The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God by Amos Yong (review)

Amos Yong’s text on biblical interpretation and disability focuses on three themes: people with disabilities are still imago dei, made in the image of God; people are more than their disabilities, they are people with disabilities not disabled people; disabilities sometimes constitute people’s identities such as Down’s syndrome and therefore such disabilities are not necessarily evils or blemishes to be cured.¹

Yong interprets Pauline theology by treating the gifts of the spirit as equally distributed by God’s grace. Therefore anyone and everyone may receive charismata, including people with disabilities (1 Cor 12:22). Yong differentiates between a theology of the weak that perpetuates stereotypes of disability by casting people with disabilities as continual recipients of community care, and a theology that redefines the “weak” as “those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour” (1 Cor 12:22). Yong notes that this is congruent with earlier discussions that state that there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus (1 Cor 12:11–13). People with disabilities are therefore included with others who are outcast, such as the poor and the powerless.

Yong tries to avoid perpetuating myths of disability that infantilize or valorize people with disabilities, while accrediting them with an equal place at the table of the Lord. If a normate view sees the power elites as the most important, he reminds us that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Cor 3:19). Yong notes that people with disabilities, especially those with intellectual disabilities, are counted by Paul in the category of “the low and despised of the world, things that are not” (1 Cor 1:28). He matches this with the idea that Christ crucified is the ultimate foolishness of God, since the crucified person was at the bottom of social scales, indicative of a person made utterly helpless. Yong states that this is congruent with our incapacity to become righteous, sanctified, and redeemed without God’s infinite grace.²

Yong’s interpretation may be correct, yet I find it uncomfortable to classify those with disabilities as most helpless. The most helpless might be the Pharisee who cannot see his own imperfections. Being a person with a disability does not automatically make me a helpless object, nor does it confer any saving grace. Yong does note that we must work with people with disabilities, so that they are part of ministry rather than passive recipients. He casts people with cognitive impairments as capable partners through inclusive approaches to ministry, just as society has begun to include these people into an integrated education system.

Yong contends that those who are profoundly disabled also contain ministry in their embodiment, and he describes the process of caregiving as a ritual of caring rather than as a state of degradation for the recipient. Mary McClintock Fulkerson notes that encountering the “twisted bodies” of people with profound disabilities can cause a visceral response—a response Nancy Eiseland calls a “ritual of degradation.”³ Yong notes strongly that we should be incorporating all people with disabilities into our ecclesial space, as co-creators, as ministers, as central to the body of the Church. Yet somehow Yong’s explanation is not satisfactory, for it still makes some people with disabilities carry the label of helplessness, and their ministry becomes solely one of being cared for by others.

Finally Yong looks at eschatology, the time after time in which there will be no sorrow. He notes that a narrow definition may cause us to postulate that all disability will disappear. We will be resurrected “whole” without blemish, disease, or disability. Such a definition reifies wholeness and predicts the erasure of disabilities in the next life. However, such a reading tends...