NO PITIABLE CHILDREN, NO ADMIRABLE PEOPLE: DISABILITY AND THE IMAGE OF GOD

January 3, 2022 Brian Brock

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Brian Brock’s recent publication, Disability: Living into the Diversity of Christ’s Body.

Most Christians assume that the image of God is the perfect theological idea with which to affirm the value and intrinsic worth of every human being.

And this is indeed what the first chapter of the Bible seems to say, when God says on the sixth day of creation, “Let us make [humankind] in our image,” (Gen. 1:26)

But what exactly is the image that appears here to be granted to every human being? This is where Christians trying to explain disability have often gotten into trouble.

There are three main ways that the image of God has been defined over the centuries of Christianity. The first has been called the substantive view. In this view human beings have many capacities, but God has distinguished human beings from all other sorts of creatures by giving them capacities that no other creatures have. Theologians have argued over what that capacity is. Some have argued that rationality is the capacity that distinguishes humans from all other creatures, others the human sense for morality, the capacity for religious sense or worship, and even the upright physical posture. The capacity to reason has been the most regular nominee for the trait that most obviously signals the presence of the divine image in human beings.

In recent decades the substantive view has been challenged “from below,” in that scientific observation has allowed us to learn that one or another animal has almost every human trait you can think of. More problematically, if we are committed to a definition of the image of God as localized in those capacities of humans that other animals do not have, then only the highest performing humans can be said to have it. The substantive view of the image of God seems to commit Christian theology to a best-case scenario in which only the best and the brightest human beings can be said to exhibit the image of God clearly.

In other words, this view creates all sorts of problems when trying to think clearly about disability. Whichever specific trait or capacity that marks human beings as having the image of God will leave out someone with some disability. This account seems to demand that we say that they are not worthy of the same respect and value as others.

The functionalist view of the image of God keys off another feature in Genesis 1: the fact that God gives human beings a task. The language of the image of God is not assumed to be an intrinsic possession of every human being but points to a royal calling. To image God is something that must be undertaken through “ruling over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (1:26). This definition of the image of God, however, comes perilously close to disenfranchising those who are not-able-to-do.

A third view tries to take the problems of the substantive and functional views into account by focusing on a different aspect of the passage, specifically Genesis 1:27. Those holding a relational view of the image of God highlight the phrase where God deliberates about making the human species in God’s “image.” After this phrase comes “male and female he created them.” In this view human beings are made for relationship, with each other and with God. It is through life-giving relationships across difference that human beings image Christ to one another.

This view affirms all human creatures as special in having been the only creatures given the task of imaging God in the world, to live in Christlike ways toward one another. This relational view is an attempt to acknowledge the reality that the New Testament never assumes that human beings securely possess the image of God. Instead, human beings are called to conform to Christ’s image, as Paul explains. “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” (2 Cor. 4:) Humans are valuable not because they have God’s image but because God made them in order that they should display Christ’s love in the world.

The human being is defined not by their attributes, their dispositions, or their capabilities but by the image that God has promised to bestow on them in Christ. Disability experiences have helped contemporary theologians do justice to the richness of the biblical tradition in affirming that bodily difference and uniqueness are part of each person’s vocation. The idea of the image of God is therefore a reminder that God loves difference and calls every human being to be conformed to Christ.

If Christians today want to get the image of God and disability right, they must banish the question, “Does this person have the capacity to image God?” People with all sorts of disabilities, including learning difficulties, may powerfully image Christ. The New Testament’s call to “put on” Christ (Gal. 3:27 KJV) aims at the restoration of the image of God in us. “Image of God” language is not a statement of a given but a call to responsibility, a call into a loving quality of relationship. Christians today get the image of God and disability right when they ask, “Does the way I look at people bring the gaze of Christ into the world? Does the way I speak to people let Christ’s voice be heard? Does the way I touch people build them up?

As a young Chinese Christian, Xin Wei felt herself being called to support an orphanage housing several disabled children in Hebei province. She soon had a growing sense that the Lord was asking her to do more. In August 2009, Xin Wei and her husband, Steve, used their savings and the funds of friends from all walks of life to start a home exclusively for children with disabilities outside the town of Da Dian in Shandong province. They called it Home of Mephibosheth.

As Xin Wei explains in the award-winning movie of the same name, children with complex needs are often abandoned in China. If they happen to be rescued, they are often cared for in the most squalid and insufficient group homes imaginable. In China, providing top-quality care to disabled children is by no means common sense. Some children are just too hard, too much of a burden.

In setting up the Home of Mephibosheth, Xin Wei and Steve were thus witness to a noticeably distinct way of life. At the root of this way of life is an understanding of the image of God very like the one I have just set out. In Xin Wei’s words,

Many people come here and look around. They often say, “How pitiable the children are!” “How admirable you are!” I say, “Here, there are no pitiable children, and there are no admirable people. There is only One who is admirable, and He is God. We are merely people covered by his grace, because our love, patience and hope are from Him.” When we look at these children through the eyes of Jesus, we discover that we need them far more than they need us. On the surface it looks as if we are serving the children. In reality we are serving Jesus Himself. Jesus is hidden within the lives of these children, and He is watching us.

The Gospel of John provides a similarly concrete picture of the ways of Jesus in this world. John offers imagery that guides Christians into the essential heart of the life that displays—images—Christ in this world. Jesus’s ministry is coming to its climactic moment. He must now undergo his passion on the cross. His time teaching his disciples in the flesh is at an end. In his last moment with them, he does something they will remember, something that encapsulates who he is. He shows them what he wants from them as he returns to the Father.

In this act we see all the threads pulled together that I have emphasized in my reading of disability in the Bible. Here we see Jesus himself showing the form of human relationships that make his image present in the world. Jesus washes his disciples’ feet: “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him” (John 13:3–5).

Jesus’s mundane act of washing feet is once again a nonverbal act. His love and commitment to the disciples is done, not said. We recall his taking others by the hand as he heals them. This is touch that heals and upbuilds through acts of service. Even the most learning impaired can feel the love in the hands of the one who bathes them.

Jesus is making a theological point. If the least presentable members have been honored, the whole body is clean. Jesus is not leaving his disciples with a hygiene lesson, redefining what counts as a bath. He is engaged in a symbolic act. He is showing them something essential about how the members of the body of Christ must relate to one another. Read in this way we can see what a potent point he is making about how the church is to relate to the “least honored” among us. If those who are assumed to be least valuable are taken care of and honored, then the whole body is right with God.

Though we may think that we know what despair and hope are, Jesus’s example asks us to consider the depth of Christian hope that is enacted when people tenderly get down on their knees to wash the feet and dress the wounds of those “who will not walk tomorrow.” In a society that constantly urges us to move on, we need to sit with the hope that is on display when someone attends to those who will not be able to perform, to move on, to make an impression. To give care and attention to those we have accepted might never be physically healed at least calls forth a giving up of our own agendas. That surrender evokes deep tenderness. It is an offer of communion. In its ripeness it opens a life-giving exchange between us and God.