Disability in the Christian Tradition: a Reader by Brian Brock and John Swinton (review)

Brian Brock and John Swinton's Disability in the Christian Tradition is a fascinating volume for clergy, theologians, and laypeople who want to understand the gifts that Christians with disabilities bring to the church. Fourteen theologians interested in disability have analyzed excerpts from fourteen past theologians or movements, in order to bring the Christian tradition into conversation with the study of disability. The authors investigated in the book range from the Church Fathers (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa) to Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche; each commentator offers a different perspective on disability, theology, and human life.

In the Introduction, Brian Brock examines the book's primary themes by asking poignant questions about humanness. One guiding question is, ''How should we think of and treat those human beings whom we experience as 'other' than us?'' Brock answers this question by outlining the book's generous interpretation of disability and tradition. He claims that Christian theology can contextualize modern accounts of disability empathically, revealing the ways in which disability is a social construct, as well as an index of physiological and/or intellectual limitation (3).

After clarifying the book's method, Brock redefines its first term, tradition, by asserting that the Christian tradition can expand the field of the term disability: the voices of ''the saints,'' read through a charitable hermeneutic (8), have much to teach twenty-first-century Christians about being both loving and human. Thereafter, Brock describes disability anew, contrasting blanket terms like the blind and the disabled with person-first language like people with disabilities. Brock also observes that binaries such as normal-aberrant or functioning-impaired presume that people with disabilities are marginalized by an agential society (9). Brock and Swinton asked each contributor to ponder what his or her theological figure considered a ''disabling'' condition, in order to create a broad portrait of disability (10).

The editors have asked contributors three questions pertinent to theologies of disability. First, they ask for whom Christians ought to care, and how care should be exercised. Second, they ask their colleagues how each author represents disability or sickness in these texts. Third, they ask who Christians ought to be in order to love people on society's margins (12). Every theologian in the book explores these inquiries; in particular, Bernd Wannenwetsch explores how Dietrich Bonhoeffer's ethical work answers Brock and Swinton's questions fully and subtly.

Wannenwetsch writes that Bonhoeffer's ethical writings and letters concerning disability resisted Nazi ideologies and activities as much as did his pastoral and academic activities (353). First, Wannenwetsch observes Bonhoeffer's consistent argument that personhood is based on ''kinship'' (362): because they are human precisely in their fragility (361), people with disabilities are those for whom believers ought to care (374). Second, Wannenwetsch explores Bonhoeffer's paradigm of sickness and health: he argues that Bonhoeffer's 1933 visit to Bethel, a town open to all people with disabilities, convinced Bonhoeffer that people who are ill demonstrate human interdependence, vulnerability, and trust more overtly than those deemed ''healthy'' and that healthy and sick people are, thus, interdependent (354–355, 370–371; Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12:158–159). Third, Wannenwetsch examines Bonhoeffer's ecclesiology: he affirms Bonhoeffer's contention that Christians are to be empathetic people (365–367, 389–390; see dbw 6:293). Bonhoeffer states emphatically that the Christian life springs unabashedly from God's joy, peace, and redemption (388; dbw 6:252–53); his pragmatic paradigm of human vulnerability shows how God works through all human beings.

Brock and Swinton's reader in theology and disability is a significant resource for theologians, ministers, and laypeople alike who want to make their communities more inclusive. Having read the volume closely, I wondered where the voices of theologians of colour were in this text: since many people of colour also experience disability, liberative theologies by (for example) Black theologians and theologians of disability could easily inform each other...