The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God

By Amos Yong

Inspiring and challenging study that rethinks the Bible’s teaching on disability

A theologian whose life experience includes growing up alongside a brother with Down syndrome, Amos Yong in this book rereads and reinterprets biblical texts about human disability, arguing that the way we read biblical texts, not the Bible itself, is what causes us to marginalize persons with disabilities. Revealing and examining the underlying stigma of disability that exists even in the church, Yong shows how the Bible offers good news to people of all abilities — and he challenges churches to become more inclusive communities of faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467434676

Amos Yong

Amos Yong (PhD, Boston University) is professor of theology and mission and director of the Center for Missiological Research at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He is the author or editor of over two dozen books, including Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace, Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture (coedited with Estrelda Alexander), Science and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences (coedited with James K. A. Smith) and The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology. Yong is a member of the the American Academy of Religion, the Christian Theological Research Fellowship, and the Society for Pentecostal Studies. He is also a licensed minister with the General Council of the Assemblies of God.

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Preface

The origins of this book derive from the invitation to be the sixth lecturer at Northwest University’s Pentecostal Lectureship series in Kirkland, Washington, in February 2010. My thanks to Blaine Charette for initiating the invitation, for asking specifically that I address this important topic, and for organizing and hosting my visit. I am grateful also to Joseph Castleberry, Jack Wisemore, Bob Stallman, Jim Huegel, Weldyn Houger, and Brad Embry for their friendship and hospitality. Many others at Northwest University, including alumnus Rick Benjamin, provided feedback on the first draft of this text. Northwest students asked great questions during the lectures and during the classroom presentations as well.

I also presented a version of Chapter 4 as The Church of the Weak and the Foolish: St. Paul as the First Theologian of (Intellectual) Disability!? at California Baptist University in Riverside, California, on 25 March 2010. My thanks to Jeff McNair for organizing this and for being such a wonderful host on this occasion, and to Jeff Mooney and CBU’s students in the M.A. in Disability Studies program for their excellent questions and comments at this lecture.

This is my first sustained venture into the field of biblical theology. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Kerry Wynn for the time he took, on short notice, to read carefully a draft of the manuscript and to send many single-spaced pages of honest and critical comments. Kerry opened my eyes to how deeply I myself was mired in a normate (able-bodied) worldview, an irony indeed, considering that I am trying in this book to expose how such pre-understandings are at work in our reading of the Bible. I am grateful also to Sarah Melcher and Marty Mittelstadt for the feedback they provided on an earlier draft of this book. Further, thanks to my graduate assistant, Timothy Lim Teck Ngern, for his help in securing needed materials, his comments on the first draft, and his assistance with the indexes. None of these people should be held responsible for the text that follows; and, given my fallibility and the fact that I’m trying to cover a good deal of biblical ground in this book, it is with fear and trembling that I submit it to the academy and especially the church for consideration.

My thanks to Brill Publishers for giving me permission to revise and use two of my earlier published essays in Chapters 3 and 4 here: Many Tongues, Many Senses: Pentecost, the Body Politic, and the Redemption of Dis/Ability (PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 31, no. 2 [2009]: 167-88), and Disability and the Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecost and the Renewal of the Church (Journal of Pentecostal Theology 19, no. 1 [2010]: 76-93).

Michael Palmer, my dean at Regent University School of Divinity, has been extremely gracious in supporting my scholarship in every conceivable way. Alma Yong, my sweetheart and wife for more than twenty-five years now, continues to provide the safe haven at home where I do most of my writing. I thank God for the blessings at home and at work that have allowed this book to be written.

I am excited that this book has found a home with Jon Pott and his team at Eerdmans. Michael Thomson was the first to wonder out loud if I had anything else Eerdmans might be interested in, and from there, things happened very quickly. It was also enjoyable to work with Mary Hietbrink. Her careful copyediting work resulted in a more accessible text. I am very grateful for my friends at Eerdmans.

