Embodying Community: a Transformative and Sacramental Ecclesiology of Disability

Abstract

This project asserts that, in and through churchly communities that embrace the sacraments’ evocation of God’s gracious invitation to inclusion, people with disabilities require critical facets of access to God’s transformative equality and justice. It makes this claim in five distinct but connected ways, via an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The Introduction proposes the thesis statement. After it examines the project’s interpretive method—a dialectical hermeneutic of suspicion and the retrieval of human beings’ embodied goodness—the Introduction also explains the thesis statement by assessing varied theological and scholarly paradigms of disability, sacrament, equality, justice, and hospitality. This introductory chapter also explores an action-reflection model based in lived experiences of disability. Part One comprises two chapters, and prioritizes suspicion, or critical distance between observation and reality. Chapter One outlines the contours of a theological anthropology of disability using texts from the books of Genesis and Isaiah, sketches a renewed Christology of disability by exploring select Gospel healing narratives, defines baptism and Holy Communion in themselves, and shows some of the ways that these sacraments can heal and free people of varied abilities. Chapter Two describes the empathy that grounds this dissertation, explores the experiences of shame, fear, and exclusion suffered by many people with disabilities, contrasts those experiences with positive experiences of welcome and inclusion, and expresses our need for a spirituality of friendship based in the generous episteme of disability. Part Two comprises three chapters, and emphasizes scholarly retrieval of human embodied goodness. The third chapter illustrates the theological significance of physical, intellectual, affective, and spiritual access to God’s equality and justice for people with disabilities through baptism and Holy Communion. The fourth chapter explores the practical significance of our access to equality and justice in terms of mutual aid and covenantal relationship. The fifth chapter observes several formative components of an embodied eschatology of disability. Finally, my Conclusions chapter summarizes my findings, and briefly explores other scholarly questions raised by this theological research.