive faith response? How could the Church encourage the bringing to

God of all that human beings are in ways that are meaningful for all? How important

was quietness when some craved it and others could not conceive of it? Who was to

decide what compromises were to be made? How was a leadership which believed

it had a responsibility to respond to these challenges to convince its congregation of

the importance of the issue? How would potential conflict be handled sensitively?

17

These are just a few of the questions that had to be addressed by a Church in which

the intellectually disabled are no longer, at best, undervalued or pitied, at worst,

stifled or shunned but are instead joyfully and gratefully recognised as fellow

members whose weakness is one aspect of the common humanity of all and whose

vulnerability is an expression of the freedom with which they inhabit their

humanness. In such a Church, as Christ is present by His Spirit, the prophetic

message of persons with intellectual disabilities is heard more and more and the

church is being ushered into a new experience of life together in Christ. By listening

to these prophetic voices urging them towards a deeper understanding of what it is

to live towards each other by the currency of love, the Church in its local and global

expressions reflects more closely the character of the One who calls them

individually and together in love and whose every thought of and act towards them is

shaped by the same transformative love. Thus this Church community has within its

reach, the capacity to receive from God the transformative grace and power to

authentically be, in its ministry, life and being, the body of Christ on earth.

1 This paper was later published in Gaventa, W, Coulter, D, eds. The Theological Voice of Wolf Wolfensberger (London: Haworth Press, 2001) 2 Vanier, An Ark for the Poor (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995) 3 Yong, A. Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity. (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007) 4 “It is a measure of the distinctiveness of the phenomenon that the word has been borrowed by English, where ‘nabi’ and ‘nabism’ are occasionally used in preference to the nearest English equivalents.” Jn. F.A. Sawyer, Prophecy and the Biblical Prophets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1 5 E.W. Heaton, A Short Introduction to the Old Testament Prophets (Oxford: One World Publications, 1977), 30 6 For example, 1Sam.9; 1Kgs.13 (All references RSV unless otherwise stated) 7 For example, 2Kgs. 21.10; 24.2 8 See, for example, Herman Gunkel, “The Prophets as Writers and Poets.” In David L. Petersen,

Prophecy in Israel (London: SPCK, 1987), pp.22-73. 9 L. Richards, Expository Dictionary of OT Words, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1985), 505. 10 Richards, Expository Dictionary, p.505. 11 Ex.4.10 12 Ex.4.11-12 13 Ex.4.14 14 Ex.4.15-16 15 Ex.4.15 16 Hos.1.2 17 Robert B Chisholm Jr., Handbook on the Prophets (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 337 18 Chisholm, Handbook on the Prophets, 337. 19 Chisholm, Handbook on the Prophets, 337. 20 Is.28.11 21 Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (NY: Harper Perennial Classics, 2001), xxii 22 1Cor.1.27-30 23 Sarah Williams, The Shaming of the Strong (London: Kingsway Publications, 2005), 49.

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24 See G, Hendry, The Westminster Confession for Today: A Contemporary Interpretation (Richmond, Vancouver: Jn. Knox Press, 1962) 25 See Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome, p.238. 26 H. Reinders, “Human Dignity in the Absence of Agency” In R. Kendall Soulen and L. Woodhead, eds., God and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 121-142 27For a supporting perspective see C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Centenary Press, 1940), 67 and a contrasting one, Swinton, “Building a Church for Strangers.”18 28 Max Weber, ‘The Prophet.’ In David Petersen, Prophecy in Israel (London: SPCK). p.99 29 Walter Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, Words That Explode (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2000), 1 30 Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, 1 31 Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 25 32 Gen.1:26-27 33 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol.3.1, the Creation of Man, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958). Also Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, (Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1981), p.172. 34 Gen.1.31 35 Further see Keith Ward, God, Chance and Necessity (Oxford: One World Publications, 1996). 36 Jn.10.10 37 Further see Thomas Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion (Grand Rapids, Brazos Press), 86. Also Stanley Hauerwas, “The Retarded and the Criteria for the Human.” In John Swinton, (ed.), Critical Reflections on Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability, (New York: Haworth Press),132. 38 See Witherington 1 and 2 Corinthians, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 255. 39 Witherington, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 264. See also “Leo the Great, Sermon 12 on the Fast.” In Amy G. Oden, And You Welcomed Me: A Sourcebook on Hospitality in Early Christianity, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 95. 40 In Great Britain the 2010 Equality Act requires that all public buildings be physically accessible on an equal basis to all members of society. 41 1Cor.12.26 42 Matthew 5.13-16 43 Luke 14.15-23 44 See John Swinton, “Building a Church for Strangers.” Journal of Region, Disability and Health, Vol. 4.(4) 2001, 35 45 1Cor.12.23 46 Col.1.18 47 1Cor.12.26 48 Jn 17