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

In this paper I will engage 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. My paper will move in three parts. 1) Explain Tanner’s approach to imago Dei in Christ the Key. 2) Demonstrate the value of Tanner’s creative proposal for its inclusion of a range of human body/minds and the inclusion of the body as an essential part of humanity’s plasticity. 3) Lastly, I will question whether plasticity, as excellent as it is as a conception of human freedom, is as strong a marker of human uniqueness as Tanner suggests. While Tanner leaves some room for non-human creatures to be imago Dei as creation reflects something of the Creator, I argue that this freedom of malleability is not limited to a uniquely human nature. Here I will consider 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. 

Typical treatments of the concept of imago Dei identify a discrete capacity or characteristic with which humanity was created so as to reflect something of God. Historically this is most often identified as rationality, freedom, or relationality, or some combination, such that our reason allows us to contemplate God and thus engage in a relationship with God. Or we are created with freewill, reflecting God’s ultimate freedom, and thus freely enter relationship with God. In her treatment of the concept of imago Dei, in addition to her claim that Christ is the true image of God, Tanner denies humanity was created with some capacity identifiable as the image of God natural to human existence, other than an excessive openness to be formed, like “soft wax.”

First, I will describe Tanner’s approach to human nature as “Humans imitate God’s incomprehensibility by having a nature that is also in a sense unlimited, unbounded by a clearly delimited nature, in virtue, in the human case, of an expansive openness and initial indefiniteness apart from some more specific formation from without” (53). I will highlight the value in such an approach from the perspective of disability, where an emphasis on reason as the imago suggests vast numbers of humans with limited cognitive ability may not reflect God. Additionally free will as the imago can appear to exclude some of the most profoundly disabled who display little if any independent agency. However, I see promise in Tanner’s reworking of human freedom as something more akin to a negative capacity: “Free will becomes a sign of unusual variability” (50). It is this plasticity that allows the human to reflect the incomprehensibility of God. 

Tanner’s approach does two important things for my purposes. First, Tanner’s apophatic approach means each person is in the image of God in that they are incomprehensible; one cannot grasp the human, or pinpoint the norm of the human. This plasticity unfolds in billions of unique personhoods. Each human is shaped by various “inputs” which may be environmental, personal, intellectual, social, and so on. This account of human nature resists the tendency in theology to deal in norms, or what is “natural” for the human. Here, what is natural is an openness, an unlimited, or undefined nature. This moves the discourse outside the normalizing categories of so much of the historical discussion around humanity. Secondly, Tanner argues, though briefly, that embodiment is essential to the plasticity of human nature. “At the end of the day it is our bodies that are to be remade into Christ’s body” (50). Humanity plasticity, including a malleable embodiment, is integral to how we reflect God. 

2) Theologians of disability are among the strongest opponents of the identification of the imago with free agency and rationality with a preference for relationality, though this proposal too sparks debate regarding how much intellect and agency is required for participation in relationship with God and others. I will briefly summarize this discourse with emphasis on contributions from Swinton, Brock, and Reinders, indicating the promise of Tanner’s approach.

3) I will conclude by questioning, however, if “expansive openness” is truly a mark of human uniqueness, considering how intertwined our lives are with the whole of creation, such that the natural world receives inputs that shape and change it, and that environment in turn shapes humanity. With theologians like Willie Jennings and Tink Tinker, I ask if we should be theorizing human nature at all in isolation from the land and our relations, that is our fellow creatures, including rock, water, and soil. The work of Sunaura Taylor is informative here, as she considers how her body became impaired in utero due to human pollution of the aquifer running under the neighborhood where her mother lived during her pregnancy. Humanity changed the water and the soil, which in turn changed her and shaped her body. 

I celebrate the proposal to rethink the human freedom as the malleable and incomprehensible nature of humanity, but I join those eco and indigenous theologians who seek to overcome the divide between humanity and nature perpetuated by the category of imago Dei, and the historical discussion that has in part alienated people with disabilities within theological anthropology. It is the recognition of the ways such systems that create norms and abuse those outside them, that has led disabled scholars like Sunaura Taylor to fight for animals, against industrial farming, and to detail the parallels in exploitation and abuse experienced by people with disabilities and the rest of natural world. As disability theology has been pressing Christian theologians to recognize that even the most profoundly disabled can “rejoice in the Lord” as the psalmist would say, so too do the rocks and trees cry out their praise. This paper will push the discussion of imago Dei to consider freedom as malleability evidenced in this interconnectedness of all life.