Disability and the Gospel E-Book

Michael S. Beates

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 306

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Michael Beates's concern with disability issues began nearly 30 years ago when his eldest child was born with multiple profound disabilities. Now, as more families like Michael's are affected by a growing number of difficulties ranging from down syndrome to autism to food allergies, the need for church programs and personal paradigm shifts is greater than ever. Working through key Bible passages on brokenness and disability while answering hard questions, Michael offers here helpful principles for believers and their churches. He shows us how to embrace our own brokenness and then to embrace those who are more physically and visibly broken, bringing hope and vision to those of us who need it most.

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“Disability and the Gospel tackles head-on the spoken and too often unspoken questions about disability. Well researched and at times provocative, Michael Beates digs beyond the surface in search of reconciliation among the realities of suffering, disability, and the teachings of Scripture. Disability and the Gospel is an important work that reveals not only a biblical worldview on physical disability, but gives comforting confirmation that God is indeed always sovereign, always in charge, and all purposeful.”

Doug Mazza, President, Joni and Friends International Disability Center

“Mike Beates has been a good friend for twelve years, and I’ve observed his godly character as well as heard and read his insightful teaching. I have read Disability and the Gospel at several stages, and I recommend it highly. The church needs to be awakened to the presence of the disabled in our communities and, as Mike stresses, to the disabilities we all have as sinners in need of God’s grace. The book contains excellent exegesis, theology, and historical studies that make a powerful case. I don’t know a better place to hear God’s Word on this important matter.”

John M. Frame, Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy, Reformed Theological Seminary; author, Doctrine of the Christian Life

“Why should the church embrace people with disabilities? Because they need us? Perhaps. But in Disability and the Gospel, Michael Beates reminds us that the transforming power of the gospel can only be ours when we, the able-bodies, admit our own brokenness and weakness and learn the truth that God uses the weak people of this world to confound the wise. The church has as much to learn from people with disabilities as she has to give to them.”

Dawn Clark, Director of Disability Ministries, College Church, Wheaton, Illinois

“Disability and the Gospel is a wonderful book! It’s biblical, profound, practical, and challenging.  It is also a book written at the right time and by the right person. Every Christian in America needs read this book, and every church should study it, underline it, and live it!   What a gift Michael Beates has given to us and to those to whom the church is called to show mercy, understanding, and compassion. I rise up and call Mike Beates blessed. Read this book. You will too!”

Steve Brown, Professor Emeritus, Reformed Seminary; teacher, Key Life, a syndicated daily teaching program; author, Three Free Sins! God Isn’t Mad at You

“In Disability and the Gospel, Michael Beates urges Christians to invite people with disabilities into our churches and our lives not because they need our help, but because worshiping and ministering alongside people with disabilities helps us to recognize our own brokenness and learn that God’s grace is most apparent and powerful when we are most weak and wounded. While my own theology of disability differs from Beates’s in significant ways, I recommend this thorough, accessible book for pastors, congregations, and individuals who want to engage more fully with those in their communities living with disabilities, and thus live out the gospel in new and transforming ways.”

Ellen Painter Dollar, author, No Easy Choice:  A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction

Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace

Copyright © 2012 by Michael S. Beates

Published by Crossway                     1300 Crescent Street                     Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

Cover image: Josh Franer, photographer

First printing 2012

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture references marked NLT are from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Ill., 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked RSV are from The Revised Standard Version. Copyright ©1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3045-6 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3046-3 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3047-0 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3048-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beates, Michael S., 1956-

Disability and the Gospel : how God uses our brokenness to display his grace / Michael S. Beates.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 978-1-4335-3045-6 (tp)

1. People with disabilities—Religious life. 2. Disabilities—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Disabilities—Biblical teaching. 4. Grace (Theology) I. Title.