Finally, I dedicate this book to three of my teachers at Western Evangelical Seminary (now George Fox Evangelical Seminary) who served as members on the committee assessing my master’s thesis, which I defended in 1992. W. Stanley Johnson was my thesis advisor and taught the class on contemporary theology that I took at the end of my first year in seminary (spring 1990), during which I experienced my intellectual and theological auklarung. In a very real sense, my calling as a theologian was initiated during this experience, as I read James C. Livingstone’s Modern Christian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Vatican II, and was gripped by Stan’s lectures on Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and others. Irv Brendlinger taught classes on Wesley, agreed to oversee my independent research on him, and was disappointed that I didn’t find Wesley as intriguing and relevant as he did. Yet, Irv, you should know that Wesley has emerged as an important dialogue partner in my Pentecostal scholarship over the years, and did play a key role in my constructive Pentecostal theology of science and of nature in an earlier book (The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology, published by Baker Academic in 2005). Susie C. Stanley (now at Messiah College) taught me Christian history, introduced me to the Society for Pentecostal Studies (when she found out I was a Pentecostal asking theological questions), and urged me to begin publishing by writing book reviews. Susie, as you well know, I haven’t stopped reviewing books or writing since! Each of these teachers has modeled the possibility of a Wesleyan form of evangelical scholarship that continues to inform my theological identity. Thanks, Stan, Irv, and Susie, for sharing your lives with me. It is in part because of your influences that I consider my work also to be an expression of Wesleyan theology in the broader evangelical tradition.

1 Introduction

Disability and the People of God — Whole or Fragmented?

This is a book about disability; it is also a book about the church, and what it means to be the church in light of the experience of disability. But I don’t claim to have the once-and-for-all final say or absolute truth about these matters; rather, I submit these ideas as arising out of my own experience growing up with a brother with Down syndrome.

Growing Up with a Brother with Down Syndrome

I was almost ten years old when my brother Mark was born. He spent the first three weeks of his life on a life-support system because he could neither breathe nor suckle on his own. I dimly recall peering at his frail, tiny body from the corridor outside the hospital room in which his incubator was kept. I only knew something was terribly wrong — partly because my mother cried a lot and even my father was worried (which wasn’t typical for him) — so I prayed earnestly that my brother would pull through.

Many others prayed as well. At the time, my parents were the senior pastors of a thriving congregation in Petaling Jaya (a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of West Malaysia), and our home was continuously open to the parishioners. These few weeks were unusually busy as congregants came and went, crying with my mother and praying with us. Why wasn’t Mark responding to the treatment? These three weeks seemed like an eternity — at least that was how it must have felt to my parents.

But God did answer our prayers. Mark did come home eventually, although his life seemed to us to hang in the balance. Our daily routines revolved around his feeding sessions, each of which would take literally hours per sitting. I remember one of those sessions quite vividly. I saw my mother cuddling Mark’s practically lifeless body and literally crying out to God from the depths of her heart. I certainly felt her anguish, and what seemed like his pain, although I’m not sure I knew enough to be certain that Mark was suffering. Regardless of what Mark did or didn’t feel, I know we were struggling to reconcile our faith in the goodness of God with the fact that each of Mark’s breaths was a sign of the precariousness and fragility of his life.

In hindsight, I believe that part of the struggle my parents endured had to do with the culture of shame that shaped the lives of those in the Chinese diaspora: the birth of children with disabilities inevitably raised questions about what, if anything, the parents had done to have deserved anything less than a healthy child. This feeling of shame was exacerbated by the pentecostal convictions that my parents proclaimed about how faith and trust in God would inevitably bring about God’s blessings and abundant life. How would our message be received now, with the presence of Mark in our family? Yet God brought us through that first year, no doubt carried by the many prayers of family and friends, and by their love and concern not only for us but also for Mark. Our church members showed us the possibility of retaining trust in God even in the midst of challenging circumstances.

