Disability Theology: What I’m Learning

If you believe in Heaven, we have a puzzle to deal with.

• Will we still be disabled in Heaven?

• What does the answer to the first question say about life before Heaven?

What Disability Theology is Teaching Me

A friend of mine, Helen Walsh, says something I can't stop thinking about. Something like: "The difference between abled bodies and disabled bodies is time."

As I age, I find that to be an assuring reminder.

If you're fully able-bodied right now, it is a temporary condition. We all share in the permanent experience of aging and decline. The bodies we have today are not the bodies we have tomorrow. The independence we take for granted is borrowed. Every one of us is on a spectrum of ability, and the arrow only points one direction. It’s only a matter of time.

As I age, and my body shows its wear, I also realize that on a day-to-day basis, I need and deserve more time than I used to require: more time to communicate, more time to eat, more time to slow down, more time for appointments.

I'm writing this piece a little differently than I usually write. I'm coming as a student, new to the field. I've been reading disability theologians, and what I found there wasn't just a new perspective on bodies. It was a challenge to the way I read Scripture, the way I think about salvation, and the way I imagine what comes after.

I think you need to hear what they're saying. I know I did.

A Question That Started This

Here's a question that sounds simple and isn't:

What happens to disabled bodies in the afterlife?

If you grew up in church, you probably absorbed an answer without anyone ever formally teaching it to you. The resurrection means healing. “The blind will see. The lame will walk.” The wheelchair is temporary. The feeding tube is temporary. The ventilator is temporary. God will fix it all.

That answer feels compassionate. For some people, it is deeply comforting — real, sustaining, sacred. I've sat with patients in hospital rooms who held onto that hope like a rope, and I would never take it from them. That hope has carried people through the worst nights of their lives, and I have no interest in telling anyone it's wrong.

But disability theologians ask a question that most of us have never considered:

What if that answer — the resurrection as cure — is not as kind as it sounds?

What if, underneath the comfort, it quietly says: your body, as it is right now, is a mistake? What if it says: the real you is the able-bodied version that God will eventually restore? What if it says: your disability is not part of who you are — it's just something that happened to you, and God will undo it?

For a lot of disabled Christians, that's not comfort. That's erasure.

And for others, it is comfort — real and sustaining and sacred. The question isn't whether that hope is valid. It's whether we can hold both experiences in the same boat.

A Field We Always Needed

Disability theology is an established field of academic theology. It has major scholars, landmark texts, and a growing body of work that intersects with liberation theology, pastoral care, bioethics, and biblical studies. It has been active for over thirty years. And I am embarrassed to tell you that my seminary education barely touched it.

That's not unusual. Most seminaries still treat disability as a pastoral care topic — something you encounter in hospital visits — rather than a theological lens that reshapes how you read Scripture, how you understand salvation, and how you think about the body of Christ. Disability theology insists it is the latter.

The field has a central commitment that distinguishes it from most theology written about disability: it speaks from within disabled experience, not about it from the outside. That distinction matters. These are not able-bodied theologians speculating about what disabled people need. These are disabled scholars and their close collaborators doing theology from the ground up.

Let me introduce you to some of them.

Nancy Eiesland and the Disabled God

Nancy L. Eiesland (1964–2009) is widely considered the founder of modern disability theology. Her 1994 book The Disabled God is the foundational text of the field, and its central claim still startles people who encounter it for the first time.

Here's the argument.

After the resurrection, Jesus still has wounds. The nail marks. The spear wound. He shows them to Thomas. He invites Thomas to touch them. The gospel writers make a point of telling us: the risen Christ is not restored to an unmarked body. The scars remain.

Eiesland's move is to take that biblical fact seriously and ask what it means for theology. If the resurrected body of Christ still bears the marks of trauma — if glorification does not erase impairment — then what does that say about disabled bodies?

Her answer: the resurrected Christ is the Disabled God. God is revealed not in spite of a wounded body, but through one.

This overturns a very old assumption. For most of Christian history, theology assumed that resurrection meant restoration to an idealized, fully able body. Eiesland pointed out that the text itself doesn't say that. The text says the opposite. The wounds stay. And they are not presented as something to be ashamed of. They are the means by which Jesus is recognized.

