For some time now, despite advances in gendered or racialized theologies, disability theologies have struggled to break free from their constructivist barriers and into mainstream theology. The reasons for this are too complex to delve into here, but we should be aware of these difficulties. Furthermore, we should be aware that disability theology has not always cared about becoming “mainstream.” Finding an ally in queer theologies, many disability theologies revel in carving a path outside the norm. As a result, resources outside the normate “theological canon” are utilized and befriended in disability theology circles. The positive effect of this is providing a new way of doing theology, free from the normate biases inherent in mainstream theologies. For those pushed to the margins by dominant voices, finding those who “speak their language” is liberating. Theology is not just for the able-bodied. However, while disability theology does not need to “prove” itself to dominant theologies, the unintended result of such marginalized conversations is that disability has largely continued to be either ignored or ghettoized by the theological mainstream.

One would certainly err in putting the blame for this lack of integration solely on disability theologies themselves. What is likely more problematic than disability theologies avoiding the mainstream theological canon is that often those in positions of power refuse to listen. Just like those who are marginalized in society, those in disability theology have, in some instances, been pushed aside by those in places of power, precisely because their body of theological work does not look like other bodies. Compounded with the notion that much disability theology is done on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves, it is not the marginalized who are at fault here. Rather, the question is whether anyone will listen.

Enter Lisa Powell, and her noteworthy recent book The Disabled God Revisited. Here, we find a book that cannot be ignored, both by disability theologians as well as those in the mainstream. It’s my contention that Powell’s methodology is what makes her book so noteworthy, for in doing so she manages to bring together both the marginalized and the mainstream in a way in which both are mutually transformed. Converted, you may say. While I am certain that many of the other respondents will focus on Powell’s content, I want to turn our attention to Powell’s method, and demonstrate why this is an important book for both disability and mainstream theology. I will conclude with a few questions for Powell about the constructive impulses in her work, and where such ponderings can take theologies of disability.

Powell is clear from the start what her book is setting out to do. She begins with Nancy Eiesland’s landmark book The Disabled God: A Liberatory Theology of Disability, and highlights Eiesland’s chapter on the Eucharist as a way of complicating our beliefs about this ancient practice. Of particular importance for both Powell is Eiesland’s emphasis on the bodily nature of communion, particularly the world we embody as we gather around Christ’s broken body. This image of the broken and impaired body of Jesus—the disabled body of Jesus—is one which guides not just Eiesland’s vision of the Eucharist, but also her doctrine of God, which in turn leads to some preliminary thoughts on eschatology. For Eiesland, because Jesus is disabled, so too is God disabled. This image has provided grounds for much reflection in disability theology, and so too is it the case for Powell.

But Powell refuses to leave Eiesland to herself. Rather, in a surprising move, she brings Eiesland into conversation with one side of the infamous “Barth wars,” or, the Trinity vs. election debate. Some may be confused: “What’s a Barth war?” Others may be intrigued. But Powell is clear here: she’s not your old-school Barthian. In fact, she speaks about her misgivings with Barthians, and her experience as a woman studying at Princeton Theological Seminary, whose perspective was often “silenced, talked over, and diminished” by her male peers. So what is it that she’s trying to do?

One ought not be familiar with intra-Barthian debates to understand the force of Powell’s argument. Indeed, Powell sweeps one side of the argument aside to argue in favor of the perspective she finds appealing. Drawing on McCormack’s reading of Barth, Powell suggests that what she found in this side of the debate was a picture of God that resonated with her reading of liberation theology. “Here was a God who takes embodiment seriously, who embraces creaturely life with a depth reaching into the very being of Godself, and who truly identifies with the entire life, ministry, and suffering of Jesus, such that the Son is eternally shaped to be this specific person” (3). She admits that she could care less about which is the “truer” reading of Barth, or in any development of his thought. Rather, here was a compelling picture of God, one worth exploring.

Why raise this all here? Why regurgitate her main points in such a manner? I do so because we need to be clear how surprising of a move this is for Powell to make from both sides. Traditionally, disability theology has not been interested in characters like Barth, and Barth studies has not been interested in contextual or liberative theologies like disability theology. As such, this raises particular challenges for any theological account. Both disciplines have their own language, their own debates, and in some instances, even their own logics. While many readers may be familiar with one or the other, very few would be familiar with both. Thus, making both accessible is no small task. Yet, Powell rises to the challenge and does just that.

However, more than challenge, we find at this intersection opportunity. As Powell herself notes, despite the rapidly increasing corpus in biblical studies, practical theology, and ethics, few works from a disability perspective have been published in constructive theology (17). In this way, Powell is doing something new, or at least uncommon. Hence, we should pay attention to why Powell invokes this intersection of disability theology and Barth studies, and invoke the constructive possibilities inherent therein in reconstructing a doctrine of God.

Rather than rehashing Powell’s argument further than I already have, I want merely to note the way that Powell crescendos her thought, climaxing precisely in the final pages of her short-but-potent book. It is at this point where the constructive impulses of these unlikely bedfellows are illuminated in their fullest. While constructively working out her argument throughout the book, Powell makes her final move to push Eiesland’s claims beyond her own in a turn to eschatology. While Eiesland dreamed of an eschatology in which disabled people retained their impairments, Powell suggests that this isn’t radical enough. Such a reading risks working within a social category which enforces a sort of “normalcy,” in which disabled people continue to be defined via the boundaries of an ableist culture. What is needed is not an eschatology which works within social definitions, but one which disrupts “the ableist underpinnings of our visions of God’s reign” (134).

Powell can only make such a move here because she has spent so much time in the lead-up talking about God. Here, it is not disabled bodies themselves which are the means of liberation. Rather, by redefining her conceptions of God, Powell has widened the possibilities of what liberation looks like, which in turn affects more than just those who currently identify as disabled. This overturning is one which has a broad, intersectional reach, in which liberation is not just for disabled people, but for all. Yet, this is done not by looking away from disabled people, but seeing precisely the constructive potential of rethinking our doctrine of God alongside disabled experiences. Disabled people neither become overlooked, nor the instruments of their own liberation (which would result in the further oppression of people with intellectual disabilities). Powell’s view cannot be distilled in either direction.

I commend Powell for her work, and could continue to go on praising it at length here. However, to further our conversation, I want to camp out on this final point a bit. What we have discovered is that there is something liberatory for all people by positioning the experiences of disabled people alongside the work of towering theological figures like Barth and McCormack. One may expect such an author making such claims to be disabled herself. But Powell is not. Indeed, she begins her book with this confession, that she is writing, in her words, “as an outsider” (1). Some may see this as a critique, others may see it as a move against the further ghettoization of disability theology. But it remains that here, someone who does not identify as disabled (at least at the moment of publication), has found potential for thinking alongside the claims of Eiesland. For the sake of our conversation, I would be curious to hear more, not least because I myself am someone who has been influenced by disability theology, while not personally identifying as disabled.

I say this because of my own struggles within the discipline as such. I have become convinced by arguments that disability is largely a social construct. As a social construct, disability should not be essentialized, and we need to understand the role of the societal gaze in instrumentalizing such identifiers. However, I also recognize that for many, disability remains a helpful identifier, either for accessing funding, finding social belonging, or understanding one’s place in the world. Because of this, I wonder about the end(s) of disability theology. Is this a discipline which has staying power, or do we hope to see the conclusion of it? Or, what is the purpose of thinking with disabled bodies and disabled accounts in theology beyond what has been presented here? Is this (as some have suggested to me) just today’s vogue topic, or is this a locus which demands long-term, sustained engagement? And, I suppose, does it need to have long-term relevance to actually make an important theological contribution today? Or is its power precisely in the notion that it is what needs to be said today? I ask them not in the spirit of critique, but because these are questions that have been asked of me and my own work at various points along the way.