Eighteen months after Mark was born, our family moved to the United States in response to a pastoral call to minister to Chinese-speaking immigrants in northern California. We settled in the valley city of Stockton, about thirty miles south of the capital city of Sacramento and about a hundred miles almost directly east of San Francisco. It was here that Mark was formally diagnosed with Down syndrome.

Named after a physician — John Langdon Down (1826-1896) — the syndrome can be described phenotypically, cognitively, or genetically. Down himself focused on the phenotype (the observable physical characteristics): a flat forehead and nasal bridge, a smaller skull or head, slanted eyes (which led to the label of Mongolism for a period), malformed ears, hyperextended joints, a gap between the first and second toes, underdeveloped genitals in males, halting motor skills, slurred speech, and so on. Cognitively, the syndrome brought with it what today are called learning disabilities in some circles, developmental delays in others. In previous generations, such cognitive impairments were quantified by the Binet-Simon and the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests: those with the syndrome were not of normal or average intelligence, but were variously classified as dull, feebleminded, morons, imbeciles, idiots, and the like. Later research on the human genome confirmed that the Down phenotype followed a trisomic mutation (rather than dyadic pairing) of the twenty-first chromosome. Mark has all of these normal features for a person with trisomy 21.

So now we had a medical condition we could associate with Mark. But that didn’t help us deal with the various physical challenges which ongoing diagnoses revealed he confronted: the aftereffects of the high fever, leukemia, and pneumonia he suffered at birth; impaired vision and hearing; flat-footedness; and, most seriously, a double murmur in his heart. When Mark was six, a heart cauterization was performed, which has allowed him another almost thirty years (at the time of this writing) of a fairly healthy life. Along the way, however, Mark has resisted wearing his prescription eyeglasses and hearing aids. He seems to get along fine without them.

I spent my teenage years caring for Mark, especially on Sundays, when my parents had a full schedule of church services and activities. Mark couldn’t sit up until he was four or five, and didn’t begin to crawl — not to mention walk — until he was almost seven or eight. As a result, he required intensive care almost around the clock. I can recall staying home with Mark when my parents would leave for church with our middle brother. I would feed him, change his diapers, entertain him, watch the Sunday-morning version of cartoons with him, and so on. I have to confess that I didn’t mind getting a formal get out of church free card during those days, as our pentecostal services could sometimes last quite long if the Spirit was really present!

I went off to college just about the time that Mark was scooting around on his hands and knees (he began walking shortly after that). Since then (over twenty-five years ago), I haven’t seen Mark on a regular basis. Marriage and then vocational assignments in different states have taken me away from home. Yes, we visit my parents occasionally, and they also bring Mark to visit with us periodically. But my not being around Mark on a regular basis has resulted in my not being able to comprehend his speech or recognize his mannerisms as well as I could before.

Over the years, Mark has lived a relatively healthy life. He was placed in the state of California’s Crippled Children’s Services (now California Children Services) program almost immediately after we arrived in the United States, and thus he was afforded an education that would not have been available to him or us if we had remained in Malaysia. As he got older, he gradually was enrolled in school, and learned to read and write. While we remain unsure about how much he actually understands, we also know that Mark has faithfully read his Bible many times over — that is by far his favorite book! Along the way, Mark learned how to take the bus to and from school, made school friends (even with his teachers), and also brought home with him new social habits (just like any child who goes off to school!). At one point in his life, Mark was an avid bowler who looked forward to every other Thursday morning, when he and his schoolmates would be taken to the bowling alley. Outside of church, that was the pastime he anticipated the most.

