Disability, Limitation, and the Crucified God
I see within myself, and many around me, a constant pull to live beyond our limits, trying to prove something, though exactly what I’m not sure.
Given a bit of time walking with Jesus, the heart motives slowly change. Maybe I’m not trying to prove how great I am, but how great He is, or how urgent this mission is, how important these values are.
It can seem like a noble pursuit, but it is dangerous. An unbalanced emphasis on servanthood can have us run off our feet, forever saying “yes,” and prioritising everyone else’s needs not out of love but out of obligation. Every time I get caught up again in some important initiative, healthy aspiration is coloured by unhealthy ambition and an over-blown sense of my own capacity.
Despite our best intentions, it is sin that has us forever pushing at the boundaries — dissatisfied with Eden and grasping for more. Not satisfied with being made in God’s image (Gen 1:26–27), the first Adam wanted to become divine (Gen 3:5). Christ, the second Adam, instead embraced the limitation of the human nature (Phil 2:6).
To be limited is a very human thing, and perhaps even divine. Nancey Eiesland, the late disability theologian, offered an image of God in a sip-puff wheelchair of the kind used by some quadriplegics.[1] It’s an image of God that, for most, is unfamiliar and provocative, perhaps even offensive. But some of the Psalms describe God as impaired: deaf and mute (Psa 22:1-2, 28:1, 35:22, 83:1, 109:1), forgetful even (Gen 8:1; 9:16;Isa 49:15-16).
I don’t go as far to suggest that God within Godself is innately disabled or limited, though Eiesland’s provocative voice has spurred a needed shift.[2] The concept of a disabled God is most clearly in view when we consider the crucified Christ. In taking on human form, Christ chose to embrace limitation (Phil 2:6-8), on the cross we see Christ subject to weakness and incapacity (Heb 5:2, Phil 2:7),the resurrected Christ retains his wounds (John 20:26), and there’s no good reason to think he shed those in the ascension.[3] Christ sits at the right hand of God, still wounded, but no less glorious or powerful.
Disability is inherent in the human condition; we will all become disabled in some way if we live long enough, and the status of “nondisabled” is at all times a precarious position. We are creatures: finite, contingent, and limited.[4] Creation itself requires limits to have form, and in the same way, limitation is an intrinsic part of our human creatureliness.
Swimming in the waters of modern Western culture, we are addicted to progress and seduced by the prospect of mastery. Dissatisfied with what we have received as gift, we look for ways to remake ourselves, we strain to make everything — including ourselves and our communities — bigger and “better”. When that drive is concentrated into the effort of one or a few, that well-meaning aspiration easily leads to perfectionism, frustration, anxiety, and hurry.
The cross and resurrection point us towards affirming dependency as our natural state and existence as gift. Meaningful community requires interdependence, which in turn, rests upon the reality that human persons are limited. Vulnerability is not a threat to our humanness but a condition of our relatedness. In a world that celebrates independence, wholeness at every level is only found in dependence. This is not a wholeness defined by freedom from flaws, loss, or brokenness, but a wholeness that can absorb and transfigure these flaws, losses, and forms of brokenness within Christ-centred community. We must fight against the confines of injustice, particularly on behalf of others. But the confines of our own humanness? These are limits to accept and embrace.
We simply cannot do or be all the things — not all the things that people expect from us, not all that the need around us might demand, or all the things that are on our hearts in God-inspired ways. God “is mindful that we are but dust” (Ps 103:14 NASB), yet we tend to live not only un-mindful of that, but in denial of it. We strain against our limits in an effort to deny our own humanity, and in doing so we miss out on the gifts of dependency, humility, vulnerability. Unwelcome gifts, let’s be honest, but these are the things that lead to our flourishing in both Christ and in community.
Note that some of this material has appeared previously in Whitaker, Maja."Hearts and Minds: Embracing Limitation." Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice 28, no. 1 (2021): 44-46.
[1]. Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994), 89.
[2]. Maja I.Whitaker, Perfect in Weakness: Disability and Human Flourishing in the New Creation (Baylor University Press, 2023).
[3]. Maja I. Whitaker, "The Wounds of the Risen Christ: Evidence for the Retention of Disabling Conditions in the Resurrection Body, "Journal of Disability & Religion (2021).
[4]. Deborah Creamer argues that “disability is not something that exists solely as a negative experience of limitation but rather that it is an intrinsic, unsurprising, and valuable element of human limit-ness.” Deborah Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 96. Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology, 96.
Rev. Maja Whitaker
Rev. Dr Maja Whitaker is a lecturer in Practical Theology at Laidlaw College, and a pastor in the Equippers network of churches. Her teaching centres around developing Christian leaders who flourish in ministry and vocation and who are deeply formed by their followership of Christ. Maja’s research interests include disability theology, human flourishing, and body theology. She is married to Dave and they have four daughters. She loves to spend her downtime in the garden, out for a run, with a good book, in the kitchen baking, or napping.