Reclaiming Resurrection from the Dead - Easter

Introduction

Two days have brought us here. Maundy Thursday, we witnessed the last supper, then on Good Friday, we watched at the foot of the cross and learned that God’s most powerful act took the form of powerlessness. On Holy Saturday, Christ descending into the realm of the dead was nothing less than divine solidarity extended to its limits, the love of God embracing the place where God might be thought to be most absent. Holy Saturday insists that nothing has been missed. Now, Easter makes its claim upon us, and the claim is bodily.

Made in a garden. Made to locked doors. Made on a beach at daybreak around a charcoal fire. Made with breath to a face. Made with fingers plunging into wounds that did not heal after death.

It should not need saying. That the resurrection is bodily is for too much of contemporary Christianity either an embarrassing excess that must be explained away or an optional metaphor that the serious believer needn’t much bother themselves with. The accounts offered in lieu tend to fall into one of two groups. Spiritual-only: Jesus rose in that his cause lives, his memory persists, his Spirit abides, his influence echoes in the lives of those who loved him. Newer and dressed in the dignified language of science, it is the resurrection of consciousness: personal identity persisting as information or awareness beyond the death of the material body. Both arrive at something recognizable as Christ. Neither arrives at the Christ presented by the New Testament.

This essay is an argument for another way. The Anglican tradition at its best has kept it from the start. The risen Christ has a spiritual body, with definite form and feature. He is the same person who died on the cross. The wounds are still there. The transformation is real and the continuance is real and the two go together because the resurrection is the action of the Spirit upon the whole person.

The wounds revealed to Thomas provide the image we will use to explore this claim. Jesus' wounds. The ones Thomas wants to see and Jesus offers to show. The wounds are the image on which this whole doctrine swings. They will take center stage here and return at the end, transformed.

I. The Anglican Grammar of Resurrection

Anglican theology starts with the same instinct its made its decisions about the cross and evil. False choices rejected. The cross was not a divine child sacrifice or a sentimental moral example. Holy Saturday was not a liturgical pause or an undifferentiated burst of triumph. The resurrection is neither spiritual survival nor brute physical resuscitation. Anglican theology reads Scripture squarely. Prays the resurrection into existence in its liturgy. Celebrates and lives the resurrection through its sacramental life. Embodiment has never been in doubt. But neither is flesh and blood forced back into the categories of a pre-Easter body.

Michael Ramsey sets out the Anglican position, insofar as there is a unified Anglican position, most precisely in The Resurrection of Christ.1 Ramsey insists on the reality of the event. The reality of Jesus’s body. A body, note, that has been transformed, but not to the point where ordinary human experience and recognition are suspended. The disciples knew him. Recognition matters: He who appears is Jesus who was crucified. Mary recognizes the voice that calls her name. The disciples on the road to Emmaus know him in the breaking of bread. Thomas is invited to thrust his fingers into the holes. Spiritual-only interpreters frequently remark that these disciples didn’t know Jesus was risen until after the appearance. Not here. Here, the continuous, bodily identity of the risen Christ is the starting point.

And because it is continuous, the crucified Christ is still here. Jesus’s wounds are still here.

II. The Spiritual-Only Position and Its Failure

Jesus’s body was raised, but in a spiritual sense, it has an ancient precedent. Docetism claims that Jesus only seemed to be embodied, only seemed to suffer, and only seemed to die. The Church was quick to identify it as gospel-destructive and didn’t hesitate to label it a heresy. If Jesus did not physically die, then the cross is a theater. If the cross is the theater, there was no solidarity on Calvary. If there was no solidarity, there is nothing solid to be done with on Holy Saturday and Easter morning, which simply brings an empty triumph.

Spiritual-only takes a subtler form today. It allows that Jesus might well have suffered, but denies that the resurrection touches his body. Disciples see Jesus and hear his voice but do not touch him because the vision is identified as a grief vision, or as the slow dawn of realization that Jesus’s message lives on beyond him, or as the founding experience of the post-Easter church whose shared certainty that Jesus has been vindicated is itself the resurrection. Rudolf Bultmann’s fingerprints are all over much of this material2.and for similar reasons. The language of resurrection becomes mythological language for a spiritual reality that, if it exists at all, doesn’t require an empty tomb.

Anglicanism cannot say that. As with Docetism, the reasons are traditional and sentimental but run much deeper than that. They are theological and structural.

The spiritual-only resurrection undoes creation. Salvation is uncoupled from the body and, therefore, from creation. Jesus may rise as a spirit or a cause, but the body that died remains unredeemed flesh. Matter is left on the sermon editor's chopping block at the moment that the doctrine of creation most needs to embrace it. William Temple argued that Christianity is the most materialist religion of all the great traditions precisely because it has a doctrine of resurrection that insists the new creation takes bodies as seriously as the old one did.3 Anglicanism has no option but to agree.

It cannot make sense of the empty tomb. Anglican scholarship emphasizes the historicity of the tomb narratives. The earliest adversaries of the resurrection did not say “it wasn’t empty.” They offered another explanation for why it was.

