I truly appreciate your scholarship, and it has helped me to gain a more expansive, liberating faith in a God that was represented to me in a way that justified harms I’m not sure I’d ever fully heal from.
I am being challenged a bit by your perspective on those with chronic illnesses and disabilities (pardon me as I’m sure I could use better terms). When I look at the life of Jesus, when He healed the blind, deaf, paralytic, the woman with the issue of blood, those who had leprosy, etc., I interpreted those stories as Jesus restoring them back to a sort of Edenic state. It was as if those conditions caused them to exist in society in a way that prevented them from fully flourishing.
The tension I hold is Jesus’ own words. He stated whatever you do for the most vulnerable, you do for Him. I see the love of the friends who carried and lowered the paralytic man from the roof as evidence of God’s love of all regardless of how they function.. not only when they brought him to Jesus for healing, but even within the life they lived with him before there was ever any hope for recovery. To be the paralytic’s friend in the first place, they had to love and appreciate who he was even when there was no benefit to being in relationship with him (especially during those times). They saw what many of us fail to see, regardless of function or productivity, we all carry the image of an infinitely creative God.
So I guess that leads me to presenting this question.. What of those whose limitations, so to speak, rob them of the fullness of life that maybe they were created to function within? I think of Elijah and his debilitating depression. An angel was sent to grant him rest and nourishment. For another, maybe clinical depression and PTSD were evidence of a life not aligned with Gods intentions for a child and/or adult to experience.. therefore, it robs them of their ability to truly live. Or maybe the person who was injured in a way that compromised their ability to function within their God given vocation (if you believe in such a thing).. Should they not pray for recovery? Or is it that recovery itself would require a miracle that may not occur, and the blessing is the knowing that they are still valued, loved and worthy of dignity regardless? And when I mention the miracle as a requirement, sometimes the miracle is the person who grew up in an ab*sive family system finding support out of it and accepting healthy relationships? Sometimes the miracle is required because the human mind (and mostly systems of healthcare being designed for profit) hasn’t been able to conceive of a cure for certain conditions?
Thank you for engaging thoughtfully. To start: chronic illness and disability are not dirty words. We should all use them!
Disability studies makes a distinction that reframes your question entirely: the social model of disability argues that what disables people is not primarily the body's condition but the structures, environments, and expectations built around a particular norm of functioning, which means when Jesus healed the man born blind or the paralytic, disability theology asks us to consider that what was being addressed was not only the body but the social exclusion that structured their lives, the temple tax system that made disability an economic catastrophe, the purity codes that made certain conditions sites of shame and segregation, the absence of ramps that made the paralytic dependent on friends with access to a roof.
Nancy Eiesland, whose work "The Disabled God" is foundational here, argues that the resurrection body of Jesus, which retains its wounds, is the theological image we should center: not the healed, restored, Edenic body, but the body that was broken and rose still marked, still carrying the evidence of what it had been through, and was recognized by those marks as the body of God.
This does not mean we stop praying for healing or building healthcare systems or carrying our friends through roofs. It means the miracle is not the only site of God's presence in the disabled body, and the unhealed body is not waiting for God to arrive. God already showed up in a body that kept its scars.
Saint Thomas Acquinas formulated the principle of double effect. I'm referring to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a detailed description: https://plato.stanford.edu/double-effect This principle lies at the heart of many moral discussions in the Church.
What we see now is that the negative consequences of sexual morality cannot longer be deemed undesirable side effects. Side effects that can be mitigated. Nowadays we see those negative, harmful consequences as directly caused by the moral rules themselves. And that they are no longer proportionate.
We cannot allow the negative side effects of sexual morality when they are diectly caused by doing - imposing - moral rules.
A very interesting and thought provoking article. I have one comment to make about the question of slavery and the church. I think this issue is often presented in a very misleading way. Christianity did not invent slavery, we’ll know that, but it inherited a world in which slavery was universal. What Christianity introduced was the radical idea that every human being possesses equal dignity before God. Those principles gradually undermined slavery throughout Europe and later became central to abolitionist movements. Christianity was possibly the single most important to precondition for the development of a negative attitude towards the institution of slavery. The most brilliant minds of the ancient world never seemed to find any problem with the private possession of other human beings.