BV4910.B43 2012

248.8'64—dc232012001374

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Contents

Foreword: Before You Begin by Joni Eareckson Tada

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1

THE VOICE OF GOD

1 The Voice of God in the Law, Prophets, and Writings: What the Old Testament Teaches about Disabilities

2 The Voice of Christ: What the Gospels Teach about Disabilities

3 The Voice of the Holy Spirit through the Apostles: What the Acts and Epistles Teach about Disabilities

4 Biblical Conclusions and Reflections

PART 2

VOICES FROM THE PAST

5 What We Learn from the Rabbis, the Early Church, and the Reformation Era

6 What We Learn from the Modern Era

PART 3

VOICES OF TODAY

7 What We Learn from Current Secular Voices

8 What We Learn from Current Christian Voices

PART 4

SPEAKING INTO TOMORROW

9 What the Church Must Say to the World in the Twenty-First Century

10 Sovereignty and the Whispering Voice of Hope

Appendix 1: God’s Sovereignty and Genetic Anomalies

Appendix 2: God’s Love for the Broken

Selected Bibliography

Notes

Foreword

Before You Begin

Back in the mid-1960s when I first embraced Christ, I would tell people it was all about Jesus, but I had no idea what that meant. Sure, Christianity was centered on Christ, but mainly he was the one who got my spiritual engine started. As long as I filled up on him every morning during my quiet time, I was able to putter along just fine.

Things changed dramatically in 1967 after I crushed my spinal cord in a diving accident that left me a quadriplegic. I was frantic and filled with fear. Oh God, I can’t do this. I can’t live like this! This time I needed the Savior urgently. Every hour. Every minute. Or else I’ll suffocate, God! Suddenly, the Bible with all its insights about suffering and weakness became the supreme thing in my life. I spent hours flipping pages of the Bible with my mouth stick, desperate to understand exactly who God is and what his relationship is to suffering. It didn’t take long to find answers that satisfied. When it came to my life-altering injury, nothing comforted me more than the assurance that God hadn’t taken his hands off the wheel for a nanosecond. I discovered that a right understanding of God’s hand in our hardships was critical to my contentment. I also discovered how important good theology is.

Fast-forward more than three decades to the worldwide ministry I now help lead at Joni and Friends—a ministry to people with disabilities who anguish over the same questions I once did. As I travel around the globe, I hear, “What does the Bible say about my child who was born with multiple disabilities?” and “Why does God allow so much brokenness in the world?” My heart aches because these people often hear only silence (or experience rejection) from the body of Christ. Sadly, the church is ill equipped to answer the tough questions about God’s goodness in a world crumbling into broken pieces.

When it comes to suffering, I’m convinced God has more in mind for us than to simply avoid it, give it ibuprofen, divorce it, institutionalize it, or miraculously heal it. But how do we embrace that which God gives from his left hand? I have found that a person’s contentment with impairment is directly proportional to the understanding of God and his Word. If a person with a disability is disappointed with God, it can usually be traced to a thin view of the God of the Bible.

Now you understand why I believe a “theology of brokenness” is desperately needed today—a theology that exalts the preeminence of God while underscoring his mercy and compassion to the frail and brokenhearted. It’s why I am so excited about the book you hold in your hands!

Disability and the Gospel provides exactly what the church needs today. I first met the author, Michael Beates, at a Reformed theology conference in 1992, and then, in the summer of 1993 at a family retreat that our ministry holds for special-needs families. Mike and Mary brought their five children including Jessica, their daughter with multiple disabilities. We struck up a conversation one afternoon and right away, I liked this man. I learned about his love for Reformed theology and his passion to preserve the integrity of God’s Word—yet he didn’t come across aloof and academic. Mike explained that years of raising his disabled daughter had softened his edges—here was a student of God’s Word who didn’t live in an ivory tower but in a real world with real pain.

I could wax on about Michael’s theological background, teaching experience, and degrees. But what I want you to mostly know about him is his zeal for Jesus Christ and his deep desire to reach families affected by disability with gospel hope—it’s why he’s helped us deliver wheelchairs around the world to needy disabled people, serving with us in Africa and Eastern Europe. As our ministry grew, I realized we needed someone like Mike to serve as a watchdog, helping to keep our theological underpinnings secure. So I asked him to serve on the International Board of Directors of Joni and Friends in 2000.