The spiritual-only resurrection begins with the resurrection and works backward to spiritualize salvation. Finish the trajectory, and the redemption of the body doesn’t matter. Miracles can’t be trusted. What matters is minds. Minds that briefly inhabited bodies. Anglican sacramental teaching becomes a drag on a functional framework that has already decided that bodies don’t matter.


III. The Consciousness-Only Position and the Luminarchist Move

The second family of alternatives offers greater contemporary prestige. Its vocabulary is drawn from neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, which have become the regnant framework for speaking about persons in the modern West. On this view, personal identity is constituted by consciousness, memory, pattern, and information. The person is the pattern, and the pattern in principle need not depend on the specific substrate that originally instantiated it. Death dissolves the substrate; resurrection, on this reading, is the reconstitution of the pattern in a new form, or its continuation in some non-material medium, or its absorption into a universal field of consciousness from which individual identity may persist or emerge.

This position has the advantage of engaging seriously with the question of personal identity after death, and it takes consciousness as irreducible rather than dismissing the inner life of the person. It is, in this sense, more honest than a purely materialist eliminativism. For those engaged in the kind of science-spirituality, this family of ideas is the natural language of the contemporary resurrection discussion. Consciousness is held to survive; the person continues; something that might be called resurrection is affirmed.

The diagnosis must be made precisely here. This is the luminarchist move applied to the resurrection. Luminarchism, as my framework names it, is the theological error of collapsing transcendence into immanence by treating the creature's experience of something greater as an experience of the system's own depth rather than an encounter with what genuinely precedes and exceeds the system from without.4 In the resurrection context, the luminarchist move preserves the phenomenology of personal survival while evacuating its bodily content. The person continues, the consciousness persists, the information endures, and the body, the particular flesh-and-blood particularity of this human being, is shed as the irrelevant substrate.

I offer five diagnostic questions to press this directly. On the luminarchist resurrection, salvation is elevation into a higher informational or conscious state rather than the healing and restoration of persons in their embodied particularity. The body is treated as a temporary substrate for consciousness rather than the permanent dwelling of the Spirit. The risen Christ becomes a pattern reconstituted rather than a person bodily vindicated. And the church that celebrates this resurrection is no longer gathered around the broken and given body of the one who was raised; it is gathered around a communal experience of surviving consciousness. In the end, because cells do this naturally, there is no Jesus except for the human one who may have stumbled upon some of the spiritual realities of the cosmos thousands of years ago. That is not the Anglican belief.

Thomas Nagel's observation is relevant here. Neo-Darwinian biology, and by extension the philosophy of mind that grows from it, operates in the third-person register.5 Consciousness is irreducibly first-person. The consciousness-only resurrection attempts to honor that first-person reality by preserving it beyond death, and in doing so, it takes a step the strict materialist refuses. The Anglican tradition affirms that step. Persons are irreducible. Identity is real. The inner life matters to God. Where the tradition must press further is the question of what that inner life is inner to. The consciousness-only resurrection answers: inner to itself. The Anglican tradition answers: inner to a body that is itself the image of God and the dwelling of the Spirit, and therefore inner to a person whose bodily particularity is held by the God who made it.

Austin Farrer's grammar of double agency is illuminating here.6 God acts through creaturely causes without being identical to them. The resurrection is God's action upon the body of Jesus, transforming it without dissolving it. This is neither resuscitation, the mere reanimation of a corpse, nor dematerialization. It is the Spirit's action upon matter, glorifying the particular body of this particular person. The agent is God; the patient is the whole person, body and soul together. To strip the resurrection down to the survival of consciousness is to remove the patient, leaving only the agent acting upon nothing that was ever materially real.


IV. The Classical Position: Spiritual Body with Individual Form

Paul's letter to the Corinthians provides the most sustained New Testament treatment of what the resurrection body is and is not.7 His controlling image is the seed and the plant: what is sown is transformed into what is raised. There is genuine continuity; it is the same seed that becomes the plant, and genuine transformation; the plant exceeds the seed in ways the seed itself could not anticipate. The spiritual body (soma pneumatikon) is the body as fully animated by and expressive of the Spirit, the body as God always intended the body to be.

Several features of Paul's account are theologically decisive. First, the resurrection body is individual. Paul does not describe the absorption of individual persons into a universal body or a collective consciousness. The same person who dies is the person who is raised. Second, the resurrection body is transformed. It is raised in glory, in power, in incorruption. The limitations and vulnerabilities of ordinary creaturely embodiment are overcome. Third, the resurrection body is the first fruits of a general resurrection: Christ's resurrection inaugurates the transformation of creation, the new creation in which all things will be made new. These three revelations must be balanced within any conception of the resurrection.

The Gospel resurrection narratives fill out Paul's account with specific detail, and the detail matters. The risen Jesus eats. He is touched. He walks, he speaks, he breathes on the disciples, he cooks breakfast. These are all bodily acts. At the same time, he appears in a locked room. He is recognized and then disappears at Emmaus. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for a gardener until he speaks her name. The body that does these things is the same body that died and is the same body now beyond death in a manner that exceeds ordinary creaturely limitation.