In reality, questions like these matter for the future of theological endeavors, and the way that bodies, narratives, and societies intersect with our understandings of God. But they also matter in a way that recognizes that theology is always located within the greater tradition of thought, for better and for worse. I think that is both what makes the questions matter, and what makes Powell’s work so potent. If we take Powell’s claims seriously, we are led to recognize that by not rethinking the doctrine of God within our liberative theologies, we risk reifying problematic views of God, which then short-circuits pathways toward liberation. What Powell has presented us here is an instrumental account of what can happen when we bring disability theology and Barth studies (or, for our purposes, we could substitute Barth studies for systematic theology more broadly) into direct conversation. Rather than one speaking and the other receiving, both end up drawn into mutual transformation in light of the other. And, in the end, such mutual transformation may best describe what disability theologians have often understood as interdependence.

Lisa Powell powerfully relates Eiesland’s Disabled God to the roles, relationships, and identities within the Trinity. As with many disability theologians, witnessing the resurrected one as the Disabled God resonated profoundly for me, telling me that my disability, the pain and joy of living in my crip body, is known and identified with through God’s very being. Powell extends this, recognizing that Jesus as the Son of God is always disabled, from the beginning of the Trinity’s being, shaping God’s ontological need and capacity for receptivity.

Powell begins her work with a confession, writing as an outsider (with many connections to disability) and recognizing the impact of disability theologies and studies on her work as a liberation theology. I feel like I, too, should begin with a confession. I am hopefully becoming a crip practical theologian, drawn to Eiesland’s focus on access to leadership, and somewhat daunted by the task of this conversation and the impressive theologians on this platform. Yet, I am grateful to stretch myself, in considering how need, vulnerability, and dependency, and how Jesus’s receptivity, are central to the being of God. If receptivity is part of the triune God, from the very beginning of time, and will shape how bodies relate and are continually formed in Christ’s identity in the kingdom, how then are we to live, proclaiming God’s coming kingdom both right in this moment on earth and not yet?

As I read, sit with, and engage Powell’s rich theological contribution, I feel this tension, this push-pull in my bodymind . . .

. . . The push that desires to imagine disability as part of God’s very being and the need to pull away from diving into an action plan upon glimpsing kingdom life on earth. I am reluctant to say we, as disciples of Christ, are called to co-create God’s kingdom . . . as we can never live up to this, and the kingdom is far beyond our imaginations, certainly well beyond the binary-centric ableist white supremacist reality of both church and society as Lisa pointedly argues. And yet, having to wait for the promise of becoming part of Christ, being continually formed in covenant relationship through the Trinity . . . deflates my crip body too. This “elsewhen” of Kafer’s crip futures, of Lisa’s rejections of ableist white supremacy, feels too long to wait for. And I recognize in my white, crip body, the ideal of action and correction.

. . . The pull takes hold of my bodymind once again. In Crip Genealogies, the editors reflect: “The imperative to do something leaves unchallenged the notion that the only thing that matters is action, that one’s impulse to act, to do, to answer, is a good one.”1 Instead, they suggest undoing as a move away from completeness and invite asking, thinking, feeling, incompletely. This resonates with the continual state of becoming that Powell leads her readers to imagine post-resurrection. Perhaps we cannot co-create the kingdom, but perhaps we can continue to dream incompletely, to dream in hope, receptive to God’s actions here and now and to come.

. . . The push that feels pride in believing Jesus knows my body, feels what my body feels, and the pull that recognizes and grieves how trauma, colonialism, settler-colonialism, racism, and war continue to maim bodies around the world. Powell names this tension: “I aim to provide an account of the eschatological life that honors disabled bodies and minds, a future that doesn’t erase impairment in a compulsory able-bodied Edenic restoration, but also doesn’t naively romanticize impairment to elide the presence or struggle” (117). Powell argues that God’s Son, part of God’s very being, is always disabled, dislodging the connection between sin and cross and disability. Her claim that God’s eternal being is directed to incarnation demonstrates a posture of receptivity, dependence, and need which opens God’s experience to my crip body and vice versa. She wonderfully disrupts the false ableist normativity that can be projected onto God and reproduced through human relationships and binaries. The God who experiences need and dependence resonates with my body, in moments of pride and in moments of struggle.

. . . And the pull away from jumping all the way into crip pride and celebration tugs at my bodymind. Like Eiesland and James Cone and other liberation theologians, Powell situates Jesus with the marginalized and traumatized. The Incarnate One is “fully identified with those whose bodies are broken, stigmatized, and persecuted” (58). Powell draws on Copeland’s naming of trauma to resist romanticizing experiences of oppression and physical pain, like those felt in disabled bodies. In recognizing Jesus is always disabled, Powell argues that trauma is not erased by God. For me, Jasbir Puar’s work has been critical for sitting between the pride and love of my disability and the grief and sin of maiming, that is continually reproduced, especially in the two-thirds world. While my bodymind yearns to be detached from sin, it also grieves how bodies continue to be brutalized, causing further debility. Puar focuses on the settler-colonial occupation in Palestine, but this is reproduced in many places where the right to maim is justified, including in policing in North America, complicating any disability pride. She concludes: “Efforts to claim disability as an empowered identity and to address ableism in Palestine will continue to be thwarted until the main source of producing debilitation—the occupation—is ended. The former simply cannot happen without the latter.”2 This call to end cycles of (re)producing debility fits with Powell’s call for radical discontinuity, dismantling the able/disabled binary and moving “radically beyond the structures that currently reward and punish bodies based on norms constructed for economic and political exploitation” (130). A radical discontinuity from violence and oppressive power allows Christians to imagine eschatology as an identity that is continually formed in covenant relationship and community practices, to become part of the complex mutual life in Christ.

. . . The push that honors the dependence, vulnerability, and need of my own crip body and the pull away from being treated as tragic and in need of care . . . I appreciate how Powell asks whose bodies are being dismissed when feminist theologians deny vulnerability. It is true that dependence and vulnerability are qualities that white Western individualistic societies prefer to deny and ignore. Similarly, people may twitch in attaching those characteristics to God. Perhaps, though, the people Powell is critiquing are afraid of naming and experiencing vulnerability. My relationship with vulnerability and dependence is complicated, to say the least. Largely, my family and community protect me from feeling vulnerable, ensuring my needs are adequately met.

. . . And the pull away from recognizing my body needs care. There are moments when fear and grief bubble up in me: when disabled peers die, when attendant care is inconsistent, when I don’t want to ask for what I need (I’m working on that one!) . . . and so, it’s easiest to deny, to pull away from, to protect myself from naming my vulnerability. Yet, that tendency to perform as a supercrip takes its own toll on my body. To distance myself from dependency is to distance myself from my body, from disability and crip communities, and from a God who shatters “autonomy, independence, and power as force as supreme values” (95). Powell rightly criticizes the visions of eschatology, and thus present-day structures, that glorify independence and self-sufficiency (121). Vulnerability need not imply powerlessness or a lack of agency, but rather understands and uses power to destabilize hierarchies. A God who needs is a God I yearn to stay in relationship with, not because I think I can or will fill that need, but rather because it reflects the importance of community.

. . . The push that recognizes receiving care is active rather than passive and the pull that knows agency is constricted for BIPOC, queer, and other marginalized bodies, and care and emphasis on agency can reinforce a capitalistic individualistic model . . . Powell claims that need and dependence create space for receptivity, if it is met with “loving, non-violent, non-dominating care” (112). Witnessing the triune God as receptive to each other, and to humanity through the act of incarnation, wonderfully repositions power and interdependency. It matters to me that Christ’s body needed care and it matters that Christ cared for other bodies. Powell, too, disrupts the heteronormative and ablenormative ideal that care be equal—framing care, instead, as those who give care and those who take it up, generating power together as the unordered Trinity does. The circulation of care, rather than being the unilateral object of care, is far from simple. Akemi Nishida refers to it as “messy dependency”:

Acknowledging and embracing their dependency as a messy, unruly, and wild element that transgresses boundaries, time/space borders, rationality, and logics dovetails with a move toward transgressing the mundane custom of categorizing and de/valuing disabled people against the measurement of independence. Dependence leaks everywhere, every time, and defies the independence-based situating of people into the human-dehuman spectrum.3

While I appreciate the invitation to reflect on care beyond mutuality, as a way of rethinking agency and power, I also don’t want to ignore how the ways my crip body moves through the world is made easier when I am “likeable” and grateful for adequate care.

