Abstract
In the newly emerging field of disability theology, one doctrine seems to be garnering increasing attention: eschatology. While eschatology has been a topic of conversation within disability theology circles since its inception (cf. Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability [Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994], p. 107), much of the current disciplinary conversation owes its existence to the argument put forth in Amos Yong’s 2007 publication Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity. In a chapter titled ‘Resurrecting Down Syndrome and Disability: Heaven and the Healing of the World’, Yong puts forward what he calls a ‘dynamic eschatology’ which he hopes will ‘preserve both the core biblical teachings related to the heavenly hope and the critical insights derived from the experience of disability’ (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007, p. 271).
What makes Yong’s contribution noteworthy is not merely that he attempted to think eschatologically about disability. Rather, what makes Yong’s contribution important is that he suggests that what marks our resurrected bodies (both physical and social) is not the disabled/able-bodied binary, but rather continual transformation into the image of Jesus. Neither disability nor nondisability will exist in the eschaton. Instead, humanity will be marked by a new normative order as we participate in the Spirit’s work of healing the entire body politic.
Yong’s work sparked new conversation in disability theology about whether or not impairments would be retained in the eschaton. This is the terrain in which Maja Whitaker’s recent book, Perfect in Weakness, Disability and Flourishing in the New Creation, comes into existence. Whitaker, Academic Dean at Laidlaw College, argues in favour of what has been called ‘the retention view’ of disability, in which those unique features of human embodiment we understand as disabilities will not necessarily be removed in our resurrected bodies, but rather will be retained.
As one would hope, Whitaker presents this view with much more nuance than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Rather, she advances an argument in which ‘embodied features that currently contribute to disability might in some cases be retained in the resurrection body’ (p. 2, emphasis added). Note the verb here: Whitaker does not want to definitively land on one side of the retainment debate when speaking about all disabilities in all persons. She does not even go as far as suggesting an ultimate eschatological outcome for specific disabilities. Whitaker’s task is different. She states ‘my primary purpose is to provoke the question, “Well, why not? Why couldn’t people with disabilities retain their disabilities in the new creation?” for the reason that it forces the second question, “Why did I think that was going to be a problem?”’ (p. 3).
What Whitaker ultimately wants to advance in arguing for the retention view is that the possibility of retention of disabilities in the eschaton ‘presents no threat to God’s goodness nor to the eschatological flourishing of the person in question and the full realization of their humanity’ (p. 2). Just as Jesus’ resurrection body bore the wounds of his crucifixion, so too, perhaps, people with disabilities will retain their disabilities in their resurrected bodies.
Readers unfamiliar with the landscape of disability theology may immediately ask two questions about such a view: 1) who thinks this is a good idea, and 2) how would one go about doing so? I will reserve Whitaker’s answer to the first question until the end of the review and make some brief comments on her method first.
Whitaker doesn’t want speculation over the retention view to devolve into a game where you build your eschatological body much like one would design a fictional video game character. Rather, she claims that the resurrection body only makes sense if there is continuity with the earthly body. What makes this difficult terrain is the belief that some parts of our body will be healed and/or transformed while retaining this continuity. Because of this, she grounds her claims in an understanding of the person as ‘an essentially embodied metaphysical unity’ in which personal identity is carried by ‘a mutually reinforcing web composed of threads of identity that are biological, psychological, relational, and narrative in nature’ (p. 10, emphasis original). Thus, the reason for arguing for retention in the resurrected body is that some disabilities may be considered ‘identity forming’, and while we cannot necessarily know which of our features are identity forming, we can trust that God secures our eschatological identity in Christ by carrying these identifying features through our postmortem transformation.
The rest of the book proceeds as follows. In Chapter 1, Whitaker lays out some key threads of the tension between the continuity and discontinuity of pre- and post-resurrection bodies throughout the Christian tradition. Here, she develops her argument that materiality is crucial to both human existence and personal identity over time, and should not be ignored in conversations about the resurrection body. In Chapter 2, she begins to advance claims about the continuity of personal identity in the new creation, particularly around what she calls ‘numerical identity’, illustrated in the formula ‘What does it take for person X at time t1 to be the same person as person Y at time t2?’ (p. 46). In other words, how do we reidentify the person in the resurrected body in light of who they were in their earthly body.
