Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader

Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader. Edited by Brian Brock and John Swinton. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing. 576 pp. $45.00 (paper).In the growing body of literature on and religion, this multiauthored volume carves out a unique niche as a resource for students and scholars of Christian theology trying to answer the question, What does Christianity say about and human personhood? Instead of trying to construct a new theology of per se, its chapters take readers inside the Christian tradition, viewed across a long historical sweep (literally, from Augustine in chapter 1 to Hauerwas in the final chapter), to discover what resources the tradition might offer for thinking theologically about disability. Chapters follow a standard format, each beginning with an interpretive essay exploring a particular thinker's perspectives in terms of its problems and contributions regarding disability, and concluding with selected primary source material. This feature alone extends the book's pedagogical value, allowing readers to hone in on the relevant sections of Aquinas's Summa or Barth's Church Dogmatics, for example, without having to comb through volumes of other material to locate clues to these theologians' thoughts on disability. Because the notion of common in twenty-first-centuiy discourse would have been unknown to pre-modem theologians, one cannot simply search the theological canon for places where the topic disability appears directly. Instead, the volumes writers seek out clues for a disability-focus by exploring how key figures shaping the tradition have thought about what it means to be human, including how Christians account for and respond to human suffering, what constitutes human wholeness, and how persons with mental and physical disabilities might help us to better understand such matters. Various chapters offer windows into particular theologians' thought-worlds through historical, cognate terminologies that depict disabling conditions, such as corporeal infirmity (Aquinas), sickness unto death (Kierkegaard), or corrupted bodies (Gregory of Nazianzus).The essays are shaped by a generous hermeneutic, as again and again the various authors urge readers to encounter these thinkers and their language within the particularity of their own historical time periods, without dismissing them based on contemporary sensibilities about language. Sometimes, however, the tradition's most towering theological voices display marked antipathy toward persons with mental and physical disabilities. In the essay by Martin Wendte on Hegel we read, for instance, that a selection from The Subjective Spirit contains Hegel's most important statement on mentally disabled people, whom, following the terminology of his time, he calls 'idiots' or 'cretins' (p. …