And I wish I could adequately express how happy I am about his new book, Disability and the Gospel, because there are thousands of families like the Beates family and millions of people like me whose disabilities force hard-hitting questions about God and the church: What does a pastor say when disability hits a family in his congregation broadside? How do Christian education directors respond when autism becomes a serious matter in the classroom? How does the church get engaged with issues that impact our culture, like physician-assisted suicide? What does it take to get a congregation to recognize its weaker members as “indispensable”? In short, how do we grab the church by its shoulders and shake some sense into it about “glorying in our infirmities”?

This excellent resource by Michael Beates gives solid answers to tough questions like these and more. It is my heartfelt prayer that you will take the insights in Disability and the Gospel and use them as a guide and resource for your church family. And don’t be surprised if you see a sudden outbreak of heaven-sent power ripple through your life and the life of your congregation—for God’s power always shows up best in brokenness. And you don’t have to break your neck to believe it.

Joni Eareckson Tada

Joni and Friends International Disability Center

Acknowledgments

The Preacher said in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. And I am the first to admit that I am not sure I have ever had a completely original thought. This book has come about through many years of experience, conversations, and collaboration with family, friends, and ministry associates. I am grateful for all those who have walked this journey of life with me and spoken truth into my life over the years.

I owe many thanks to Joni Tada and our many mutual colleagues at Joni and Friends for almost twenty years of partnership in the gospel. Trips overseas with “Wheels for the World,” time spent at family retreats, and many personal discussions at board meetings and conferences have left an indelible mark on this book.

Dr. Steve Childers, Dr. Steve Brown, and especially Dr. John Frame guided this work through its initial form in the Doctor of Ministry program at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. Mike Yuen at Joni and Friends turned the old Mac files of my dissertation into useable form so I could transform this book into (hopefully) a more readable and useful form. Connie Amon and Amy Lauger read, edited, and commented extensively on the manuscript. Thom Narbe has cheered me on for many years. They are all true friends and servants.

Harry and Shellie provided the atmosphere to write undistracted for many hours and are commended for not charging me rent for the work space at that front table by the window! Howard Shore and Phil Keaggy provided the sound track for much of the process, adding beautiful music to the labor of writing.

And I owe much as well to the good people at Crossway, particularly Allan Fisher for first considering the manuscript, Jill Carter and Mattie Wolf for guiding it through, and for so many others in that strong gospel community for contributing their time and talents to this finished work. Any weaknesses contained herein are mine but have been made less so due to their careful and diligent work.

Jameson, Abraham, Abbie, Shoshanah, Eli, and Josiah had their fingerprints (sometimes literally) all over the early drafts of this when they were younger children. Shotgun the greyhound was my constant companion, lying on the floor at my feet through much of the original writing. And of course, Jessica’s life drove me to write—this book is essentially her contribution, her gift, to God’s people.

Finally, my dearest Mary has lived and modeled the truth in this book one day at a time for thirty years. I am forever grateful to God for her faithful, persevering, trusting heart.

And I know all these good people (and so many others known to God for their contributions) join me in saying, “Soli Deo Gloria!”

Introduction

I will never forget that day in the summer of 1982. Toting our three-month-old daughter to the doctor because she was sick, the last thing my wife, Mary, and I expected was that our lives would be changed forever and our souls indelibly marked with the wounds of pain and dreams that died. Our daughter Jessica would eventually be diagnosed with a unique “chromosomal anomaly”: at conception, or within the first few cell divisions, something occurred with her eighth chromosome and this, along with other physical anomalies (maybe related, maybe not), meant that she would go through this life disabled, seriously and profoundly, unable ever to talk, walk, or care for herself in a meaningful and self-determinative way.

