The understanding of incarnation – the core concept of Christian faith – is a person which is central to a healthy theology of disability. What does it mean to say Christ is human and to say that that humanity is in the graphic of God. If our responses to these thoughts are grounded in physical and psychological capacity, we will mechanically exclude disabled men and women as aberrations awaiting a get rid of. But what is the substitute?
Nancy Eiesland famously wrote of The Disabled God and, in so doing, first articulated the (then surprising) thought that disability was an integral part of Christ’s identity – the wounded arms and facet which, in their incredibly impairment, declared Divinity.[1] Other individuals, drawing seriously on the Parable of the Banquet in Luke 13, have considering the fact that spoken of an obligation of hospitality on the Church with regard to disabled individuals. Although the Church has, in modern several years, moved absent from a conception of disabled people today as objects of charity and spoken extra and more of disabled men and women relocating from “internal exile” to energetic participation in the Church, there has been minor theological dialogue of the mother nature of incapacity by itself.[2] The unspoken assumption has however been that a non-inclusive Church (“us”), just needs to relax its guard on the gates to some degree so as to enable disabled Other people (“them”) to enter.