Disability, Society and Theology: Voices from Africa

Chapter Two: Claiming and Developing a Disability Hermeneutics: Towards a Liberating Theology of Disability

Claiming and Developing a Disability Hermeneutics CHAPTER TWO Claiming and Developing a Disability Hermeneutics:Towards a Liberating TheologyofDisability Arne Fritzson What is Hermeneutics? H ermeneutics in Swedish is a difficult word with different meanings in different contexts. It can mean a certain way of doing research – when applied to the fields of society and human behaviour. It can also simply mean – the understanding of interpretation theories. In this Chapter, we shall define hermeneutics in a more qualified way as a certain type of philosophy. This philosophy draws on the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger among others. In this kind of philosophy, interpretation is the key concept. Interpretation, according to this philosophy is the only means we should use to understand our world. It further states that, we cannot understand things and concepts as they are in themselves, without interpreting them. Also, our understanding is part of our own personalities. It is influenced by our own personal experiences. How we understand certain concepts is a combination of what we know from experience and our individual perceptions. That means that each interpreter has his or her own unique understanding of the meaning of what he or she is interpreting. There Disability, Society, and Theology is no one accepted understanding of the concept from which all the other interpretations are derived. Instead, there are several meanings and interpretations. That does not mean that this kind of philosophy is totally relative, and regards any interpretation as good as the other. There kind of deliberations, it is not a question of right or wrong. Some people believe that our interpretations are always not equal to the reality we try to depict. In a way, every interpretation is wrong because every individual interpreter is partial. From a theological perspective we can say that it is only God who understands reality as it actually is. We imperfect human beings can only interpret reality from our own narrow perspectives. This means that plurality is a central concept in this philosophy. Since there is no correct interpretation, there is need to respect other interpreters and their interpretations. However, we should not discourage conflict on interpretation but welcome them as healthy and constructive. Furthermore, the tensions brought about by conflicting interpretations will open up new possibilities of reaching a deeper meaning and understanding. This kind of philosophy is in particular interesting to theologians who are looking for a Christian theology about disability. Disability is a peculiar concept. It encompasses dissimilar conditions for people who are also diverse. For example, it is quite different not to be able to see, hear or walk. A person who cannot see needs quite different adjustments in his or her environment compared to a person who is not able to walk or hear. Despite this unlikeness, we call all of them “persons with disabilities”, which implies that they have something in common. Is that not quite a weird idea? In my opinion, the concept of disability as viewed by society is basically a political idea. We can trace its roots to the poor laws that were adopted in European countries in the 17th Century. These laws specified who was to be described as poor. In this case, the laws referred to those who could not afford basic needs. The main source of limitations of the ‘poor’rested in their ‘bodily constitution’. 26 Claiming and Developing a Disability Hermeneutics These laws and the political decision created the first category or entity of people ‘united’ yet they had so unlike conditions. This is the category we now know as people with disabilities. This clearly shows that there is no exact representation for understanding the concept of ‘disabilities’. Every perception is basically a description of a category of people that in its roots is profoundly ambiguous as discussed above. To a great extent, those who attempt to interpret disability only make a distinction between those who are seen as ‘persons with disabilities’ and those who are ‘able bodied’. We can as well refer to them as temporarily able bodied (TABs), since some acquire disability after birth but also since everyone potentially can acquire disability at some point in life. This kind of distinction raises new problems. First, there is not one interpretation that is right everywhere and all the time. Every interpretation has the potential to be offensive in certain contexts. This makes a hermeneutic approach particularly valuable when it comes to the issue of...