Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity: The Wounded Christ and Human Vulnerability

Abstract

What does it mean to be a human being? This question takes on particular significance when it is brought into conversation with the history and lives of people with disabilities. For centuries, disabled people have been subjected to attitudes and practices that have served as tools of their dehumanization. In response, disability theologies such as those of Jean Vanier and Thomas Reynolds have sought to reconstruct alternative ways of speaking about what it means to be a human being that begin with the lives of people with disabilities and the quality of vulnerability. Drawing on Nancy Eiesland’s interpretation of the wounded Christ of the resurrection, this article argues that if what makes us human is our vulnerability, this understanding is only truly liberating and transformative when it is accompanied by a commitment to resisting the injustices and sins that threaten the lives of the most vulnerable in the first place.