Tanner's Freedom as Plasticity: Human Nature, Disability, and the Natural World

This paper engages Kathryn Tanner’s account of human nature in Christ the Key, where she re-interprets the common identification of freedom as imago Dei to be the plasticity of human nature. Drawing from disability theology the paper demonstrates the value of Tanner’s creative proposal for its potential inclusion of a vast range of human body/minds and the insistence that the body is an essential aspect of humanity’s plasticity. Lastly, the paper considers whether freedom as malleability is limited to a uniquely human nature. Drawing from indigenous and eco-theologies and disabled ecological advocates, the paper considers the interconnection of all creation, such that the “inputs” of which Tanner speaks go both ways: from environment to human and human to environment so as to shape not only human body/minds but all aspects of nature. The paper moves against the trend to theorize humanity isolated from land and all nature.