Previous posts: Chapter 1A: "The Questions"; Chapter 1B: "What Kind of Project Is This?"; Chapter 2A: "The One with Whom We Have to Do"; Chapter 2B: "The Kinds of Project This Isn't"; Chapter 3A: "The One Who Has To Do With Us"; Chapter 6: "To Be and To Have a Living Body"; Chapter 7: "Personal Bodies: Meditation on Job 10"
Theological reflection:
In reading through Parts 1 and 2 of Kelsey's work -- on, respectively, the triune God relating to humankind creatively and to draw it to eschatological consummation -- a theme has emerged that warrants pointing out, meditating on, and working through. Particularly in Chapter 6, "To Be and To Have a Living Body," and in Chapter 15A, "Who and What We Are as Eschatologically Consummated Creatures," Kelsey is insistent on maintaining what I will call an exceptionless, unimpairable anthropology.
Which is to say: according to Kelsey, no set of acceptable anthropological definitions may contain exceptions (e.g., those who are mentally handicapped or born lacking certain widespread capacities) or impairments (e.g., those who have lost the ability to see or to speak).
Note what Kelsey says in Chapter 6:
There is plenty to dispute in each proposed marker of the class "human," but they all share one major drawback. Each relies on a property that undoubtedly characterizes most living human bodies, but only in varying degrees. Some of them, such as "rationality," "self-consciousness," and "language-using," appear to be missing in newborn human beings and only appear through a developmental process. Some disappear in the dementia of some of the aged, even though normal maturation may earlier have developed them to a high degree. Some are destroyed by accident or disease. Some never develop, through some malfunction of normal developmental processes. Were these characteristics employed strictly as the criteria of human beings' humanness, one would have to conclude that infants and profoundly damaged human beings were not human. But in that case, one would have to say that Christian theological anthropological claims do not apply to such living bodies, which is theologically unacceptable. To avoid that conclusion, it has regularly been necessary in theology to introduce mediating categories such as "potential 'human' living bodies" (e.g., infants) and "former" or "lapsed 'human' living bodies" (e.g., those who are profoundly damaged). These categories, mediating between the "genuinely human" and the "quasi-human," too easily appear to be euphemisms for "not really human." The advantage of a criterion based on Homo sapiens DNA is that it identifies in a more clear-cut way the subset of living bodies of which theological anthropological claims are made. (258; emphasis added)Connect these remarks to what he later says in Chapter 15A:
There is no warrant for supposing that eschatologically transfigured or glorified nonphysical bodies are perfect bodies in which the imperfections and disabilities that were among the factors constituting their concrete particularity as pre-mortem physical bodies have been removed, healed, or corrected. Such a claim cannot be said to follow any trajectory of thought rooted in the narrative logic of accounts in canonical Christian Holy Scripture of God drawing humankind to eschatological consummation. . . . [Earlier in the book, I] set aside the traditional claim that God creates absolutely perfect living human bodies on the grounds that the concept of absolutely perfect human bodies is incapable of coherent explanation and exposition.I assume it is clear what I mean by "exceptionless" and "unimpairable." The former specifies the rule that one cannot make claims about what it means to be a human being that contain a single exception, the latter the rule that human persons cannot be damaged "in" their humanity (i.e., whatever it means to be human cannot itself be impaired).
What is theologically at stake here, of course, is the status of imperfections (e.g., wounds) and "disabilities" as properties constitutive of the concrete particularity of eschatologically glorified human bodies. Is the concept of an eschatologically glorified human body inconsistent with the ascription to it of bodily imperfections and disabilities that could serve as some of the properties by which it is recognized in its concrete particularity as continuous with a pre-mortem human living body one had known? I urge that it is not. I suggest that there are no theological grounds for rejecting the proposal that eschatologically glorified bodies, spiritual bodies in Paul's sense, continue in their concrete particularity to have the imperfections and disabilities that were properties constitutive of their concrete particularities before death. (540-41; emphasis added)
From what I can tell, these sorts of parameters (E.U.A. for short) are becoming more common -- even a trend -- in anthropological work, whether theological, philosophical, or otherwise. In general, and certainly as evidenced by Kelsey's arguments in its favor above, the reasons behind the trend are sound and worthwhile, and so this broad turn in thinking may indeed by the right one. However, I want at the very least to raise some questions for it that are worth answering as we continue this line of thought.
(N.B.: I am a newbie to this discipline, and more or less clueless in the realm of disabilities studies, so for those with more knowledge and experience in those areas, please proceed with charity. I am sincerely looking to learn, not poke holes.)