It’s also worth remembering that in 1537, the papal bull Sublimis Deus explicitly affirmed that Indigenous peoples were fully human and could not be enslaved, even if they were not Christians yet. The fact that many colonists ignored this teaching is certainly a scandal, but it is a failure to follow Church teaching, not evidence that the teaching itself endorsed slavery.
If there is something to apologise for, it is the failure of Christians to live up to their own principles, not the principles that ultimately helped make slavery morally indefensible. So I’m not sure I follow when you mention the matter of the church and slavery or the need to apologise for anything related to it.
Christianity did introduce the radical claim that every human being possesses equal dignity before God. That claim did become central to abolitionist movements. But the encyclical itself does not make the argument you are making. Leo XIV does not say the Church failed to live up to its own principles. He says the Church asked for pardon. His language is specific: "many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves," the Apostolic See "intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation," and "it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized." He calls it "a wound in Christian memory" and asks for pardon in the name of the Church. The pope is not saying Christianity invented slavery. He is saying the institution participated in and legitimized it in specific ways that require more than an acknowledgment that individual Christians failed to follow good principles. He is saying the institution itself bears responsibility.
I am wondering about how to respond to those who might argue:
A. If disabled bodies don’t warrant prayers for healing, why would we “violate their dignity” with medical treatment?
B. If disabled bodies should not be healed because they have their own dignity even in suffering, then won’t that be used as an argument against altering dysmorphic bodies through transition?
A. The dignity of the disabled body is not demonstrated by whether treatment is offered or withheld. It is demonstrated by whether the person inside the body is asked. The healing prayer tradition's specific violation of dignity was not that it prayed for healing. It was that it prayed over bodies without consulting the people inhabiting them, that it made the community's theological discomfort the reason for the prayer rather than the person's own expressed need, that it treated the disabled body as a problem the community needed resolved rather than a person with their own relationship to their own body and their own God.
Dignity means: you get to decide. You get to want a cure or not want one. You get to pursue treatment or decline it. You get to pray for healing or pray for the world to stop treating your body as a problem. You get to be the subject of your own story rather than the occasion for someone else's faith testimony.
B: This is a false parallel and the distinction is straightforward. Disability studies' social model locates the problem not in the body itself but in the structures built around a norm of functioning that excludes certain bodies. Trans medicine is not correcting a body that has its own dignity intact. It is relieving the specific suffering produced by the misalignment between a person's embodied sense of self and the body they inhabit. These are categorically different situations. One is about structural exclusion of bodies that function differently. The other is about a person's interior knowledge of their own embodiment. The dignity of the disabled body does not require the body to remain unchanged. It requires the world to stop treating difference as deficiency. Transition is a person inhabiting their own dignity more fully, which is exactly what the encyclical says integral human development looks like.
Very helpful. Thanks for taking the time to lay it out so clearly. I was part of a churchplant where 1/3 of the congregants were individuals in full-time care. We often had to warn away newcomers who wanted to pray for them without even asking and there was a creepy egoistic saviour aspect looking to give themselves a good testimony to brag about with little concern for the person’s dignity. Happily, we could typically spot them a mile away and run blockage.
In the case of my trans daughter, I think you’ve really nailed the false equivalency and again, noted her agency as central to the journey. She knows what she needs and our only job is to accompany her.
I had a child with severe disabilities. From the moment it was discovered his life was not going to be 1)Good 2)Long 3)Worth while, the religious fanfare was elevated to high alert. When the dr gave me the news he prayed over him before I left his office, to tell my family the diagnosis. This dr was a part of the church I grew up in. Small town life. His outcome was the same. When he died “he’s in a better place” was said so often I wanted to throat punch the next person who said it to me. I should write a book 🤷🏼♀️😁
I truly appreciate your scholarship, and it has helped me to gain a more expansive, liberating faith in a God that was represented to me in a way that justified harms I’m not sure I’d ever fully heal from.