Our daughter Jessica did not die, and though there have been times we thought she might, she is still here as I write this in 2011. But in all honesty, I will admit to you, it would have been so much easier in many ways if she had. That is not something you can say out loud in most churches, but it is the brutal truth. Perhaps you have suffered some severe degree of brokenness, whether physical or otherwise, or you care for someone who has. If so, you may know what I am talking about.

The death of a newborn child, while excruciatingly painful, is also graciously final. People move on. Granted, they are never the same, but still necessarily they move ahead. But the brokenness of lifelong disability leaves many people in a state of what some have called “chronic sorrow.” And too often, the Christian church in the West communicates to people that sorrow and brokenness are conditions we expect people to overcome and conquer. People should get past such places in their experiences. But the hard truth is some of us, by God’s difficult providence, find ourselves facing brokenness day in and day out with no prospect of a significant change in the situation. In fact, though you walk on with Christ, by faith, often with gritty devotion and hard work, not only does the situation not get better or go away, but too often it gets more and more difficult with every passing year.

Perhaps you live with a debilitating and deteriorating condition. Maybe you suffer from chronic sorrow related to deep and abiding emotional trauma. Some have the burden of caring for a spouse or child with paralysis. Many face the long battle with cancer that threatens death. Still others live in the aftermath of the death of a loved one. As I write this opening chapter, I have received another call from a good Christian man, hearing that his dear friend has suddenly been taken from this life by an auto accident. And in my little church, this is not the first or even second time we have been touched by such loss this year. The pain and sense of confusion can be palpable at times because so many people we know and love live so much of their lives in the midst of this pain.

If there is no prospect of improvement, if the dawn seems like it will never come, perhaps you feel like Job when he said in chapter 3:

Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,

whom God has hedged in?

For my sighing comes instead of my bread,

and my groanings are poured out like water.

For the thing that I fear comes upon me,

and what I dread befalls me.

I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;

I have no rest, but trouble comes. (3:23–26)

How do we square this experience with the teaching of the rest of Scripture? And how should the church community respond to such circumstances? These were the questions I began to ask as a young idealistic graduate student in theology almost thirty years ago. These questions, and others related to it, still nag me when I am alone in the car or mowing the lawn. And our predictable responses in the church also nag me. Why do we in the evangelical church in the West demand that everyone be “normal” and look the same? Why do we as a culture try so hard (and succeed so well!) at hiding people with disabilities from our everyday view? Why do people with visible and invisible brokenness often feel as though they have to hide the problem in order to join God’s people for worship? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, what answers does the good news of the gospel give us for these questions, and how does the gospel give us hope in these situations?

As I asked these questions over the years, I began to realize by simple observation that people with disabilities are almost universally absent from the congregations of most American churches. In 1 Corinthians 12:14–27, the apostle Paul describes the church using the metaphor of the human body. He said that “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (v. 18). Some parts he describes as weaker but indispensable and others as less honorable and less respectable but treated with special honor and greater respect (vv. 22–23). Certainly on one level Paul is describing people with disabilities, broken people, as part of Christ’s body, the new community. And his description of the Christian community should be understood as normative, as what we should see when we walk into church.

Statistics from many sources number Americans with disabilities at over forty million people. This is approximately one in every six citizens. Add to this number people whose “brokenness” is relational and emotional, and this category may include almost every other person in the pew. But even a casual survey of most American congregations shows that these weaker, indispensable, and especially honorable members are, for the most part, simply not there. Or, if they are present, too often they are either separate from others (and I realize that this may be necessary in some cases) or they hide their brokenness behind masks of false happiness and superficial normality.

Those with visible disabilities certainly are not represented proportionally to their numbers in the general population. Long ago now, in 1983 (long before the Americans with Disabilities Act), Joni Eareckson Tada wrote, “Ten percent of our population is severely disabled. (That’s a flat figure, including impairments of all sorts.) So theoretically, on any given Sunday, a pastor ought to look out over his people and see ten percent who are limited—the deaf, the blind, people in wheelchairs—whatever.”1 This has not changed since Joni wrote it twenty-five years ago. In fact, as technology improves, more and more people with disabilities are able to survive for longer periods, so perhaps even more should be present in church.