1. Kelsey claims there is "no warrant" theologically nor a single "trajectory of thought rooted in the narrative logic of accounts in canonical Christian Holy Scripture" that would lead one to suppose that "imperfections and disabilities" will be "removed, healed, or corrected" in the eschaton. He combines this claim with another he opposes, namely, that eschatological bodies will be "perfect bodies." But need we make these two claims the same? Can we not say that, in some sense, there might be some imperfections or disabilities that might be "removed, healed, or corrected," without going so far as to say that "glorified body" equates to "perfected body"?
2. Is there any way to differentiate between various "imperfections and disabilities"? A martyr's wounds (like the paradigmatic stigmata of Christ) seem to be fundamentally different -- that is, on both a conceptual and a practical level -- than a person's being born with eyes that do not function correctly, and so cannot see. Is it inherently inappropriate to say that, at the resurrection, the former will remain as a constitutive component of that person's particularity, while the latter will somehow be healed? What if a person born blind has that hope herself? What are generous but critical ways in which to talk about such things without being either insensitive or prejudice-assuming?
3. Shouldn't the flow of time come into play as a theological factor in these discussions? What of a person physically unable to walk for years, but who (through medical and therapeutic means) comes to walk later in life? What of a person whose mental impairment comes through an accident late in life? What of those persons who lived prior to modern medicine whose disabilities or physical/mental challenges are addressable ("fixable") today?
4. How are we to understand both sickness and disease and the vulnerability of damageable bodies in connection to sin, death, and something like a "fall"? Kelsey argues (and I think him correct) that the vulnerability of embodiment and finitude appropriately belongs to a world created by God and deemed "good." But what of disease? Do Alzheimer's, HIV/AIDS, Cholera belong to a "good" cosmos? How are the ravaging consequences of such things taken into account as "removed, healed, or corrected" in eschatological consummation?
5. A related question involves profound mental and physical impairments, particularly for persons born with them. Do these belong to a world without sin, to an "unfallen" world? Do they, or their consequences, therefore belong or remain in a righted-world, a healed and restored cosmos purged of sin and the power of death?
6. Another similar question, related also to temporality, is the matter of complications that lead to the death of infants and children. In what ways can we speak coherently about the "imperfections and disabilities" that were involved in such tragic deaths without also speaking of their being (again, somehow) righted or undone or healed by God in glory?
7. As regards the biblical narrative, the single glaring instance of something like "imperfections and disabilities" being responded to eschatologically by God is of course the enormous repetition of stories of Jesus' healing in the Gospels. Kelsey does not deal with this in his argument, and I have seen at least some Christian theological arguments that claim we should seek to qualify (if not outright disallow) the import of these texts for normatively shaping the way in which Christians think about such things. If the latter approach is correct, why, and on what grounds? If the healing stories are germane to the question of resurrected life and eschatological transformation -- relevant as a picture of what happens when the reign of God comes near to the lives of people experiencing some kind of limitation on their personal flourishing in community -- how are they so? What do they say about both the "now" of persons living with some kind of "imperfection" or "disability" and their "not yet"? How, in other words, should they form our hope for life in God's kingdom?
8. Is it helpful at all to identify generic features of human life, not as markers of some human essence but as descriptors of what it is like, generally, to be in the midst of living human community? If one excludes such descriptive features on the grounds that they do not apply to everyone -- infants, in Kelsey's example, or elderly persons with dementia -- what are we left with to talk about regarding what actual human life is like "on the whole"? In other words, if aliens were to set down in the midst of nearly any human community on the planet, they would be bound to discover language-using, art-making, sex-coupling, food-eating, divinity-worshiping, child-rearing, violence-erupting, land-tilling, animal-relating, technology-creating, family-networking, story-telling, group-indwelling creatures we call "human." Of course, not every individual or community can claim every single one of these features. But do these features not tell us something about what human existence is like? Is there not a way to think about and discuss them without slipping into needlessly essentialist (and so prejudicial) talk?
9. Finally, is identification of human being by Homo sapiens DNA really a solution to the historically disputed anthropological alternatives? Was there really no sure way of telling what was human before the last 150 years? Can we not imagine some global catastrophe that would set human civilization back technologically (and thus scientifically) that would render this answer untenable? What of areas of the world where DNA is not a viable cultural idiom? Are their cultural ideas of how to identify human being translatable with this claim?
I'll leave my reflections/questions at that. I look forward to hearing others' thoughts, both those who have read the book and those who have not.
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