Incarnating Disability: Reconsidering Nancy Eiesland’s Account of Embodiment Through Eastern Orthodox Creation Narrative

In this paper I examine how Nancy Eiesland’s account of Christ becoming “the disabled God” incarnates disability through the cross, ultimately locating the mode for Christ’s becoming disabled through his propitiation for sin. I argue that this location compromises Eiesland’s goal of detaching disability from its historic association as a sign of fallenness. While other modes of embodiment are incarnated through birth for Eiesland, Christ’s disability is incarnated through crucifixion. By reimagining her anthropology through Eastern Orthodox creation narrative, however, I am able to reposition Christ’s incarnation into disability within his human nature, specifically within Christ’s passibility. I pair Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius’ descriptions of passibility as contingency with critical disability theory’s descriptions of interdependency, specifically Tobin Siebers’ definition of complex embodiment as contingency. Handling passibility as material contingency, I reconsider Eiesland’s “disabled God” through Christ’s passible human nature, his susceptibility to material change, and corresponding dependency on material and social facilitation. In this reconsidered framework, Christ incarnates disability outside sin or fallenness, accomplishing Eiesland’s goals of resymbolizing disability in Christianity as a part of what it means to be human.

In her seminal work, The Disabled God, Eiesland argues that through its symbols the church has become a “city on a hill, inaccessible and inhospitable” to people with disabilities. Primarily through biblical metaphor, disability is associated with tragedy, imperfection, and fallenness, symbols which communicate to variable bodies that disability is either individually or globally attached to sin in Christian tradition. In response to these symbols, Eiesland recommends the vision of the “disabled God,” God in a sip-puff wheelchair, the God represented in a broken body at the crucifixion who retains material limitation and the marks of suffering even after his resurrection. In this way, Eiesland reimagines Eucharist around the disabled Christ, locating disability at the heart of Christian practice rather than on the periphery.

However, I argue this organization does not accomplish the symbolic reshaping Eiesland intends because the location for incarnating disability in her framework is the cross. If Christ becomes disabled at the point of crucifixion, disability is still incarnated through sin, symbolically associated with propitiation and expiation. If Christ becomes disabled through taking on sin, Eiesland’s aim of detaching disability from the framework of sin or fallenness is not ultimately accomplished. Eiesland’s anthropology relies on the cross for the location of Christ's solidarity with humanity, and as a result she must inevitably locate Christ’s incarnation into disability at the same location, undermining her efforts to detach disability from sin because Christ is incarnated into disability by taking on the sins of the world.  

I argue that there is another location available for incarnating disability that does not represent disability as sin or sin adjacent: the creation of the human being, or more precisely, Christ’s human nature. In Eastern Orthodox anthropology, the making of the human being relates to Christ as the only full human being; all other human beings are becoming human. When describing human nature and human progression, therefore, Christ is the firstborn of Creation and the standard-bearer for what it means to be human. The rest of humanity, made in Christ’s image, is becoming more like that human image of God. St. Gregory of Nyssa’s work, usually rendered “On the Making of Man,” begins not with how human beings were created in the Genesis account but instead with Christ’s humanity. Accordingly, John Behr’s new translation of the work renders the title, “On the Human Image of God,” reflecting this relationship between Christ as the icon of human nature and the corresponding framework used to discuss human genesis. Likewise, St. Athanasius does not begin his work On Incarnation with an account of Christ being born an infant in Jerusalem, but instead with the creation of the human being in Christ’s image. To understand human nature, Athanasius looks to Christ. Eastern Orthodox creation narrative blends features of Christology and iconography in such a way that links Christ’s human nature with the image of God in the human being. When we describe the human being at creation, then, Eastern Orthodox anthropology allows us to shape the human being as figured by Christ’s humanity. The attributes of Christ’s humanity describe human nature.

From this anthropology, I argue that Christ’s passibility is an alternative location for incarnating disability, meaning that human contingency is not a result of a fallen nature but rather is a facet of innate humanness. Because Christ’s humanity is sinless, his passibility proves that material contingency is not related to sin. By examining human nature through the lens of Eastern Orthodox creation narrative, we can describe human embodiment through the attributes of Christ’s human nature, reclaiming Christ’s passibility as a location for incarnating or embodying disability. Passibility, in a classical framework, is not merely the ability to suffer but the ability to be acted upon, to be contingent.

When defining disability, Tobin Siebers argues that the deficits of the social model, which interactionalists like Tom Shakespeare critique as overlooking the material body, can be overcome by viewing disability not as a model but as a theory of complex embodiment. One of the major features in Siebers’ complex embodiment is material contingency, which I use to amplify Eiesland’s claim that Christ is the disabled God. By locating Christ’s material contingency within human nature at creation rather than at the moment of crucifixion, I frame Christ’s incarnation into disability outside of sin. Through this framework, extended states of dependency are features of human contingency. By locating disability within passibility, I am able to escape the association between disability and sin. Rather than related to a fallen nature, disability, as an expression of human passibility, is a feature of innate interdependency.