Let’s be clear: such people have not been purposely excluded from the church. And we know that most church members and leaders would certainly affirm that broken people and people with disabilities are welcome at their particular church. But those who live with disabilities (that is, those who are disabled and those who live with and care for someone who is disabled) will testify that, though American culture generally is becoming more aware of and responsive to the needs and abilities of this disabled segment of society (especially since the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990), in many subtle ways people with disabilities sense a lack of welcome from the church. Nancy Eiesland agrees, writing:

The history of the church’s interaction with the disabled is at best an ambiguous one. Rather than being a structure for empowerment, the church has more often supported the societal structures and attitudes that have treated people with disabilities as objects of pity and paternalism. For many disabled persons the church has been a “city on a hill”—physically inaccessible and socially inhospitable.2

My own family lives with disability. We have been to churches where we have had to carry Jessica’s wheelchair over obstacles or up steps to get inside. We have experienced the quiet stares that betray an unspoken discomfort with our presence. Many years ago when she was young, we heard nursery workers and Sunday school teachers actually say, “You’re not going to leave her here with us, are you?” And, of course, well-intentioned but theologically obtuse believers have sincerely asked us if we had confessed the sin in our lives that must surely be responsible for her affliction.

Too often people in the church, while accepting and loving all people, lack the initiative or the insight to provide simple measures that would make the church community more complete, satisfying, and welcoming for those who live with brokenness. People don’t know the needs because they don’t ask or take the initiative to find out. Our situation is nearly paradigmatic for myriad other families with whom we have spoken—families whose disabilities span a wide spectrum­ from the obvious wheelchair people to those with much more subtle but just as demanding marginal issues of brokenness.

The problem is that Christian people generally have an inadequate understanding of God’s role in disabilities. This lack of understanding leads to closed doors for people with disabilities even after the handicapped spaces are painted in the parking lot, dipped curbs are cut, and ramps are built to the front entrance of the church. But the more vital problem is that the Christian community generally tends to keep people with disabilities marginalized in the church. Stanley Hauerwas (with Bonnie Raine) has written:

While ethical imperatives of the Gospel seem clear and have never been forgotten by our churches, the direction which they might offer us as community members has not surfaced as a compelling rationale for caring for our handicapped members or for cherishing as an achievable goal their total integration in our community.3

Why has God ordained some to be disabled, weaker members? How does such design reflect his sovereign and loving care for his people? And if the church should contain weaker and less honorable members, just as he has intended them to be (1 Cor. 12:18), then why are people with disabilities painfully absent from most American congregations? By Paul’s definition of the church, most churches today are incomplete without people with disabilities. This is fundamentally a gospel-related problem that must be addressed. 

How can the church embrace people with disabilities more biblically and more effectively and thus live the gospel more fully before the watching world? We must set out to destroy some dangerously outmoded concepts about people with disabilities and how they must be treated. We must revisit our deeply ensconced cultural assumptions about what it means to be “normal” as opposed to what it might mean to live for years in a state that must be considered “brokenness.” We must strive to replace wrong-headed (even if sincere) thinking in these areas with biblically based, culturally relevant, redemption-oriented understandings of people with disabilities and brokenness in the church in America. Such a reassessment is critical if the church is ever to model more closely Jesus’s vision in the Gospels and Paul’s vision in 1 Corinthians.

I set out in these pages to look at what the Bible says about brokenness generally and disability specifically. Then I want to consider a bit of what the sages have said through the years since the church began—some of it is profound and encouraging, some of it is simply shameful and embarrassing. But once we have this base of Bible and history upon which to build, we can develop principles and outline a gospel paradigm that will help believers individually and churches corporately first to embrace their own brokenness and then equip them to embrace those more physically and visibly broken around them.

