Transcription
Good day. I'm here today with Dr. Amos Young. He's the dean of the school of Mission and Theology and a professor of Theology and Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in California. And I'm Andrew Gabriel from andrewka-gabriel.com and Horizon College and Seminary. So you've written a lot on theology, admission—well, just about every theological topic—but you also have an interest in disability theology. He's the author of a number of works on that; one is *The Bible, Disability, and the Church*. But you have a personal interest, or not interest, but a personal uh, connection with this.
Yeah. Tell us just briefly about that.
Yeah, my—I'm an uh, a oldest of three boys, and the youngest one, Mark, has Down syndrome. So I grew up sort of watching over him, taking care of him, and obviously he's still around with us, so remains part of our life.
For a lot of people, you know, when they think about theology, they think christology, pneumatology; disability theology isn't in the list. So what is—what is disability theology?
Uh, one could say it's—it's a bit like, uh, you know, an emphasis on, uh, you know, women's perspectives on theology, let's say, uh, you know, feminist theological perspectives. And I think the most important thing that to understand about disability theology is, uh, how does—how do we ask questions about God and God's relationship with the world from the perspective of people that have a disability and experience life with disabilities? So what are—what, you know, what's one or two really big emphases within disability theology?
Yeah, so we start with the experiences of, let's say, people like my brother Mark, and then we ask questions about how the world uh, looks like from that perspective. One of the key themes in the disability community is nothing—nothing about us without us. In other words, listening to their witnesses, their perspectives, their experiences, and then reconsidering theological themes and topics from those perspectives.
So let me ask, you know, as a Pentecostal theologian, is—are there certain things within Pentecostal theology that or even your own theology that you think is perhaps a bit unique about this—a Pentecostal theology of disability theology in comparison to maybe some other traditions?
Yeah, so I think one of the things that uh, disability experience and disability perspectives encourages and challenges potentially to think about is, I think in a—in a kind of normal perspective, and again, you know, what normal is is usually defined by the people without disabilities, right? So these normal perspectives would then say that there's something wrong with disability, and in some respects potentially that might be the case. But when I look at my brother Mark and his life and his experience, and we believe that he was knitted together uh, you know, from God, you know, by God in—in his mother's womb, then—then it challenges us to, let's say, even make a contrast between our—to understand, you know, what does normal mean for what it means to be a human being, and how might we revise our understanding of that—let's say our theological anthropology—in light of, let's say, a Mark in his experiences. And from a Pentecostal perspective, I think that also is one of the most opportunities and challenges. You know, Pentecostals believe in God's healing power. Unfortunately, uh, oftentimes in—with regard to people with disabilities, we are quite indiscriminate with regard to the differences between, let's say, healing and what I would say curing might be. And I think sometimes, you know, healing and curing are equivalent, but in other cases, for instance, you know, Mark, a person with Down syndrome, doesn't need to be healed from Down syndrome; he needs to be cured from a cold; he needs to be cured from a broken arm, etc., etc. But um, he's whole as he—as a person with Down syndrome, right? So uh, that's what I think of the—of the opportunities that—and—and—and challenges that Pentecostals have because we often default to, well, let's lay hands on you and pray that God heals you, as opposed to listening to the witness of the person living with whatever impairment or disability that he or she might be living with, and—and really attend to their lives, their testimonies, their journey, and potentially be able to appreciate God's wholeness in their lives as opposed to their need for us to pray for their according quote healing.
Right. Right. So how might disability theology speak to a distinction between somebody who has a, you know, disability that they're born with versus somebody who maybe has an accident later in life and has a physical, mental disability or whatever because of that?
