Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amos Yong is Chief Academic Officer and professor of theology and mission at Fuller Theological Seminary. One of the most notable Pentecostal theologians writing today, Yong is the author and editor of more than four dozen books.

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The Bible, Disability, and the Church

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface..........................................................................................................................................xi1. Introduction: Disability and the People of God — Whole or Fragmented?...................................................................12. Holiness, the Covenant, and Ancient Israel: Exclusion, Inclusion, and Disability..............................................................173. What Hath Dr. Luke and His Colleagues to Say? Jesus, the Early Church, and a (Radical Pentecostal) Theology of Disability.....................494. One Body, Many Members: St. Paul's Charismatic Ecclesiology and the Renewal of Dis/Ability....................................................825. When There Shall Be No More Tears: Eschatology, the Reign of God, and the Redemption of Disability............................................118Epilogue: The New Biblical Theology of Disability: So What?......................................................................................145Appendix: Disability at Qumran...................................................................................................................148For Further Reading..............................................................................................................................149Name Index.......................................................................................................................................152Subject Index....................................................................................................................................155Scripture Index..................................................................................................................................158

Chapter One

Disability and the People of God — Whole or Fragmented?

This is a book about disability; it is also a book about the church, and what it means to be the church in light of the experience of disability. But I don't claim to have the once-and-for-all final say or absolute truth about these matters; rather, I submit these ideas as arising out of my own experience growing up with a brother with Down syndrome.

Growing Up with a Brother with Down Syndrome

I was almost ten years old when my brother Mark was born. He spent the first three weeks of his life on a life-support system because he could neither breathe nor suckle on his own. I dimly recall peering at his frail, tiny body from the corridor outside the hospital room in which his incubator was kept. I only knew something was terribly wrong — partly because my mother cried a lot and even my father was worried (which wasn't typical for him) — so I prayed earnestly that my brother would pull through.

Many others prayed as well. At the time, my parents were the senior pastors of a thriving congregation in Petaling Jaya (a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of West Malaysia), and our home was continuously open to the parishioners. These few weeks were unusually busy as congregants came and went, crying with my mother and praying with us. Why wasn't Mark responding to the treatment? These three weeks seemed like an eternity — at least that was how it must have felt to my parents.

But God did answer our prayers. Mark did come home eventually, although his life seemed to us to hang in the balance. Our daily routines revolved around his feeding sessions, each of which would take literally hours per sitting. I remember one of those sessions quite vividly. I saw my mother cuddling Mark's practically lifeless body and literally crying out to God from the depths of her heart. I certainly felt her anguish, and what seemed like his pain, although I'm not sure I knew enough to be certain that Mark was suffering. Regardless of what Mark did or didn't feel, I know we were struggling to reconcile our faith in the goodness of God with the fact that each of Mark's breaths was a sign of the precariousness and fragility of his life.

In hindsight, I believe that part of the struggle my parents endured had to do with the culture of shame that shaped the lives of those in the Chinese diaspora: the birth of children with disabilities inevitably raised questions about what, if anything, the parents had done to have deserved anything less than a healthy child. This feeling of shame was exacerbated by the pentecostal convictions that my parents proclaimed about how faith and trust in God would inevitably bring about God's blessings and abundant life. How would our message be received now, with the presence of Mark in our family? Yet God brought us through that first year, no doubt carried by the many prayers of family and friends, and by their love and concern not only for us but also for Mark. Our church members showed us the possibility of retaining trust in God even in the midst of challenging circumstances.

Eighteen months after Mark was born, our family moved to the United States in response to a pastoral call to minister to Chinese-speaking immigrants in northern California. We settled in the "valley" city of Stockton, about thirty miles south of the capital city of Sacramento and about a hundred miles almost directly east of San Francisco. It was here that Mark was formally diagnosed with Down syndrome.

Named after a physician — John Langdon Down (1826-1896) — the syndrome can be described phenotypically, cognitively, or genetically. Down himself focused on the phenotype (the observable physical characteristics): a flat forehead and nasal bridge, a smaller skull or head, slanted eyes (which led to the label of "Mongolism" for a period), malformed ears, hyperextended joints, a gap between the first and second toes, underdeveloped genitals in males, halting motor skills, slurred speech, and so on. Cognitively, the syndrome brought with it what today are called "learning disabilities" in some circles, "developmental delays" in others. In previous generations, such cognitive impairments were quantified by the Binet-Simon and the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests: those with the syndrome were not of normal or average intelligence, but were variously classified as "dull," "feebleminded," "morons," "imbeciles," "idiots," and the like. Later research on the human genome confirmed that the Down phenotype followed a trisomic mutation (rather than dyadic pairing) of the twenty-first chromosome. Mark has all of these "normal" features for a person with trisomy 21.

So now we had a medical condition we could associate with Mark. But that didn't help us deal with the various physical challenges which ongoing diagnoses revealed he confronted: the aftereffects of the high fever, leukemia, and pneumonia he suffered at birth; impaired vision and hearing; flat-footedness; and, most seriously, a double murmur in his heart. When Mark was six, a heart cauterization was performed, which has allowed him another almost thirty years (at the time of this writing) of a fairly healthy life. Along the way, however, Mark has resisted wearing his prescription eyeglasses and hearing aids. He seems to get along fine without them.

I spent my teenage years caring for Mark, especially on Sundays, when my parents had a full schedule of church services and activities. Mark couldn't sit up until he was four or five, and didn't begin to crawl —...