I am not a person with a disability in the traditional sense, so I cannot speak as one who has borne the experience through lifelong social rejection and barriers to progress. My experience with people living with disabilities generally remains painfully limited. Yes, I am a parent of a profoundly disabled child now thirty years old. And yes, we adopted a couple of kids (both about twenty years old now) who have their own challenging situations from birth. And yes, my work as a member of the International Board of Directors at Joni and Friends and my association with local disability networks has widened my experience a bit. But the varieties of disabilities common in our communities (and thus the experiences related to those disabilities) are broad, and I have interacted personally with only a small slice of the spectrum.

Also, I recognize that the field of medical ethics, which touches on this area, is in a continual state of flux. It seems that new discoveries and advances bring new blessings and curses with each passing week. As such, it has become nearly impossible to keep up with the information and even to a large degree the rapidly changing nature of the issues being addressed.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination an expert either in disabilities or in the nature of the gospel. But all that being said, let’s explore together some important verses, passages, and themes in the Bible so that we can begin to adjust our thinking. We want to have the mind of Christ, so we need to see what God has said through the Scriptures of the Old Testament, through the life and words of Jesus in the Gospels, and through the Holy Spirit speaking by the apostles in the Acts and Epistles.

Then let’s look at some history so that we can avoid mistakes made before. There are ancient and modern voices that can bring us wisdom, warn us against error, and help us hear the cry of those, even today, who yearn for deep and accepting fellowship with God’s people.

Finally, let’s revisit these hard questions and ask how we can live under God’s grace in the power of the gospel, even if we live in the weakness of disability and brokenness of soul.

PART 1

THE VOICE OF GOD

In the ancient Hebrew texts we call the Old Testament, we find revelation that informs our understanding with respect not only to who we are as people but also to how God sees us. We also begin to see a pattern of God showing favor to the broken, the weak, and the outcast—indeed surprisingly often using such subjects for his own purpose and glory. We will consider the Old Testament texts according to their traditional Hebrew divisions: the Law, Prophets, and Writings. In the Law (also called the Torah, or the Five Books of Moses) we will look at passages in Genesis through Deuteronomy. Then we will consider the Prophets. In this category the Hebrew Scriptures include the traditional historical books (Joshua through Kings) and the prophetic books (Isaiah through Malachi). Finally, we will look at a few passages from the Writings. This portion of the Hebrew Scriptures is a collection of wisdom and poetic books (Job through Proverbs) as well as a few others like Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, and the five scrolls (Ruth, Esther, Lamentations, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes).

CHAPTER ONE

The Voice of God in the Law, Prophets, and Writings

What the Old Testament Teaches about Disabilities

As we open the Old Testament Scriptures, so many stories jump out at us. Maybe you are like me and these stories start a flood of memories: Sunday school lessons, vacation Bible school experiences, perhaps college Bible studies, and of course sermons from Sunday morning worship. Even if this was not your experience, even if you did not read the Bible growing up, most people recognize the Bible heroes like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Gideon, Samson, and King David. Even if some of these stories are new to you, the names are probably familiar from films and all those cable shows (Bible Mysteries Revealed!).

But whatever our experience and knowledge of the Scriptures, I find that most of us have a preconceived notion that all these big names of the Old Testament are big names because of their character, the grandeur of their courage, and their leadership traits. Nothing could be further from the truth! I hope you will see, as I have, that on the contrary, God’s story in Scripture uses these characters to highlight their weakness, their inability, their brokenness. And in so doing, God’s glory and God’s grace are magnified all the more!

The Scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Old Testa­ment, speak more often than we might initially think about disability and brokenness. If we are to understand and embrace God’s heart in this crucial area, we must allow divine revelation to inform our thinking concerning God’s creation of man, in what manner God has placed his image in man, and what part God plays in those conditions we consider abnormal and those conditions that are obviously disabling to people.

THE MYSTERY OF MAN

Our survey cannot be comprehensive by any means—the scriptural witness to our themes of weakness and brokenness is deep. But let’s attempt to survey pertinent texts from the Old Testament, considering a cross section of the Scripture’s teaching, picking up on the most prominent and informative texts, and commenting on the themes unfolding for us through the divine revelation.