That's a great—that's a great question, and that's the, you know, it is one of the um, issues I think that theology needs to pay attention to—with regard to history—what happens historically—what happens historically uh, with us and what happens with us existentially. So there's a certain reality, of course, like, let's say, you know, one of our—I don't know if you know Shane Clifton, a theologian from Australia—just short of his 40th birthday was in a—a bike accident that basically left him as a quadriplegic. So he lived 40 years uh, if you want quote unquote normal um, but um, in the last uh, probably 15 years, he's had to adjust to life, and you know, there's obviously a great deal of loss, a great deal of sadness, great deal of experience of loss for him, for his family, yeah, and even for us as a Pentecostal theological community uh, and so attending to how—what happens with people over the course of lifetimes uh, we can appreciate then the historicity, the—the changes of state, the loss. We should—we should not minimize that um, but we should not assume those losses for people that—if you were born in this—with a certain—with a certain condition or with a certain uh, set of abilities and—and—and lack of abilities or lack of capacities. And it's also the case that, you know, um, there are people who have witnessed to, let's say, having become visually impaired over a long period of time, starting maybe in—in the teens, and you know, John Hull is a case in point um, a blind theologian who was sighted until about, you know, the middle teens, and over a course about 15 years lost his sight, and now for the last about 30 years has been living sightless and theologizing as a blind theologian. So one could appreciate the loss of sight during and over a certain period of time, and then one can also appreciate his having now been adapted to and—and living without sight and living quite uh, productively. Again, that's those normal mechanisms where we try to impose labels on people and say, oh, you must not be able to be productive if you have a disability. And someone like John Hull, his life journey has led him to this point. So I think the—the question there is attentiveness to people's journeys, attentiveness to how some people may adapt over time, some people may not um, walking with people as they need—as they need to be accompanied. If some will want to keep, you know, asking God to cure them, then as we accompany them, we should be attentive to that, and we should continue to walk in faith with them in that—in that regard. But other folks may have adapted over time, and—and then we need to also uh, um, you know, with integrity appreciate their—their own resolve, their own agency, not assume that they're—that they are, you know, passively being imposed upon because each one of us have the ability to, as Saint Paul invites us to, be content in all things. And what does that mean for us to actually live into that in light of whatever life circumstances might—might throw up for us?
Right. Yeah, you're giving some really good practical advice there, which is where I was gonna go, so that's helpful. Can you maybe just in a brief moment and share like, okay, where a lot of people might say, how does the Bible really speak to disability theology? Oh wow, they don't necessarily see it there.
I—I think that that's where, if you will, for most of us who don't have a disability, we read the Bible from our quote unquote able-bodied perspectives. And people with disabilities actually say that all of us are able-bodied are temporarily able-bodied. We are born completely dependent upon somebody else, right? And if we are actually blessed to live long enough, we'll probably leave the world practically completely dependent upon other people.
Right. I've been thinking—I mean, I'm still pretty young, but I've been thinking about that recently as they start to grow and as I reach over to tie my shoes, I'm like, I'm going to get older, and what's that going to look like?
Yeah. Yeah. And—and so, you know, I started—we started this little short conversation by saying, what are the experiences of people with disabilities? And actually, when you have a certain experience of life—living without loss of a certain sensory capacity or mobility incapacity or whatever it is that your impairment might entail—all of a sudden, when you read the Bible from your perspective, you read it with different lens. If you're a woman and you read the Bible, you're reading—you're noticing things that men might not notice. If you come from a particular cultural, ethnic background and you read certain parts of the Bible, certain things might jump out, and other things might—might—might not if you don't have those sets of life experiences. And so I think one of the things that's amazing—in fact, you mentioned my book, *The Bible, Disability, and the Church*. I've also edited with a number of others uh, *The Bible and Disability Commentary*, in which it's just remarkable how when you actually adopt the lenses of the experiences of people with disabilities or people with those experiences, all of a sudden the Bible just comes alive, and there are a lot of things that you never noticed before about what the Bible says because you're just not primed to observe what's there in the text itself. John Hull, the person I mentioned earlier, says, "In the beginning there was darkness." Think about that from Genesis one perspective, right? Before "Let there be light," well, what was that? Well, John noticed that, right, as a person without sight. Before there was even "Let there be light," what was there? That's the mystery of God in the darkness, right? Well, never thought about that, right? Because we've got such a disjunctive view of how light and darkness are separate, but those are the kinds of insights I think that people with disabilities bring to the biblical text, from Genesis to Revelation, that I think we'd be much—we're much more impoverished when we read the lenses from our mere temporarily able-bodied perspectives.
Yeah, that's helpful. Well, thanks so much, Dr. Young. It's been great having you, and the great work, Andrew.
Oh, thank you. Thanks everybody for watching. [Music]