. . . A pull appears again, away from needing to be liked to ensure I, as an individual, receive care. Nishida explains, “A politics of likeability can bleed into and distract interdependent and caring relationships.”4 Certainly we should be caring and respectful toward one another, but adequate care must not be withheld if someone doesn’t “like” me. In fact, I am having an ongoing struggle with an attendant who is consistently late, reprimands me if I don’t ask how she is (and has stopped asking how I am), and is argumentative if I ask for my care (e.g., brushing teeth) to be done differently. I do have power in taking up care, yes, but at the end (or beginning) of the day, I need my shoes on if I’m going to be able to work, leave the house, etc. This is far from power that destabilizes dominance . . . and yet, I know others have similar and worse stories than mine. My bodymind yearns to be part of a care web Powell describes at the end of her book, but for now, my care web with other crip bodies remains virtual rather than in the flesh. Recognizing need, vulnerability, and dependence in the triune God honors crip bodies, yet it is not always beautiful or simple to live into. There can be glimpses, indeed, but there are reminders that much has to be dismantled or undone, in our living, for Powell and Kafer’s imagining of crip futures to be possible.

These pushes and pulls on my bodymind swirled within me as I read Powell’s powerful theological construction situating vulnerability, need, and dependence within the Trinity. Her final call to become increasingly intertwined, ever replenished in meeting each other’s needs, is a holy service indeed. My bodymind, amidst these tensions, yearns to recognize and experience the dependency, vulnerability, and receptivity that lives within the Trinity, alive in our Christian communities today. By intentionally turning to how Powell’s writing works in my bodymind, I pray others experience the beauty and pain of the Trinity’s need, vulnerability, and receptivity in turning toward their own and other bodyminds as well.

Lisa Powell’s revisited Disabled God is a very welcome theological journeying with Nancy Eiesland’s theological proposal to not simply make theological overtures at hospitality for disabled people, but to engage and articulate theologies from disabled embodiment and perspectives. Eiesland’s disabled God, a God imagined in a sip-puff chair, a God disabled in the crucifixion of Jesus and resurrected as wounded survivor, inaugurated what we can now discern as a field of “disability theology” within a discipline and its intersections. I often wondered what conversations with Nancy Eiesland might have been like had she been around longer to develop more of her theological trajectories. I wonder if she, like Powell, would have noted and lamented the scarcity of creative theological interventions in doctrines. I celebrate important engagements from practical theology and biblical studies, that investigate communal responses and responsibilities toward people with disabilities, and critical textual studies exploring the range of disabilities in texts and contexts. Though in terms of theological imagination, much of disability theology has remained focused on liberating theological anthropologies (which are crucial!) and on how to reshape communal living based in such visions of being human. With very few exceptions, Eiesland’s call to radically re-imagine God as disabled has been repeated, but not much heeded. One of the few exceptions emerged in Deaf Liberation Theology that imagines a Deaf God (though perhaps more accurately put, a God who signs and does not privilege hearing or oralism). Perhaps some of this can be explained via the critique directed at Eiesland, as Powell notes, namely the risk of naturalizing debilitation (disablement caused by violence, personal and structural), but also the uneasy reading of Jesus as part of the human disability community and, well, his overcoming (resurrection, glorification—a sort of re-ablement?). But with all the valid critiques leveled at Eiesland (and responded to constructively by Powell), I am still wondering if much of the resistance (refusal?) to flesh out anything other than a God who is at most removed-from-and/or-overcoming-of-disability, or at least wounded-but-now-beyond-disability might be grounded in a deeply embedded linkage between cognition/mental normalcy and potence. Because by far the strongest resistance I have encountered to a disabled God (in students and scholars alike) is not to a wounded or physically impaired Jesus, but resistance to imagining the experience of cognitive-emotional impairment and disability in the story of Jesus and keeping it there even post-resurrection and redemption. While we might imagine God’s experiences of trauma and impairment (via incarnation in Jesus), and thus God’s desire and ability to suffer-with, a God with cognitive deficits or emotional difficulties appears to be a no-go zone for the theological imagination. For example, John Swinton (whose critique of Eiesland is employed in Powell’s book), in response to embodied experiences of dementia, constructs an (omnicogniscient? hypercognitive?) God whose memory holds our self and personhood. Or on a gut-level response, the resistance is like that of one of my students, who exclaimed, “I’m already anxious enough, so what good is an anxious God to me?” It seems that a desire for a potent/omnipotent God then is not threatened by wounds or physical limits, but definitely by any cognitive or mental limitations.

As Powell observes, Eiesland herself focused explicitly on physical impairments as the site of encountering and understanding God, at the exclusion of other disabilities, notably intellectual disability and mental/emotional differences. In here lies my first (of three) curiosities brought to my conversation with Powell: Can we go there? Can her theological proposal, in what she imagines a triune God to be, take us to a differently disabled God? Can Powell’s disabled God who is in covenantal relationship, a God whose being is constituted as/in relation, a God who in Jesus is engaged in receptivity, called to vulnerability and gifted with care, . . . can this God experience, embody, exist with intellectual and/or emotional disabilities? Is it imaginable, and even more than that, liberating, to construct a God with Down syndrome, an anxious or autistic God, . . . ? What does it look like, as Powell via Eiesland suggests, when/if all mental and emotional differences are in God through the receptivity of Jesus’ humanity? Powell, with Eiesland, notes that a Jesus Christ who needs care and mutuality (such as an embodied God with cognitive impairments) does not have to symbolize powerlessness but constitutes relationality and interdependence (127). I’m all for this kind of conceptualization of the divine, and yet I am left wondering where in this constellation the experiences of cognitive and emotional disability emerge and how, if not more heavily on the human (and not divine) interrelation. And perhaps, this is where we need to expand our imagination away from an anthropomorphized God, whilst also not simply disembodying the divine (i.e., in God as the Ground of Being, or as myself have experimented with in imaging God as the In-Between, the Desire that enables but not subsumes difference). So I am curious to imagine God from all kinds of disability experiences with Powell.

Another point of curious engagement for me is in Powell’s exploration of a disability eschatology. She takes up Eiesland’s proposal that impairments will remain post-resurrection (with Jesus as the prototype of a resurrected body) and imagines a transformation (not deletion) of disabilities, but not as overcoming/healing, but as transforming the normate/disabled binary identity construction. Leaning on crip and trans insights, Powell imagines a continual webbing into mutual life (rather than a static future ontology). I welcome this theological construction, because of the creative weaving together of crip and trans contributions with disability concerns, and it moves disability theology forward in removing a fixed futurity from our hopes of liberation. And as a side note: Is this perhaps where some of the answer to my above question can be found? I am curious what Lisa Powell might think. But my question on the theme of resurrection and liberation is: I wonder if utilizing Deborah Creamer’s limits model might have been another critical and useful piece to weave in here. Since Powell makes use of Creamer’s work in framing Eiesland’s work and disability theology as a field, Creamer’s contribution to theological anthropology with the limits model of disability could enrich our conversation here. Because embodied limits are normal to the human experience, and this inescapability is also the site of our interdependence and potentiality for relationship. I wonder if thinking through embodied limits together with nonlinear transing of identity and bodies in shifting communities would add a constructive strand into this tapestry Powell weaves with her disability eschatology. It might help us envision ourselves resurrected beyond a non/disabled binary without erasing limits that are identity-shaping and yet in need of care and transformation of relationships.