THE LAW

In the first five books—the Torah in Jewish tradition, the Pentateuch in the Christian tradition—we will draw points from both narrative texts and legal texts. We will deduce principles from narratives, while legal texts speak in plain propositions concerning what should be true.

GENESIS 1:26–27, 5:1, AND 9:6

Fundamental to our study, of course, are the earliest texts speaking of humankind made in God’s image and likeness. In Genesis 1:26–27, 5:1, and 9:6, it is clear that God has placed something of himself into human beings—something of essential significance—that separates humans from the rest of creation. Theologians call this the imago Dei or “the image of God” in man. We must wait for further revelation to broaden our understanding concerning the precise nature of this image in man. However, we must note two important points.

First, a grammatical observation. The sequence of verbal clauses in 1:26–27 has traditionally been translated “Let us make man . . . and let him have dominion.” A more subtle understanding of Hebrew clausal relationships, however, could justifiably render the phrase, “Let us make man in our image so that he might rule.” Seen in this light, one may conjecture that “dominion” is one aspect; some say possibly even the primary purpose, of the image. Having said that, however, we must quickly add that by no means is dominion the only aspect, nor certainly the only purpose, of our imaging God.

Second, traditionally this essence of the image of God has been understood to reside in the nonmaterial aspects of man: the intellect, communication, and other communicable attributes of God (our ability to express love, compassion, kindness, mercy, etc.). However, right from the start, let me try to bring a measure of correction to this traditional understanding. The words image and likeness in Genesis 1 are based on two different Hebrew words (tselem and demut). These two words, image and likeness, grammatically and lexically seem to carry a strong physical element in their broad meanings. About these words, John Piper has said, “Although abstract qualities are there, demut is used uniformly in connection with a tangible visual reproduction of something else. So again, as with tselem, the usage of demut urges us very strongly in the direction of a physical likeness.”1 Further, Piper contends:

It would reflect a theological prejudice to deny that the author means man’s physical appearance images his Maker. As von Rad says, “Man’s bodily appearance is not at all to be excepted from the realm of God’s image. . . . Therefore, one will do well to split the physical from the spiritual as little as possible: the whole man is created in God’s image.”2

In the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, von Rad contends, in his article on a key Greek synonym, eikon, that the divine likeness does not consist of such things as personality, moral capacity, etc. If asked to choose between spiritual and physical likeness, von Rad said he “should have to decide in favor of a predominately physical likeness in the OT.”3 Finally, Anthony Hoekema has said, “The image of God, we have found, is not something man has, but something man is. It means that human beings both mirror and represent God. Thus, there is a sense in which the image includes the physical body.”4 The question of how a corporeal body can image the incorporeal God will be addressed as we proceed.

GENESIS 32:25–32

In Genesis 32:25–32, a brief and mystical passage, Jacob wrestles with a “man” just before returning to Canaan to meet his brother Esau. The text tells us the man “touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint” (v. 25) and that Jacob left “limping because of his hip” (v. 31). Though the text lacks more explicit detail, tradition has held that Jacob was permanently disabled on the very occasion when he was renamed “Israel.”

Judith Abrams in her book Judaism and Disability: Portrayals in Ancient Texts from the Tanach through the Bavli, writes insightfully, “Jacob’s disability is accompanied by a blessing. His flawed moral state has finally been made manifest in his physical state and he is, somehow, released from his sin of tricking his father and brother. . . . Israel, then, in its first incarnation is physically disabled.”5 Jacob is perhaps the clearest example for us of a consistent portrait that God paints through these opening narratives in the Law. The Patriarchs, far from being “heroes of faith,” are more often stumbling, weak, and broken people whom God uses in their weakness. When God met Jacob and left him wounded, it was a physical wound that was meant to remind him of his spiritual brokenness. He could no longer feign moral strength as he limped through life with this new physical disability.