PAUL’S BLIND FAITH: DISABLING SIGHTEDNESS IN ACTS 9
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What does “blind faith” mean to you? I’ve heard it used as both compliment and insult, a commendation and a criticism. Some folks find blind faith admirable – a posture of total trust in something beyond understanding, or in the experiences of others. Others think blind faith is contemptible — ignorant, uncritical adherence to something that doesn’t make any sense, the rejection of rationality and evidence. Jesus seems to invoke blind faith when he appears to Thomas after his resurrection: “Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe” (John 20:29 NRSV). But I wonder…what does blind faith mean to someone who actually has a visual impairment?
John M. Hull, a professor of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham, became blind in the middle of his life. Throughout the rest of his professional, personal, and spiritual life, he wrestled with the theological implications of his disability. His book In the Beginning, There Was Darkness: A Blind Person’s Conversation with the Bible struggles to find good news for visually impaired people. Hull determined that the Bible is a sighted text — that is, it privileges the perspective of sighted people and views blind people negatively. The words we use to study the Bible betray this sightedness: we speak of worldviews, lenses, perspectives, outlooks. This sense even sinks down to the very language of the Greek New Testament: the verb “to know” is derived from the verb “to see”. “I know” in Greek literally means “I have seen (and therefore I know).” Sight and knowledge are often intertwined, not only within scripture but within our conversations around it.
Louise J. Lawrence pushes the issue further. (1) The uncritical acceptance of biblical sightedness by generations of interpreters has reduced the blind characters in the Bible to props to make theological claims. To be blind, or to have any disability, is to be disenfranchised. The sighted text seems unable to see disabled folks as people, rendering them invisible. When people with disabilities go unseen, or see themselves only as crude props in sighted stories, they will struggle to find a home within our communities. This crisis of biblical interpretation is a crisis for the whole Church: if our sighted readings of scripture fail to empathize with people of different abilities, then the Body of Christ is the one left disabled. Lawrence advocates for subversive readings of scripture that recognize blindness not as weakness, but as strength. If we can uncover sighted biases in our reading of scripture, we might ultimately see a fuller picture of Christian community that affirms the dignity of all people.
Inspired by Lawrence’s scholarship, I’ve wondered about a subversive reading of “blind faith” as “the faith of folks who are visually impaired.” The character of blind faith is less about trust beyond understanding, and more about the different perspectives of a marginalized community who see the world differently. This kind of blind faith challenges some of my assumptions about the nature of Christian belief, cutting through sighted preconceptions to offer a different strain of spiritual wisdom. Reading scripture with this interpretation has caused me to approach the conversion of St. Paul from a different direction. In this story, questions of sight and faith are intimately intertwined — and we see God's grace render weakness as strength to create a more inclusive community of faith.
Paul’s conversion story is told three times in Acts: narrated first in chapter 9, and later recounted in chapters 22 and 26. Early in the book of Acts, Paul is a villain. He does not see Jesus as Lord, and strives to persecute the fledgling church. While on the road to Damascus to confront the Christians there, Paul is overcome by a flash of heavenly light. He hears the voice of the Lord crying out to him – “Saul, why do you persecute me?” Paul is blinded by this encounter with Jesus, and he is led by hand to Damascus where Christ instructs him to wait. Paul prays and fasts for three days. On the third day, Jesus appears to Ananias — one of the disciples Paul was coming to persecute — and sends him to greet Paul. Ananias, while initially fearful, finds the blinded Paul and greets him as a brother. Ananias lays his hands on Paul, and the apostle’s sight is restored as something like scales fall from his eyes. Paul is immediately baptized, and the church’s great enemy becomes her great advocate.
Paul’s sight and blindness play a crucial part in this conversion story, reflecting the character of his faith. Acts invokes the ancient discipline of physiognomy: the notion that a person’s inner qualities can be revealed by their physical characteristics. (2) Paul’s physical blindness signifies something about his internal character, and ancient audiences would have been familiar with this connection. We see this theme explored in other ancient literature: Oedipus in Sophocles, Polyphemus in Homer, Isaac in the Book of Genesis, Samson in the Book of Judges, or the healing stories surrounding Jesus. In the world of Acts, physical blindness supposedly reflected a deeper spiritual status. This relationship between external and internal qualities was dialectic: a change in one could mark a change in the other. As Paul’s physical character moves from sightedness to blindness and back to sightedness, the character of his faith is moving as well.