And my last curiosity: I wonder about Powell’s statement that we receive our identity in Christ by being engrafted into “the disabled Jewish flesh of Jesus.” She does not explore much in this volume the complex and even fraught Christian theological tendency to read ourselves into Jesus’ Jewishness (though she importantly notes that this anti-Jewish supersessionism is part of the critique against her interlocutor Barth). Jewish-Christian relations are not the focus of her book, and when she does attend to Jesus’ embodied context she notes with Eiesland and others the importance of contextualizing Jesus’ disfigurement as stigmatized, poor Jew at the hands of empire and state-sanctioned violence. Powell leans on J. Kameron Carter’s exploration of locating Christian identity in a covenantal, eschatological identity, which enables Christians to root their theological identity in a Jewish body that signals openness outside of racial categories. But I wonder what Powell would say if she had more space to explore this ever-lurking supersessionist tendency in Christian theologies. I recognize the potential of linking Jewish and disabled in the flesh of Jesus to remind Christians of the context of Jesus’ embodied experiences, and locating in this link a new identity, one based in a community of call and relationship (beginning with Abram), an identity marked by openness, by a continual journey toward and into community with others and God. But I wonder if a disability theology that also tackles anti-Jewish supersessionism wouldn’t be more constructively served then if we forego once and for all, or at least pull back for now, from the notion of “grafting.” For one, it might be constructive for Christian theologies to figure out what to do with a Jewish Jesus without having to make him our own (or make us his own / adopted flesh). Perhaps we can go there again sometime, but for now, in this world we live in, maybe we could see what kind of Christologies can emerge without this intense linking and imagery of absorbing of / being absorbed into Jewishness—because in the end, the visions of eschatological liberation seem to still be remarkably dominated by redeemed Christian flesh. Again, I don’t think this is what Powell is doing (falling into a trap of supersessionism), I just wonder if her Christology is possible, perhaps constructively so, without becoming flesh of Jewish flesh.

With gratitude for Lisa Powell’s critical and constructive contribution, and with curiosity and hope for more disability theologies to come.

Introduction

When I first heard that Lisa Powell had just written a book on disability theology that had drawn heavily on my (still-emerging) theological ontology . . . well, I was as surprised to learn that she had done that as she clearly was in doing it! My own surprise was occasioned not so much by the thought that my work might have some relevance for disability theology as by the fact that Lisa would be the person to show this to be the case. Her interests, back when I knew her well, were in Latin American liberation theology and spirituality. We were good friends for a time, in spite of the fact that I was a Barth scholar; certainly not because of it!

In any event, I could not say no to an invitation to participate in a Syndicate-style symposium on her book. Though I had not read the landmark studies in disability theology and was not conversant with its debates and its critical but hopeful engagement with other forms of liberation theology, I was sure Powell and I would be able to find things to talk about—and that Syndicate would provide us a good vehicle for doing this since they actively discourage the writing of “reviews.” And I was right, as it turns out.

In reading Powell’s work, I was pleased to find that she was not merely drawing upon work I have done but doing it in the most responsible way; i.e., taking ownership of the ideas she borrowed, making them her own and using them for her own purposes. In the process, she was offering some additions and corrections which fell on already prepared soil where I was concerned. And that requires a bit of explanation.

The truth is that the corrections I discovered Powell to be making were corrections I had already been forced to make as a consequence of ongoing dialogue with Alexandra Pârvan, a Romanian philosopher. When I completed the final draft of my Christology and submitted it to CUP in January 2021, I sent it to my Romanian friend. She immediately began working on my definition of “Reformed kenoticism” as the “ontological receptivity” of the eternal Son to Jesus in their (ongoing) “hypostatic uniting.” Though finding the basic Christological model by which I tried to explain all of this to be interesting (because new and creative), she too saw clearly the need for extensions and corrections. But in her case, she carried them out by elaborating a new theory of the “erotic” with whose assistance she demonstrated to me the need for changes in my basic model and how to flesh out the central concept of the eternal Son’s “ontological receptivity” through consideration of its “how.”1 It is relevant here to point out that her concept of eros was as wide as that of the Greeks. Erotic desire, for her, is in play whenever a relation is characterized by anticipation, longing, appearance and disappearance, intermittent and incomplete fulfillments. So defined, it can help us to “see” the relation of human subjects to a wide variety of less than fully attainable “objects”; in art, e.g., to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Vincent Van Gogh (to mention only a couple of obvious examples); in music, the relation of audiences to the original interpretation given by a great conductor to an equally great composition; in sport, the relation of Lionel Messi’s adoring fans to his ever-new, ever-surprising enactments of on-field artistry. The crucial point to be made in the context of this symposium is this: “sexuality” is but one possible manifestation of the erotic among many—and probably not the most important one.

Since publishing this piece, Pârvan has written two more.2 She has done so this time while drawing upon understandings of the poet’s relation to nature (most especially)—found both in Romantic poetry and in the philosophical fragments produced by the Romantic movement (1790s to 1880s)—in order to theorize the reciprocal “engagement” by Jesus of the Son’s “receptivity.” In any event, her resources in thinking through my theological problems were philosophical and literary (with visual arts hovering in the background)—rather than literature on disability, sexuality, and gender as is the case with Powell. It is also the case that Powell is more interested in the implications of my understanding of an eternal kenosis for the doctrine of the Trinity, while Pârvan has addressed herself more strictly to Christology. But the overlap in results is remarkable.

In what follows, I want to stay with Powell’s focus on Trinity initially and then return to the Christological in order to further grounding and support for her much needed work in disability studies.

The Formation of Trinitarian Dogma Historically Contextualized

Anyone who has acquired a deep familiarity with patristic scholarship treating of the emergence of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity knows how significant the concept of divine simplicity was for the construction of the church’s dogma of the Trinity. By the first half of the third century, simplicity had become a “regulative principle,” a “formal feature” of the Christian understanding of God’s “being”3—such that nothing could be said with respect to any other topic pertaining to the doctrine of God (even on the topic of Trinity) that was not controlled decisively by the prior commitment to simplicity.

But simplicity is a harsh task-master. For it to be sustained, acceptance of certain necessary entailments was required: impassibility, an “immutability” defined as “changelessness,” incorporeality, uniqueness, incomprehensibility—and a concept of “unity” whose meaning also had to be carefully controlled by simplicity. In addition, it was necessary to absolutize all other terms thought to be rightly applied to God—above all, eternity (as transcending time and so, as timelessness) and immensity (as transcending space and so, as spacelessness), but also those which emerge in discussion of God’s relation to the world (i.e., omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence). Such absolutizing made the distinction between “uncreated being” and “created being” itself to be absolute. All of this was firmly in place before the Arian controversy brought about deeper investigation into the doctrine of the Trinity. And the often overlooked fact is that all sides to the controversies that unfolded between Nicaea I and Constantinople I presupposed this understanding. The differences between those deemed heretical and those eventually acknowledged to be “orthodox” had to do with differing strategies for securing the received God-concept within the realm of trinitarian thinking. What was clear was that Origen’s assignment of simplicity to the Father alone, thereby rendering the Son capable of composition, was no longer acceptable. Part of the reason was, of course, Origen’s idea of the pre-existence of the soul of Jesus, but it was more than that. Among those who would eventually define the dogma of the Trinity, a “co-equality” of “persons” was now de rigueur—above all, in the West. And so the trick was now to explain the eternal processions (i.e., the generation of the Son and the breathing-forth of the Spirit) in ways that did not conflict with three co-equal “persons.”

The idea of “perichoresis,” when it was added, was the most clearly “sexed” idea in later Neo-Chalcedonian elaborations of the orthodox dogma (since it meant the indwelling of each member of the Trinity “in” the other two). But when that took place, simplicity and co-equality were again decisive for insisting that all “inter-penetration” (in whichever directions) had to be purely “spiritual” and altogether mutual.