She also named something the church had mostly avoided naming directly. For centuries, Christianity framed disability primarily as brokenness, fallenness, or an occasion for charity. Disabled people were objects of pity or symbols of suffering — recipients of ministry, not participants in theological leadership. Eiesland called this the "charity model" of disability, and she argued it denied disabled people full membership in the body of Christ.

Her reframe: if all human beings bear the image of God, then disability must be part of that image. If it isn't, Christian anthropology has a hole in it.

John Swinton and the Memories of God

John Swinton is a Scottish theologian whose work focuses on cognitive disability, dementia, and neurodegenerative illness. His book Dementia: Living in the Memories of God asks one of the most terrifying questions a person can face: if I lose my memory, will I still be me?

Modern Western culture answers that question badly. We define personhood in terms of cognition, independence, and productivity. If you can think clearly, make your own decisions, and contribute economically, you're a full person. If you can't — if dementia or ALS or traumatic brain injury takes those capacities — then we start using language like "shell of their former self" and "already gone." We treat cognitive decline as a kind of pre-death.

Swinton says this is theologically wrong.

His argument draws from Christian anthropology: personhood is relational, not cognitive. We are not isolated minds piloting bodies. We are beings constituted by relationship — with each other and with God. Identity is not something we possess individually. It is something we hold together.

Here's the pastoral heart of his work: even when a person forgets everything — forgets their name, their family, their story — God does not forget them. In Scripture, when God "remembers," it isn't a mental act. It's a covenant act. God remembering means God sustaining, God holding, God refusing to let go. Swinton argues that this divine remembering is the ultimate ground of human identity.

A person with dementia is not losing their self. They are becoming more dependent on others to hold their identity with them. And that, Swinton says, is not a tragedy. It's a revelation. Because all of us are always more dependent on others than we think. Dementia makes it visible.

This applies powerfully beyond dementia. For people living with ALS, with locked-in syndrome, with any condition that strips away the capacities we associate with personhood — Swinton's framework insists: you are not less. You are not disappearing. You are held.

And here's the part that often gets missed: when Swinton says identity is held by community, he's not speaking in abstractions. He means the people who show up. The family members who build the communication systems. The caregivers who learn to read the eye movements, who translate the blinks into words, who spend years becoming fluent in a language of two. When you hold someone's identity with them — when you refuse to let them disappear — that is not just service. That is the body of Christ doing what the body of Christ is supposed to do.

Amos Yong and the Spirit's Work in Diverse Bodies

Amos Yong is a Pentecostal theologian who asks a question that shifts the entire conversation: instead of asking what is wrong with disabled bodies, what if we asked how the Holy Spirit works through them?

Yong pushes back against what he identifies as a deeply embedded Western assumption — that human worth is measured by rationality, independence, and productivity. He argues that Christianity, properly understood, actually centers the opposite: dependence, vulnerability, and mutual need.

His signature insight: disability reveals the truth of human interdependence. Rather than being an exception to the normal human condition, disability makes visible what is true for everyone. No one is self-sufficient. No one makes it alone. The myth of the autonomous individual is exactly that — a myth. And disability exposes it.

Thomas Reynolds and the Cult of Normalcy

Thomas E. Reynolds focuses on the social dimensions of disability. His key contribution is naming something he calls "the cult of normalcy" — the way society defines human worth through a narrow set of standards about what a normal body and mind look like.

Reynolds argues that the real problem facing disabled people is not their bodies. It is exclusion. It is a world built around a single template of ability, a world that treats any deviation from that template as deficiency. The suffering that comes with disability is, overwhelmingly, social suffering — stigma, isolation, inaccessible spaces, cultural discomfort with dependence.

His theological vision: salvation means communities restructured around belonging. Not fixing bodies to fit the world, but transforming the world to hold every body.

Deborah Creamer and the Limits Model

Deborah Beth Creamer offers one of the most widely cited conceptual frameworks in the field. She describes disability as a "limit experience" — and then she makes a move that's deceptively simple and deeply profound.

All human beings live with limits. Limited energy, limited time, limited strength, limited knowledge. That's not a flaw in creation. That's the nature of being a creature rather than the Creator. Disability doesn't introduce limitation into human life. It makes an already-existing reality more visible.