There are different ways for audiences to interpret the effect of blindness in the story. Paul’s blindness could have been punishment for his persecution of the church, or a way to make Paul weak so that he no longer posed a threat. Blindness could illustrate Paul’s foolishness, an outward and physical sign of his inward and spiritual ignorance. But perhaps this blindness is not about punishment, weakness, or ignorance… perhaps this blindness is about wisdom. By losing his sight, Paul gains spiritual perception — he is able to see Jesus clearly. The motif of blindness-as-wisdom is not a postmodern anachronism forced on scripture, but is found throughout ancient literature: the blind seer Tiresias in Oedipus Rex sees the folly of the protagonist, the blind prophet Ahijah in 1 Kings 14 perceives the true nature of Jeroboam’s deceptions, and the blind beggar Bartimaeus in Mark 10 discerns the kingly power of Jesus. The blind faith of Paul illustrates how different abilities offer different ways of understanding God.
By disabling Paul’s sightedness, Christ turns him away from the mere appearance of truth to experience the deeper possibilities of God’s activity in the world. Paul’s encounter with Jesus destabilizes his perspective, both physically and spiritually. Paul is portrayed as capable and self-sufficient in Acts until this moment, when he is forced to rely on the help of others: to be led to Damascus, to be housed there, and finally to meet Ananias. I imagine Paul’s sense of his individual strength is challenged by this experience of communal strength, as learns to be interdependent rather than independent. In his heart, Paul has also lost sight of his reliable certainties — the ways he thought the world worked. He learns that God is able to do more than we can ask or imagine, and this realization allows Paul to embrace the radical vision of the gospel. Such lessons are not for Paul alone: each of us benefits from encountering Christ through a new perspective, challenging our blind spots and empathizing with people who are different from us. Paul’s blindness, and the disabilities of our neighbors, do not have to be read as divine punishment or spiritual ignorance. Differences of ability can be strengths.
It’s unsurprising that this sensibility pervades the apostle’s theology. In his letters to the Corinthians, Paul declares that what seems foolish to the world is wisdom to God (1 Corinthians 3:19), that the body of Christ is made up of different members with different abilities (1 Corinthians 12), that God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul’s writings make space for people of different abilities. They are not diseases to be cured or curses to be lifted; they are not insufficient or burdens on their communities. The church of God has room for all people and all kinds of people – in fact, the church has need of them, as their presence makes the whole body of Christ stronger. This is reflected in Paul’s own conversion: despite his past violence and present blindness, he is welcomed and received as a brother by Ananias. Paul’s blind faith allows him to encounter the radical nature of the church as a place that welcomes the hostile, the marginalized, the differently-abled, and the disruptive. The church in Acts is radically inclusive, hospitable, and accessible.
What does this mean for our own churches? In my tradition, the Book of Common Prayer also privileges sightedness in worship (not to mention the prayers which use blindness as a metaphor for sin). But beyond our books, bulletins, and screens, the liturgy creates space for deeper sensory experiences. The smell of incense, the taste of bread, the sound of the organ, the touch of water in the font – how do these experiences help sighted people encounter God differently? And how can our worship be accommodating to those with different abilities, so that their gifts and perspectives of the divine can find a home in our common prayer? Perhaps the first step is recognizing that sight and knowledge are not always intertwined: there are other modes of understanding that don’t depend on vision, and we cannot always trust everything that we see.
John Hull offers his own reflection on Paul’s blindness, noting that Paul is not the only one who is changed. When confronted with an impaired individual, the church community changes to accommodate him. Ananias goes to Paul, and calls Paul brother, and lays his hands upon him. This story about sight is also a story about touch: about embracing one another, finding strength and wisdom in coming together. Ananias is never blinded, but his own faith is changed by his encounter with the disabled Paul. The faith of the whole church is changed by Paul’s newfound perspective, in his ministry and writings to the earliest churches. Our churches today are not in the business of changing people of differing abilities: it is our mission to be changed by them, to learn from their unique perspectives, and to more fully encounter the grace of God.
Blind faith — the faith of those who perceive the world differently — has so much to offer our worshipping communities. It sees the inhospitality of the world and the radical inclusion of God’s family; it recognizes that Jesus’ ministry is not just about healing bodies, but reconstituting entire systems of dehumanizing cruelty. Blind faith invites us beyond the limits of our sight and our knowledge, to meet Christ anew in the embrace of our neighbors.
In her book, Sense and Stigma in the Gospels: Depictions of Sensory-Disabled Characters
Physiognomy is not just a relic of the ancient world – it undergirded the 20th-century eugenics movement, and even influences racial profiling in contemporary police practices. When this pseudoscience is taken seriously by real-world systems, it often has disastrous consequences for marginalized individuals and communities.