Where does this leave us? It is certainly not a mistake to say that the trinitarian dogma—once formulated—could be, has been, and continues to be appealed to in an effort to ground and justify patriarchy, heterosexism, the marginalization of the disabled, etc. But we must at least acknowledge that this was not and still today is not a necessary step to take. The relation of ideas, one to another, is not like the relation of mathematical concepts. It is rarely the case that if you say x you must say y (unless y has already been built into the definition of x). Most of the time, a dogmatic proposition makes other propositions possible—but if only possible and not necessary then it is equally possible (and quite often the most responsible thing to do!) to reject many if not most of these possibilities.

We must also keep in mind, however, that the very thing that has long functioned as a hedge against the possibility that justification for dominating relations amongst humans might be sought in the dogma of the Trinity was itself a tenuous addition. I refer of course to the added concept of “co-equality.” To be sure, the co-equality in question was rooted in the logic of substance metaphysics, consisting in the insistence that Father, Son, and Spirit all share fully and completely the same “essence” or “substance.” What made this addition tenuous was the fact that it never had a clear warrant in Scripture. The same Gospel in which the saying could be found “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30) also depicted the relation of Jesus in whom the Word became flesh in terms of subjection and obedience (John 6:38). The writer was, it must quickly be added, no metaphysician—and it is likely that the “oneness” of which Jesus is made here to speak refers more nearly to an agreement of wills between two asymmetrically related persons than to a metaphysical unity of being. And that is what makes the addition tenuous.

It does not help that the idea of simplicity presupposed in the construction of the dogma entails an understanding of divine “incomprehensibility” that places the entire construct’s capacity to defend itself against misuse in jeopardy. I do not want to start a fight here over apophaticism, so I will simply say this much. The apophatic makes God ultimately unknowable—a common enough phrase which wants not to deny all knowledge of God but to qualify every claim to it. For if God is ultimately unknowable, then there is no claim about God which is immune to the charge of hubris. And if that is the case, then the relation between the apophatic and the so-called kataphatic must always be an asymmetrical one; indeed, radically so, since the negations of the creaturely must always come first in order to secure simplicity. With those negations already in place, how far can positive affirmations reach? Can what are called “analogies” really be analogies? My point here is not to argue about this (in fact, I will refuse to do so in this forum). My point is that the ancient metaphysical conception of God as simple, impassible, etc. can just as easily promote relations of subjection as relations of reciprocity and respect, because the co-equality of trinitarian persons was never a necessary conclusion to draw. It was but a possible one. Based on the metaphysics alone, Origen might have been right. And co-equality, precisely as a possible but not necessary metaphysical adornment, can hardly prevent a slide back into various forms of subordination in the understanding of trinitarian relations.

Efforts to shore up co-equality in recent years have only created new problems. The strategy employed by Leonardo Boff and, subsequently, by Linn Tonstad, to jettison the language of “procession” (i.e., eternal generation and eternal spiration), has made it possible to suggest that each person of the Trinity is the origin of the other two.4 The result has been the construction of a kind of perpetual motion machine; eternalized inter-trinitarian relations as perfectly balanced inter-circulation (which comports even more obviously to the demands of simplicity, etc. even more than the original co-equality had done). But this is surely an instance of a speculative theology which knows of no constraints. Certainly, it places the dogma at the further possible remove from the witness of the NT by stripping it of every last one of its biblical elements. I say that for the following reason.

The most famous term employed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 in speaking of the relation of the Son to the Father was extra-biblical: the much discussed homoousios. But at least in the Creed, this term was surrounded by a host of biblical elements: the distinction between “one God, the Father” and “one Lord, Jesus Christ” (which calls to our minds the re-working of the Shema carried out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:6); the use of monogenē in relation to the Son to underscore that distinction; the naming of the eternally generated Son “Jesus Christ” (which ties him, as generated, to the flesh to be assumed, even before the subject of incarnation has been introduced); “true God,” yes, but “true God from [ek]” “true God”; “through whom all things came into existence” (again, a reminder of 1 Corinthians 8:6 but with a further distinction between all things being “from” [ek] the Father and “through” [dia] the Son Jesus Christ); the language of “coming down” from heaven (used in John’s Gospel in close proximity to the language of “sending”—John 6:37–38, 51; cf. John 3:16); the use of ekporeuómenon to speak of the Spirit’s relation to the Father (from John 15:26). There is more, but this much must be sufficient.

Taking a step back, the language of generation and procession are so basic to the primitive (i.e., not yet metaphysical) trinitarianism of John’s Gospel that we must surely misinterpret passages like John 10:30 and the whole of John 17 if we read them in the absence of the relations established in these terms. Strip the Creed of them while ignoring all of the other biblical elements which are suggestive of an element of subordination and all you are left with is the homoousios—which I guess was the goal all along. But, then, the Creed, in this desiccated form, has become something of a Platonic city, floating in the clouds and never touching ground in biblical soil.

Lisa Powell has chosen to root her disability theology in a very differently formed trinitarianism. Her doctrine of the Trinity is grounded in a Christology which carries out a thorough revision of the received dogma in that area of reflection first, before using it to ground her constructive reflections on the doctrine of the Trinity. That, I think, is a wholly salutary thing to do where method is concerned. And it has made possible a critical engagement between her disability theology on the one side and feminist and queer theologies (with which she otherwise shares a great deal in common) on the other side. What I want to do now is to turn to a close examination of her Christological model with its focus on divine vulnerability. That will lead me quite naturally to a discussion of the fruitfulness of her model for disability theology and especially for envisioning life-giving relations between caregivers and those being offered care.

Powell’s Christology: Receptivity, Vulnerability, and Engagement

I call the receptivity of the Son “ontological” because I understand the determination for incarnation to be proper to him. And because the Jesus with whom he will be joining himself in time is already given to him in that eternal generation by which both are “constituted” together as the second “person” of the Trinity, the second “person” is the “Son-Jesus.” The hyphen in that naming stands for that which is ontologically most fundamental: the eternal relation which gives rise immediately to “hypostatic uniting.” I could also say that the name of the second “person” of the Trinity is “Jesus Christ” and I would have said the same thing.5 To the question, how can the Son be receptive to Jesus before Jesus appears in time? Pârvan answers that his desire for Jesus is even more heightened when Jesus is not yet or only intermittently “present” to him. The physical presence of Jesus is not needed for affective uniting to be taking place because, again, it is the relation which is ontologically basic. And so, I repeat: the name of the second “person” of the Trinity is “Jesus Christ” (the God-human). Receptivity—and as we shall see, “engagement”—is an ongoing actualization of the eternal relation joining the Son to Jesus.

Not all of this was said in my published Christology but I suspect Powell will approve. But now, she has an important addition and two corrections to make in relation to my proposal. First, the addition.

For the sake of the disability theology she is constructing, it is very important for her to be able to say:

The logos incarnandus, the Word to be flesh, then is specifically the Logos anticipating the assumption of broken flesh, and a body that is outcast, rejected, and persecuted by social, religious, and political institutions. This, in the final analysis, is specifically who the Logos is; and this is the original free decision of God’s self-determination and constitution: to be a human on the fringe, a human stigmatized, who suffers in the body, and also suffers the psychological and emotional pain of rejection and isolation. . . . This is the flesh anticipated from eternity. It is not just that Jesus retained a broken body, so that the humanity of God is ever after a wounded, enfleshed humanity. . . . God in God’s second way of being has always been anticipating a disabled body. The eternal primal identity of the Son is not the logos asarkos, and is not even the logos incarnandus, but more specifically is the logos incarnandus fractus (the word going to be in broken flesh). (79)

Powell is certainly not the first to “particularize” the anticipated flesh; others have made this move before her—most notably, perhaps, Karl Barth with his oft-repeated insistence that the anticipated flesh is Jewish flesh.6 But Powell has taken a significant step forward by insisting that the anticipated flesh is the broken flesh of Jesus of Nazareth.

