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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.
18
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
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