I am being challenged a bit by your perspective on those with chronic illnesses and disabilities (pardon me as I’m sure I could use better terms). When I look at the life of Jesus, when He healed the blind, deaf, paralytic, the woman with the issue of blood, those who had leprosy, etc., I interpreted those stories as Jesus restoring them back to a sort of Edenic state. It was as if those conditions caused them to exist in society in a way that prevented them from fully flourishing.
The tension I hold is Jesus’ own words. He stated whatever you do for the most vulnerable, you do for Him. I see the love of the friends who carried and lowered the paralytic man from the roof as evidence of God’s love of all regardless of how they function.. not only when they brought him to Jesus for healing, but even within the life they lived with him before there was ever any hope for recovery. To be the paralytic’s friend in the first place, they had to love and appreciate who he was even when there was no benefit to being in relationship with him (especially during those times). They saw what many of us fail to see, regardless of function or productivity, we all carry the image of an infinitely creative God.
So I guess that leads me to presenting this question.. What of those whose limitations, so to speak, rob them of the fullness of life that maybe they were created to function within? I think of Elijah and his debilitating depression. An angel was sent to grant him rest and nourishment. For another, maybe clinical depression and PTSD were evidence of a life not aligned with Gods intentions for a child and/or adult to experience.. therefore, it robs them of their ability to truly live. Or maybe the person who was injured in a way that compromised their ability to function within their God given vocation (if you believe in such a thing).. Should they not pray for recovery? Or is it that recovery itself would require a miracle that may not occur, and the blessing is the knowing that they are still valued, loved and worthy of dignity regardless? And when I mention the miracle as a requirement, sometimes the miracle is the person who grew up in an ab*sive family system finding support out of it and accepting healthy relationships? Sometimes the miracle is required because the human mind (and mostly systems of healthcare being designed for profit) hasn’t been able to conceive of a cure for certain conditions?
Thank you for engaging thoughtfully. To start: chronic illness and disability are not dirty words. We should all use them!
Disability studies makes a distinction that reframes your question entirely: the social model of disability argues that what disables people is not primarily the body's condition but the structures, environments, and expectations built around a particular norm of functioning, which means when Jesus healed the man born blind or the paralytic, disability theology asks us to consider that what was being addressed was not only the body but the social exclusion that structured their lives, the temple tax system that made disability an economic catastrophe, the purity codes that made certain conditions sites of shame and segregation, the absence of ramps that made the paralytic dependent on friends with access to a roof.
Nancy Eiesland, whose work "The Disabled God" is foundational here, argues that the resurrection body of Jesus, which retains its wounds, is the theological image we should center: not the healed, restored, Edenic body, but the body that was broken and rose still marked, still carrying the evidence of what it had been through, and was recognized by those marks as the body of God.
This does not mean we stop praying for healing or building healthcare systems or carrying our friends through roofs. It means the miracle is not the only site of God's presence in the disabled body, and the unhealed body is not waiting for God to arrive. God already showed up in a body that kept its scars.
i'm not even sure how to put my feelings into words. thank you ❤️
Saint Thomas Acquinas formulated the principle of double effect. I'm referring to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a detailed description: https://plato.stanford.edu/double-effect This principle lies at the heart of many moral discussions in the Church.
What we see now is that the negative consequences of sexual morality cannot longer be deemed undesirable side effects. Side effects that can be mitigated. Nowadays we see those negative, harmful consequences as directly caused by the moral rules themselves. And that they are no longer proportionate.
We cannot allow the negative side effects of sexual morality when they are diectly caused by doing - imposing - moral rules.
Yes, 100%.
A very interesting and thought provoking article. I have one comment to make about the question of slavery and the church. I think this issue is often presented in a very misleading way. Christianity did not invent slavery, we’ll know that, but it inherited a world in which slavery was universal. What Christianity introduced was the radical idea that every human being possesses equal dignity before God. Those principles gradually undermined slavery throughout Europe and later became central to abolitionist movements. Christianity was possibly the single most important to precondition for the development of a negative attitude towards the institution of slavery. The most brilliant minds of the ancient world never seemed to find any problem with the private possession of other human beings.