Instead of asking "how do we fix disability," Creamer asks: what does disability reveal about the human condition? Her answer: that finitude is not a failure. That dependence is not a defect. That limits are part of being human, and theology that can't account for them isn't describing actual human life.

ALS Theology

There's a specific place where disability theology gets pressed to its hardest edges, and that's in the context of advanced neurodegenerative illness — ALS, locked-in syndrome, late-stage dementia.

Tony Judt and Night Thoughts

Historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with ALS and spent many years composing essays in a season of life where his body was becoming more and more still. He described what he called "night thoughts" — a series of essays on the mental life that continued, rich and complex. Judt’s writings focused on his experiences of navigating extreme physical dependence, confronting impending death, and using memory as a form of intellectual escape.

Judt wasn't formally considered a theologian, but his reflections have been widely taken up in theological discussions of dependency and dignity. He named something crucial: the worst suffering of ALS is often not the paralysis itself. The worst suffering can be living in a culture that treats total dependence as total humiliation.

In that sense, a lot of healing is possible in every stage of neurodegenerative illness, and it happens in the form a daily community practice. It’s something that takes time. It takes learning to listen patiently, practicing new communication methods, sharing in creative projects, differentiating the intent from the translation. Many of our disabilities are permanent, but humiliation doesn’t have to be one of them.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, describing his experiences living with locked-in syndrome,. His famous metaphor — the body as a diving bell, the mind as a butterfly — became a touchstone for theological reflection on embodiment and interior freedom. It's a beautiful image.

But it's worth noting the tension: the metaphor locates the real self in the mind and casts the body as a prison. Swinton's whole framework pushes against that split. Personhood isn't locked inside a private mental theater, free despite the body. Personhood is relational — held between people, expressed through whatever means of connection remain. The butterfly isn't trapped inside the bell. The butterfly is what happens between the person and the people who refuse to stop listening.

These voices, alongside Swinton's theological framework, converge on a claim that challenges comfortable theology: ALS forces the question of whether the church actually believes, in our actions, that dignity is unconditional. Not dignity earned by contribution. Not dignity maintained by independence. Unconditional dignity. Dignity that persists when the body can do nothing the culture values. Do we believe that dignity is unconditional? It’s an uncomfortable question because we still have to figure out the answer.

A Question

Here's a question that disability theologians offer.

While traditional theology can sometimes ask: how will God repair the body?

Disability theology invites us to ask:

why do we assume disabled bodies need repairing?

That shift changes everything.

It changes how you read the healing miracles in the gospels — not as proofs that disability is wrong, but as acts of social restoration in a world that excluded people with impairments from community life. Jesus doesn't just heal bodies. He restores people to belonging.

It changes how you read the letters from the Apostle Paul on the resurrection body — not as a promise that everyone will become able-bodied, but as a promise that the transformed body, whatever it looks like, will be free from suffering and oppression. "Sown in weakness, raised in power" doesn't have to mean "sown disabled, raised normal." It can mean: sown in a world that diminishes you, raised into one that doesn't.

It changes how you think about what salvation actually is. Not becoming physically normal. But radical belonging. Perfect justice. Mutual dependence without shame. A world structured around care.

What do you think?

What am I missing? What am I misunderstanding? What are your unnoticed insights? I really want to hear from you. I have a contact from on the About page.

The Teachers

If you want to go deeper, here are the scholars and texts at the center of this field:

Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God (1994) — the foundational text of modern disability theology.

John Swinton, Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (2012) — the landmark work on cognitive disability and personhood.

Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome (2007) — disability, the Holy Spirit, and interdependence.

Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion (2008) — disability, belonging, and the critique of normalcy.

Deborah Beth Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities (2009) — the "limits model" of human embodiment.

Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (2010) — essays composed inside ALS, on dependency and dignity.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997) — the interior life within locked-in syndrome.

Additional voices worth reading: Sharon V. Betcher on chronic illness and embodiment, Brian Brock on disability and virtue ethics, and Bethany McKinney Fox on church inclusion practices.

Hope Hilton, MDiv · noharmscripture.com