In defining the second “person” of the Trinity in terms of anticipated impairment, Powell has bid farewell to the idea of divine self-sufficiency. God is not impassible; God can be acted upon. And if God is, nonetheless, “immutable,” it is only in the sense identified by Justo Gonzalez: “if there is any sense in which the God of the Bible can be described as ‘immutable,’ this has nothing to do with impassibility or ontological immobility, but rather with the assurance that ‘God’s steadfast love endureth forever’” (72). With this addition and the just-made clarification, I can happily agree. Powell is right in my view to speak of God as the “disabled God.”

But, now, she ventures to offer at least two corrections to my construction of the eternal identity of the Son-Jesus, the first having to do with “vulnerability” and the second having to do with “need.”

I should begin by acknowledging that my Christological model was held back by vestiges (unrecognized by me) of the older, classical metaphysics that I had in theory set aside but which snuck back in whenever the subject of the Son’s knowledge of what he would receive from Jesus reared its head.7 I had a decided tendency to retain “foreknowledge” in the Son, a knowing in advance of all that would come to him from the side of Jesus in order to . . . what? To preserve in the Son the very sort of “immutability” (as changelessness) that I had rejected??? Part of my confusion had to do with a second vestige of classical metaphysics at work in my thinking, viz., the assumption that one needed a fixed set of “common properties” (shared equally by the three persons) if there was to be unity in the Trinity. But the “unity” I unconsciously presupposed could only be purchased from the abstract metaphysical understanding of divine “essence” I had also rejected. Pârvan it was who first helped me to see the incongruities remaining in my model. I have had to acknowledge that where what is coming from Jesus to the Son is already known by the latter, receptivity is a charade; nothing can be given to the Son by Jesus that he does not have already. But that would then yield no receptivity at all. No, for receptivity to be real, the Son cannot know what Jesus will do or experience before he himself does and experiences it as receptive to Jesus.8 But that means, then, the idea of “common properties” is as deeply problematic as the metaphysics which funded it. The “unity” of the triune God will also have to be differently conceived; a subject for another occasion. In any case, Powell is right: with real receptivity comes vulnerability . . . and even risk (when seen in the right light).

So wherein precisely does vulnerability and risk lie? In receptivity, yes. But can we say more? I begin here: why is the Holy Spirit poured out upon Jesus in his baptism in the Jordan? If it were the case that the eternal Son was hypostatically united to Jesus (in the sense of a “union” made complete in the womb of the Virgin), such that the Son could act through and upon a Jesus “hypostasized” in himself, there would be no need for the Spirit’s ministry in the life of Jesus; no need for the Spirit to reveal the Father to him, to lead and guide him, to empower him for human achievements above the ordinary but still within range of the creaturely. In truth, the outpouring of the Spirit would have been rendered superfluous to requirements because all of these divine activities in relation to Jesus would more naturally (due to the “hypostatic union”) be performed by the Son. The outpouring itself would have been reduced to a “sign” testifying to the sonship of Jesus—certainly a possible reading of the baptism narratives taken in isolation. But, then, we would have to acknowledge that all other reports of the Spirit’s ministry to Jesus in the Synoptics especially are simply false, inventions of the primitive church(es). So if it is not a later invention when Jesus is reported to have taught in the synagogue in Nazareth that “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” and then concludes “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” then a real problem is created for defenders of “hypostatic union” in its classical form. For Luke will go on to depict the Spirit as the power by which Jesus casts out demons and heals the blind (Luke 12:28; 28:35–43). It is not the Son who does this, but the Spirit.9

Now if it is the Spirit who lifts Jesus above his fellows, enabling him to do extraordinary things, then we have already learned that vulnerability and risk, though quite real, ought not to be absolutized or even just generalized about. Jesus is not left to his own devices. He is free—and indeed, spontaneously free—to obey or not to obey, to respond to the call given to him through the Spirit or not to respond. But the fact that the Spirit rested “upon” Jesus would have to have the effect of at least reducing the risk. In any event, the Spirit’s ministry in the life of Jesus makes ever so much more sense when “hypostatic union” is replaced by ongoing “hypostatic uniting” and receptivity.

I won’t say much here about Powell’s talk of the Son’s reliance upon the Spirit’s work “in” Jesus as evidence of “need, a weakness even, in God the Son” (96)—mostly because I think there are more important matters needing attention. “Need” is a complicating conception since it almost inevitably implies a lack. But what is lacking to the Son if it is the case that his telos lies in “hypostatic uniting” and that he is, therefore, constantly completing himself through the actualization of a “unity” that is both real but never his secure possession? This is not the set of conditions which we typically use the term “need” to describe. I would prefer myself to rest content with the Son’s “desire” or “longing” for Jesus.

I come then to “engagement.” This is actually Pârvan’s word but it describes perfectly the conditions of the giving and receiving of care as described by Powell when drawing on the work of Eva Kittay (154–57). “Engagement” is a description of a qualified reciprocity between two asymmetrically related individuals with “gifts” flowing from each to the other. I made a mistake in my Christology of insisting that all the traffic flows from the human to the Son and never in the opposite direction. That I could do this reflects once again the residual presence in my thinking of the classical metaphysical conception of divine power as “omnipotence” such that any act performed by the Son upon Jesus would, by definition, be an exercise of omnipotence which would cancel out spontaneous human activity. Pârvan challenged this for reasons closely akin to Powell’s when appropriating Kittay’s work. What I am learning from both is the need to reconstruct the Christian understanding of divine power (its limits and uses) from the ground up.

As related by Powell, Kittay is interested in what happens to both caregivers and those cared for in their encounters. There is, Kittay maintains, a kind of “reciprocation” that can arise when certain conditions are met. The first condition is that caregivers understand their care as for the other and do not see it as an act done to the other. Care must not be imposed or forced upon the one to whom care is offered, and care must be received as care by the recipient of the offered assistance. But care can be resisted and even rejected, especially where mental impairment is involved. The kind of “intermittence” described by Pârvan’s erotic theory can occur in these encounters too. And there are times when the intermittence arises from the side of the caregiver—when, for example, his/her/their work takes place in the midst of a break-down of, or, in the worst cases, the absence of a support network that cares for the caregiver as well. But when conditions are optimal, when the offer of care is the expression of love and it is gladly received as such, then something further can happen. The “dependent” one can also become a giver of “gifts” (156). Kittay “acknowledges herself as a recipient of her daughter Sesha’s giving as well. She calls the lessons she’s recorded in her book Love’s Labor the direct product of ‘Sesha’s gentle tutoring’ of her.” She says, “I will continue to learn from my daughter, from those who share her mothering with me, and from . . . this remarkable relationship . . .” (156–57).

Powell is interested in this context with the implications of this evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity. She writes here with great economy: “Much disability theology, including what I am developing here, places value on forms of inter-dependence for human life and for the triune life, typically by way of a perichoresis of the divine being, pouring out life to others and receiving life from others. This perichoresis sounds fully symmetrical and reciprocal. Covenant ontology on the other hand shifts this emphasis as there is a vulnerability across the life of God and some forms of dependency, but it is not an equal mode of receptivity or reliance on another” (155). I could wish that Powell had said more about this: “perichoresis” too requires substance metaphysics to get off the ground. Powell seems here to be critical only of a form of it. But my real interest lies elsewhere—in what the experiences reported by Kittay have to contribute to Christology—and, specifically, to an exploration of the “how” of “hypostatic uniting.” This is a topic Powell leaves unexplored. But Pârvan has addressed this problem and has done so in ways that help us to imagine what Powell’s disability theology might have to offer to Christology as well.