It was in church, however, that Mark thrived. I never saw evidence of this when Mark was growing up. (Remember, we stayed home on Sunday mornings!) But over these last twenty-plus years, Mark has become one of the key members of the small but vibrant church my parents pastor. Everyone knows Mark, who is the unassigned greeter for every service. He’s also the unappointed worship leader, expressively lifting up his hands, slowly shifting his feet, singing with gusto (even if out of tune), sometimes praying out loud (even to the point of speaking in tongues) — in short, leading not from the platform but by example from the main floor. During prayer times, especially during the tarrying portions of the service at the altar, Mark will go up uninvited to gently lay lands on those who are kneeling and pray especially for those he knows, very specifically asking for God’s blessings, but also verbalizing Trinitarian prayers addressed to Father, Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit in different respects. Mark is especially sensitive to those who are sick, firmly believing in a healing God (so we know that he has received, understood, and embraced at least this dimension of my parents’ ministry), and always faithfully praying for deliverance from the devil as the cause of illness and claiming healing in the name of Jesus.

At home, Mark spends much of his time reading the Bible, hand-copying extensive scriptural passages, and listening to worship music. He still lives at home with Mom and Dad, and for one reason or another, has never been employed, with or without accommodations. He is relatively independent around the house, but Mom continues to assist him, especially in the area of bodily care. In many respects, Mark has been a model of Down syndrome: loving and gracious as a child; sensitive and tender in most interpersonal interactions; but also stubborn and ornery at times, especially as he has grown into adulthood and midlife.

For my parents, Mark has become nothing less than God’s unique gift to them and to the world. They have come a long way from the earliest days of wrestling deeply with the meaning of his life. My mother, especially, has come to see in Mark God’s miraculous provision. If you were to visit her home, she would share her testimony of life with Mark as one miracle after another: of the many physical healings in his body; of Mark’s being rescued from being shut away in the back of the house (still the plight of many people with Down syndrome in the global South) to being at the forefront of ministry in their church; of the many lives — nurses, doctors, teachers, counselors, and so on — that have been touched by the story of Mark and of our family. Yes, along the way, the many trials and even sufferings associated with raising a son with multiple intellectual and physical disabilities will be recounted by my mother; but so will the faithfulness of God amid these struggles. There can be no denying the unique person that Mark is, both in the challenges that he and we have had to overcome with God’s help, and in the opportunities his life has presented, for us and for the church as well.

Making Theological Sense of a World with Disability

This book is the second one that I’ve written on theology and disability. In the previous volume, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity,¹ I reflected extensively on my growing up with Mark and on his life as it has unfolded. But as one trained in systematic theology, when it came time to write the book, I approached it as a systematician. Hence the book is basically an exploration at the interface of theology and disability that addresses questions from across the theological loci like the doctrines of creation and providence, of the person and work of Christ (Christology and atonement), of humanity (theological anthropology), of the church (ecclesiology), of salvation (soteriology), and of the last things (eschatology). My approach was primarily theological, although deeply informed by interdisciplinary methodologies, particularly from across the medical, social, and human sciences. In this book I attempted to show how our negative theological understandings of disability have developed over the centuries, and I suggested how to revise such views with the goal of creating a more hospitable and inclusive world for people with disabilities.

The goals of this second volume are largely that of the first. Mark’s life lies behind — and in a real sense within — these pages as well, and here I also continue to think through the meaning of disability, as I did in the first book. However, this book differs from and extends the first one in at least three ways. First, Theology and Down Syndrome was written primarily for the theological academy. I had come to see that theological discourse had marginalized disability and sought to register the importance of disability perspectives in the theological task. So while the theologically initiated should consult Theology and Down Syndrome, this present book is directed also toward interested laypeople. Theologians aren’t the only ones who need to be alerted to how traditional notions of disability unintentionally exclude people with disabilities from our communities and even our churches. I’m hoping that Bible study groups, adult religious education classes, and other interested people will find in this book an accessible discussion of the issues that are pertinent to all people, with and without disabilities. I hope this doesn’t mean that theologians will be uninterested in what follows. The fact is that all of us need to be more informed about how our beliefs about and practices regarding disability remain discriminatory in many ways, but need not be that way.

Second, Theology and Down Syndrome was more strictly a