Chapter 3 moves us further into questions about identity. Identity, she suggests, ‘is an all-or-nothing relation; it either is continuous or it is not’ (p. 67). If this is so, we are led to the key question of the chapter (and in many ways, the book): ‘How much change can a person undergo and still remain the same person?’ or, ‘How different can a person’s post-resurrection body be from their pre-resurrection body while still maintaining continuity of personal identity in order to fulfill the Christian hope for a fully personal afterlife?’ (p. 67). In other words, how can I ensure that the resurrected person is really me and not someone else?
Until this point, while Whitaker does dialogue with disability theology at various points, there is nothing particularly unique to the disability experience in the claims posited herein. All Whitaker has been doing is developing an account of personal identity and continuity in the resurrected body. That changes in Chapter 4. Here, Whitaker gives her fullest account of the retention view, giving significant space to examining the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion on his resurrected body, focusing primarily on the biblical basis for such a view, but indicating that the persistence of these wounds suggests a symbolic power of subverting the pattern of the world which tends to equate beauty and power with glory and value.
Finally, in Chapter 5, Whitaker examines the implications of the retainment view for pre-resurrection thought and practice, based on the claim that ‘diverse embodiment, that is, the set of embodied features that distinguish a person with a disability, is a neutral characteristic that is only made disadvantageous by the experience of living in the social and physical world of the old creation’ (p. 112). Her argument climaxes in the following claim: ‘the retention view can form an eschatological parable that functions to provoke a reassessment of our assumptions regarding human flourishing and a rejection of the culturally conditioned values of autonomy, success, and invulnerability’ (p. 117).
In this, we are led back to the first question that readers unfamiliar with the landscape of disability theology may ask: why would someone want to argue in favour of the retention view? That is because of the well-trodden claim that what we believe about the eschaton (and, by extension, what we believe about the resurrection body) affects how we live in the present. If we believe that all disabilities are shed in the eschaton, we will believe that all disabilities are lesser conditions that we should seek to get rid of. However, if we believe that there is room for identity-forming impairments to be retained in the resurrected body, we are forced to think differently about the presence of disability among us today.
Whitaker’s unique contribution to the landscape of disability is that Perfect in Weakness is currently the most developed account of the retention view. While visions of the retention view were present sparingly in Eiesland’s The Disabled God, and developed into a chapter in Yong’s Theology and Down Syndrome, Whitaker’s Perfect in Weakness fills a unique gap in the literature. And in doing so, she provokes significant thought about the presence of disability both in the eschaton, and in our present.
Perfect in Weakness is well-researched and draws from the wells of biblical studies, analytic philosophy, cognitive science, and theology. If Whitaker’s claim was simply, as noted above, to ask whether the retention view is possible, or even plausible, I think she has succeeded. One can certainly imagine a world where disabilities may be present in the eschaton. But, while recognizing that there is always a particular amount of speculation in any eschatological claims, there were times where it seemed like Whitaker was really ‘hedging her bets’, or not arguing as forcefully in favour of the retention view that one might desire.
There are multiple reasons for this, I think. First, as noted above, there is always a particular amount of unknown while dealing with eschatology, and thus the resurrected body. But second, I think there is also a certain amount of unknown (or at least, unclarity) around what we mean when we are speaking about disability. While Whitaker does speak on her use of the term ‘disability’ in her introduction, one could not expect a book to cover every disability, as disability is a polyphonous and malleable category. But finally, and I think most importantly, the reason that it might seem like Whitaker is not arguing as forcefully as possible is because the main point of her book is not to describe what every single resurrection body might look like. Rather, by arguing for the retention view, Whitaker, like Eisland, Yong, and others before her, is challenging her readers to evaluate their presumptions about human flourishing and personal identity in light of the message of the Gospel. Are these presumptions liberative for the flourishing of people with disabilities? Or do we need to reconstruct our presumptions in light of the possibility that those unique features of human embodiment that we colloquially refer to as ‘disabilities’ may indeed be present in the eschaton?