To speak of Jesus as “engaging” the Son’s receptivity is to suggest that Jesus knows that he exists in a relation to the Son that results in a “hypostatic uniting” that is continuously taking place. He knows that the Son relates to him “receptively”; he knows that he is made “one person” with the Son. If he did not, there could be no real uniting.

Without this responsiveness on the part of Jesus, the Son’s receptivity could not be the uniting principle in the God-human, because in receptivity the Son would do something on his own, separately from Jesus, rather than do something in concert with Jesus and for both sides of the person. Uniting requires a measure of sharing, and if that which only one of the two does decides that the two are brought together, then the sharing is absent. Jesus would carry out his human life on his own, and it would be transferred into the Son through the latter’s hidden receptivity—thus, in the second person, there would be two separate sequences, with no connection (or mutual acknowledgment) of the two undertakings making sense together. This is no unity.10

I hope that readers can hear echoes of the central tendency of Cyril’s Christology to overcome separation and establish unity—albeit now in the categories of a Romantically-funded “psychological ontology.” But there is more.

Engaging also means that Jesus acts for the Son (and not just on the Son) insofar as he knows that his events and life are received into the divine. . . . He knows that what he does, what he goes through . . . throughout all his mission are not his alone to bear. This means that in and by his very receiving the Son acts on Jesus—and here the paradox of love appears again: acting out of love is never sheer activity. As in any good relation, neither Jesus’ nor the Son’s are sheer actions or sheer passive states.11

What is really exciting in these reflections on receptivity and engagement is the Romantic contribution to understanding the “unity” that emerges “in-between” the two (to use Pârvan’s phrase). Not in just one (as the an– and enhypostasia had it) but “in between” so that both are transformed (“made one”) by their joining. And so: “romantic unity is reached not just in one member of the relation but between them, and that ‘in-between’ also means ‘beyond each of them,’ for the unity achieved—just as that in the God-human—is not a mere summing up, a ‘1 + 1’ addition.”12

If, now, we think back on Eva Kittay’s relation with her daughter Sesha, we can now see that something special occurred “in-between” them. A unity was generated in a highly actualistic way that reached beyond both but was the result of gifts being given by each to the other precisely in an asymmetrical relation. Does this Christological reflection have anything to contribute to the dignity and, indeed, emerging identity of disabled persons? I think it does.

Covenant Ontology and the Resurrected Life

What can theology contribute to our understanding of resurrected life? No one living today has ever seen a resurrected body; a resuscitated corpse, perhaps, but not a resurrected body. And the reports provided in the NT of Jesus’ resurrected body are not entirely congruent one with another (he eats but is able to pass through locked doors?) such that we could form a reliable picture. Is “eschatological imagination” (190) all that we have left? The protest Powell raises against “ableist presumptions” in the current efforts to imagine resurrected life and her warning that much of it is still afflicted by a “celebration of self-sufficiency” (fully realized independence as the characteristic condition of life) seems just and right to me. Powell writes: “The future I envision is a celebration not of particular embodiments disabled or otherwise”—about which, I might add, we can have no certainty—“but a journey into the glorification or perfection of mutual care, interdependence, and vulnerability” (191). But is “envisioning” enough for a solid hope? Christology has much to offer at this point.

“Hypostatic uniting” of the sort I have described in this essay cannot and need not come to an end in the eschaton. The self-revelation of the triune God will continue to be mediated through the “Son-Jesus” in the eschaton. The NT knows nothing of a “beatific vision” of a divine “essence.” But it does know something of a living encounter with the resurrected Jesus Christ (the “Son-Jesus”). “Beloved, we are God’s children now, what we will be has not yet been revealed. . . . What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). When he is revealed, not a divine “essence.” When he is revealed: the need for revelation still exists in the eschaton. As he is: living in ongoing, transformative uniting such that revelation to us still takes place through his flesh but does so in a new and fresh history. And so I say yes to Powell’s vision for the future.

Lisa Powell’s The Disabled God Revisited is a breath of fresh air. Creativity, particularity, argument-making, and a living sense that there are stakes at stake in theological reflection: these are all features devoutly to be wished and when found, as here, appreciated. Powell risks (and has already received) critique from those who like nothing and know even less of that which calls itself queer in theology, but her synthesis of disability theology with crip theory and recent Christological and trinitarian debates proves an exciting addition to theologies that refuse to accept the siloing of systematic from constructive and liberation theology.

Moving from Powell’s introductory invocation of Nancy Eiesland’s Disabled God and perennially present(ist) envisionings of heavenly embodiment to the inspiration she finds in Barth-establishment scholastic imaginings of logical priorities in the eternal life of God places the reader immediately in a theological terrain that has not yet become encampment. (For me, the latter also brings rather dark memories of my graduate school days in the first decade of this century, when it seemed taken for granted that new entries into the bibliographies of the “Barth and election debate” would be pored over, analyzed, and responded to as though they were the avant-garde of academic theological thought.) That Powell situates her time at Princeton Theological Seminary as one spent outside the then-dominant establishment scholasticism whose boring dudeliness she acknowledges allows at least this reader the patience and willingness to place exasperated familiarity with that debate at a remove, and to consider anew not so much the debate itself but what Powell finds vitalizing in it. That Barth-and-liberation-theology has become its own industry should not impede examination of how Powell’s highly creative synthesis enables theological insights worth having. (You might think, upon reading this paragraph, that I do not like Barth; there’s not a trace of truth in such a conclusion, but Barthians taken as a group are anything other than enabling of Christian theology’s best and most urgent possibilities, as Barthians [starting with Barth, who was famously not a Barthian] even themselves occasionally acknowledge.)

As we will see, among the pressing methodological questions Powell’s book touches on is one, seldom recognized explicitly as such, that we might term association or permission, with its correlate stipulation. When do theological associations permit sanctifications we wish to resist, even if the sanctification is not necessitated by the association? To what extent do stipulative assertions—or, more generously, telling theological stories like whose plot is sequencing in the divine life—protect against undesirable consequences, or enable desirable ones, elsewhere in a theological system? The example of the former perhaps most widely encountered in theology classrooms in the United States today is Delores Williams’s rejection of the salvific effects of the cross on the basis that it sanctifies unjust and violent forms of surrogacy experienced by Black women by sanctifying surrogacy as such. Pertinent to Powell’s concerns, does denying that God depends on creation sanctify the fiction of masculinist independence by divinizing it? In both stipulative and storytelling forms, we might name the myriad theological attempts to associate God ever more closely with vulnerability and suffering, so that vulnerability and suffering will not render human life foreign to a blissed-out sovereign God for whom they are of no ultimate significance. Not a little of our labor as theologians is spent tracing these itineraries, examining their plausibility and implications in order to feel out the extent to which we are weighting evidence similarly, exploring dissimilar strategies, or whether we find similar means or overlapping ends more conducive to the experience of participating in a shared theological conversation.

Even were Powell’s book of less intrinsic interest than it is, it would be a worthy entry into our contemporary navigation of these matters, since it maps out a less-trodden itinerary that disentangles possibilities often assumed to belong together. In modeling her own path for readers, she invites readers to develop or examine their own networked map models anew, not least because she (in the main) gives account of her reasons for assessing evidence as convincing, or adopting one claim rather than another, quite transparently.