It’s also worth remembering that in 1537, the papal bull Sublimis Deus explicitly affirmed that Indigenous peoples were fully human and could not be enslaved, even if they were not Christians yet. The fact that many colonists ignored this teaching is certainly a scandal, but it is a failure to follow Church teaching, not evidence that the teaching itself endorsed slavery.
If there is something to apologise for, it is the failure of Christians to live up to their own principles, not the principles that ultimately helped make slavery morally indefensible. So I’m not sure I follow when you mention the matter of the church and slavery or the need to apologise for anything related to it.
Christianity did introduce the radical claim that every human being possesses equal dignity before God. That claim did become central to abolitionist movements. But the encyclical itself does not make the argument you are making. Leo XIV does not say the Church failed to live up to its own principles. He says the Church asked for pardon. His language is specific: "many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves," the Apostolic See "intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation," and "it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized." He calls it "a wound in Christian memory" and asks for pardon in the name of the Church. The pope is not saying Christianity invented slavery. He is saying the institution participated in and legitimized it in specific ways that require more than an acknowledgment that individual Christians failed to follow good principles. He is saying the institution itself bears responsibility.
Amen! 🙌
I am wondering about how to respond to those who might argue:
A. If disabled bodies don’t warrant prayers for healing, why would we “violate their dignity” with medical treatment?
B. If disabled bodies should not be healed because they have their own dignity even in suffering, then won’t that be used as an argument against altering dysmorphic bodies through transition?
A. The dignity of the disabled body is not demonstrated by whether treatment is offered or withheld. It is demonstrated by whether the person inside the body is asked. The healing prayer tradition's specific violation of dignity was not that it prayed for healing. It was that it prayed over bodies without consulting the people inhabiting them, that it made the community's theological discomfort the reason for the prayer rather than the person's own expressed need, that it treated the disabled body as a problem the community needed resolved rather than a person with their own relationship to their own body and their own God.
Dignity means: you get to decide. You get to want a cure or not want one. You get to pursue treatment or decline it. You get to pray for healing or pray for the world to stop treating your body as a problem. You get to be the subject of your own story rather than the occasion for someone else's faith testimony.
B: This is a false parallel and the distinction is straightforward. Disability studies' social model locates the problem not in the body itself but in the structures built around a norm of functioning that excludes certain bodies. Trans medicine is not correcting a body that has its own dignity intact. It is relieving the specific suffering produced by the misalignment between a person's embodied sense of self and the body they inhabit. These are categorically different situations. One is about structural exclusion of bodies that function differently. The other is about a person's interior knowledge of their own embodiment. The dignity of the disabled body does not require the body to remain unchanged. It requires the world to stop treating difference as deficiency. Transition is a person inhabiting their own dignity more fully, which is exactly what the encyclical says integral human development looks like.
Very helpful. Thanks for taking the time to lay it out so clearly. I was part of a churchplant where 1/3 of the congregants were individuals in full-time care. We often had to warn away newcomers who wanted to pray for them without even asking and there was a creepy egoistic saviour aspect looking to give themselves a good testimony to brag about with little concern for the person’s dignity. Happily, we could typically spot them a mile away and run blockage.
In the case of my trans daughter, I think you’ve really nailed the false equivalency and again, noted her agency as central to the journey. She knows what she needs and our only job is to accompany her.
Thanks for your help.
By the way, great article and I like the way you are connecting the dots. I’m just trying to anticipate the “you can’t have it both ways” objections.
I had a child with severe disabilities. From the moment it was discovered his life was not going to be 1)Good 2)Long 3)Worth while, the religious fanfare was elevated to high alert. When the dr gave me the news he prayed over him before I left his office, to tell my family the diagnosis. This dr was a part of the church I grew up in. Small town life. His outcome was the same. When he died “he’s in a better place” was said so often I wanted to throat punch the next person who said it to me. I should write a book 🤷🏼♀️😁
I am so sorry and sadly not surprised. I hope you write that book. We will be in a better place for it.