Following her lead leaves me wanting to hear her think further and more explicitly about a few questions. The first pertains generally to models that give ontological priority to divine covenantal self-determination, but more forcefully to those that, like Powell’s, use that ontological priority to insist on the reality of vulnerability and risk-taking in God’s eternal being. Perhaps due to my oft-acknowledged literalness as a reader, I cannot quite follow how the model accomplishes what it seeks. Powell grounds divine “receptivity, dependence, and need” (associated primarily with the Son) in “God’s primordial self-determining decision” (41). The “original free decision of God’s self-determination and constitution” is to be destined for brokenness (57). Here, it seems that the typical advantage of supralapsarian Christology is simply given up, since sin and death are rendered absolutely necessary for God’s self-realization. But what I find genuinely confusing, perhaps even incomprehensible, is how grounding risk, vulnerability, and dependence in an original free divine decision undermines the ultimate priority of self-making or what one might, should one so desire, call autonomy or the self-determining subject who makes, um, himself as he pleases. I struggle to see what is gained on such an account that is not gained more easily and directly by acknowledging that vulnerability, dependence, and risk are ineluctable aspects of human existence that invite neither sanctification nor despite. For Kathryn Tanner, her principle of non-contrastive transcendence requires that the contrasts can be radicalized in both directions rather than one (as also in Barth, if not read through McCormack). For Pseudo-Dionysius, God is in some sense beyond even similarity and difference with creation. Images of God are ultimately undone in a way that relativizes any hold conceptualization is taken to have on God. In both, one retains the essential point that the ultimate dependence of all on God is the condition of our freedom to embrace a God who loves in freedom, freely. Dependence is the condition of human freedom, enabled by a God who simply, freely, loves us. Why is divine dependence on us necessarily more effective in undermining fictions of masculinist independence than our utter dependence on God is in the first place?

Which raises another matter for all of us who envision the being of God in our writing. If we are concerned with overvaluing autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency—that is, we wish to erect bulwarks against grandiosity and its destructive temptations—how can the material practice of rewriting the ontological constitution of God in highly technical and assertive ways serve the ends we claim to value? Whether successfully or not, in God and Difference I sought to do the minimum of such rewriting that would be compatible with acknowledgment that the one with whom we have to do in Jesus is none other than God as God is, but even that minimum left me worried that it was too much. In fact, for a long time I considered arguing that we should say nothing of the constitution of distinctions in God but leave them undisturbed, under an apophatic blanket.

That said, I might quibble with aspects of Powell’s discussion of the election debate, perhaps not surprisingly as I understand Jesus’s humanity as enhypostasized by the second person of the Trinity, which finds claims like “the Son needs the humanity of Jesus [. . .] to fulfill and complete the Son’s identity as the God-human” (53), verging on the incomprehensible, as if the humanity of Jesus were not God’s very own. Rather than seeing the development of Christological and trinitarian doctrine as an outgrowth of “a conception of God’s perfection that required that the divine nature be protected in some sense from a humanity that would . . . compromise it through the mutability of the human” (59), I see the order of faith running differently, deriving from the salvific power of the resurrected Christ who, in putting an end to sin and death, must then be and have the power of God.

Powell’s able discussion of my own work nonetheless underestimates, I think, how trinitarian imagery comes alive, as well as the extent to which I was trying to show how God gets sexed and gendered even by well-intentioned theologians, rather than making arguments or assumptions about the gendered meanings of what I or anyone else does in bed. The argument was not grounded in assessments of particular sexual practices or positions, but in an analysis of the translation mechanisms by which God-language remains tied to a heterosexist imaginative and cultural matrix that makes use of associations that both Powell and I deplore. Ultimately, though, I cannot see how the account of divine vulnerability that she develops is not a case of corrective projectionism. Nor am I nearly as sanguine as she is about our capacity to overwrite the entanglements by which gender, power, subordination, and sexuality feed into and uphold each other. God and Difference tried to show just how complex such relationships are, especially when the matter is that of God: what gets undone over here might very well be reinstated another way over there, much as free self-determination for dependence might be an ultimate form of sovereignty.

Which leaves me with a final question that I’d love to hear more from her about. How does death fit into Powell’s model? I strongly agree with Powell that the language and imagery we use to signpost post-resurrection bodied life ought to avoid contrasts between impaired and unimpaired bodies, as that distinction has no meaning in reconciled life. Yet bodies not vulnerable to death—if there is such a thing—are so different from bodies that we know that the relativization of impaired/unimpaired life dwindles in the shadow of the differences between bodies that die and those that don’t. What happens to the Christian intuition that death is in some sense a problem, if its concomitant aspects (the many fragilities of bodied life) are taken not to be?

Lisa Powell’s The Disabled God answers a perennial question: Can anything good come out of a Barth Doctoral Seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary? The good that did come out of it was Powell’s recognition that something different must be done with Barth. This book not only does something different with Barth but something different with our reflection on the identity of the triune God. The triune God is rendered needy, receptive, and willingly entangled in creaturely brokenness and becoming. As Powell says,

The eternal primal identity of the Son is not the logos asarkos, and is not even the logos incarnandus, but more specifically is the logos incarnandus fractus (the word going to be in broken flesh). (57)

This creative deployment of Bruce McCormack’s humiliation Christology for the purpose of rethinking disability is stunning. Powell does two marvelous works here. On the one hand, Powell brings the current rethinking of God’s life away from masculinist projection all the way to the disabled body. And on the other hand, Powell repurposes ideas of receptivity, vulnerability, and weakness in ways that refuse gender binaries and heteronormativity. The result is a God who reveals a covenant ontology that weaves together care and agency, dependency and voice in the display of both divine and human life. I especially like the way Powell draws on the African American ecclesial and homiletical tradition of call and response to articulate that display.

Even as I celebrate the constructive theological moves of this text, I have three questions about its execution. First, are we really caught between saying that there is “… within God a need, or a critical dependency, [or retreating] … to a God that is only sheer power, independence, and autonomy” (95)? I agree that we are yet in a forest of white self-sufficient masculinist projection onto the being of God, and therefore challenging the ways that projection corrupts or constitutes Christian practice remains an urgent problem. I also appreciate the way Powell is drawing on the wisdom freshly installed by Barth and expressed in theologians like McCormack, Jenson, Torrance, and a host of others, who refuse to think a God behind the back of Jesus Christ, a Logos endued with power and plans that might be imagined apart from Jesus. But a needy God like a powerful God both seem to be a God behind the back of Jesus Christ, that must be theorized in order to work out the theological logistics of God’s activity in the world. Alternatively, if I put both feet down hard in the Creator/creature distinction and contemplate the love of God found in Jesus, then I can say like Irenaeus said, that in Jesus God entered fully into the contours of the creature and forever lives those contours which include need. In other words, I am not sure why I need to say more than that about the eternal being of God.

My second question has to do with the identitarian logics that are at work in Powell’s wonderful construal. Are we still caught here in the problem of identitarian logic? I appreciate the way Powell recognizes part of the problem of identitarian logic—that it organizes subjectivities within political economies and for us colonial political economies. That logic then invites us to imagine our agency and our futures oriented inside those identities. Powell rightly wants to take hold of the fluidity that is the creature in its multiple becomings. This is in service to overcoming the rightness of the normal body, the holiness of a normed body of God in Jesus, and the sacrality of dreaming of the norming of bodies. Yet the other side of the problem of identitarian logic is in fact the enclosed body that formed through the separation of people from land. As S. Federici, Deloria Jr., and a host of other thinkers have noted, that separation cut off the contemplating of the self in the land and with animals and other people through the processes of cultivating life. This separation installed the formation of the body as raced and gendered and of land as private and territorialized. This means that we have been brought into a dismal contemplation of the self in displacement. That displacement frontloads the question, “Who am I?” and presses us to contemplate the body in isolation from the land and animals, and from our environments, which sadly seems to be the case with this important text.

Finally, I want to stay with this isolationist problematic that floats through Powell’s text and ask about the built environment. Where is it in this treatment? The wonderful quote from Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work that Powell closes this book with is so important not only because it gestures toward “the kind of vulnerability and communal care that could shape our future eschatological lives together” (136) but it also situates thinking the body in the built environment. What is now necessary is to press embodiment all the way to the dirt, to the joining of bone and dirt. We must think the body, the building, and design together as one reality. This means more than thinking about accessibility to thinking about the reconfiguring of life in place together, turning our attention away from enclosed bodies and more toward thinking how the body is woven with continuous building and designing. In this regard, Lisa Powell’s book is a good place to start that thinking.