Rowan Williams, in his reading of the resurrection appearances, notes that the disciples recognize Jesus rather than deduce him.8 Recognition is a category that requires continuity of identity. One can only recognize what one has previously known. The disciples do not conclude from the evidence that this is Jesus; they know it is Jesus. The knowing precedes the reasoning. That kind of recognition belongs to a person, to an embodied person whose voice, face, gestures, and wounds are the basis on which recognition is possible.

The wounds are the center of the doctrine. They are, precisely, the marks of continuity. The risen Christ is the crucified one, raised. The wounds remain in the glorified body as the permanent testimony that this is the same person, that the cross was real, that the suffering was real, that the death was real, and that God's answer to all of that reality was transformation rather than replacement. The scars of Calvary are carried into the new creation. They are glorified.

This has profound implications for the Anglican theology of evil developed in my Holy Saturday essay. If the wounds remain in the risen body, then suffering leaves a permanent mark upon the person that even resurrection does not erase. God's answer to evil is the transformation of the particular person, wounds and all, into glory. The victims of history are raised as themselves. The traumatized are raised with their histories held and healed. The ones who suffered are the ones who are vindicated.


V. The Sacramental Confirmation

Anglican theology has always understood the Eucharist as the place where the resurrection is most fully encountered within ordinary creaturely time. The one who is crucified and risen makes himself known in the breaking of the bread. The Emmaus story makes this clear: the disciples do not recognize him in the conversation on the road. They recognize him in the fractio panis, in the moment when his hands break the bread, and he gives it to them.9

That eucharistic recognition confirms the bodily resurrection at the liturgical level. The Eucharist is a bodily action: hands are extended, bread is taken, broken, and given; the cup is shared; the body and blood of Christ are received through the material elements. If the resurrection were the survival of consciousness only, there would be no particular reason for this enactment. A meditation, a visualization, a communal remembering of Jesus's teaching would serve just as well. The reason the Church has gathered around this table, in this bodily way, is that the risen Lord who meets them here is the same Lord whose body was given and whose blood was poured out on Calvary, and who was raised in that same body on the third day.

The Prayer Book expresses this with characteristic restraint and precision. The eucharistic prayer does not speculate about the mechanics of Christ's presence. It draws the gathered assembly into the reality of the one sacrifice, made once for all, and prays that we who receive the body and blood of Christ may be filled with his grace and heavenly benediction.10 I name this Civitas Eucharisticus in my book Embodied Liturgy.

The grammar is participatory: we are drawn into Christ's death and resurrection through the material signs of bread and wine. The beauty of the action, the specificity of the elements, the embodied gathering in a common place — all of this is required because the resurrection it enacts is a bodily resurrection.

VI. Resurrection, Luminarchism, and the Fate of the Image-Bearer

The three positions surveyed in this essay correspond to three different anthropologies, and the anthropology at stake is nothing less than the doctrine of the image of God. The spiritual-only resurrection implicitly locates the image of God in the soul or spirit, with the body as instrument or container. The consciousness-only resurrection similarly locates the image of God in the pattern of consciousness, with matter as the disposable substrate. Both positions effectively answer the question of what the image-bearer is by saying: the inner life, the consciousness, the soul, and the body is a vehicle the image-bearer rides until death.

Anglican theology answers differently. The image of God is borne by the whole person. The body is the image of God. The body that was formed from the earth, animated by the breath of God, sustained by food and water and rest, vulnerable to pain and death, that body is the bearer of the divine image and therefore the object of divine redemption.

The luminarchist move in its resurrection form is the substitution of the pattern for the person, the consciousness for the creature. It preserves the phenomenology of personal survival while evacuating the creaturely particularity that is the actual object of God's love. God so loved the world, the kosmos, the material creation, the specific persons in their specific bodies, that he gave his only Son. The resurrection confirms that God's love extends to the body, that the material creature is held by God even through and beyond death, that the image-bearer is vindicated in the fullness of what they are.

This is the load-bearing wall that the consciousness-only resurrection removes. When the body is shed in the act of resurrection, the implicit theology of creation is that the body was always provisional, always the lesser part, always destined for dissolution. And if the body is destined for dissolution, the sacraments that convey grace through material signs are at best pragmatic accommodations to creaturely limitation rather than genuine vehicles of divine action. The Incarnation, the permanent assumption of matter by the Word of God, is undermined at its root. The Word that took on flesh is depicted as eventually releasing that flesh as an outgrown form — precisely the conclusion Chalcedon was framed to prevent.

VII. The Disabled God and the Permanent Wounds

In 1994 Nancy L. Eiesland published The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability, and the argument she makes is an illuminating confirmation of what I am offering.11 Eiesland reads the resurrection appearances in Luke with attention to a detail that traditional theology has tended to spiritualize away: the risen Christ who stands among the disciples still bears the wounds of crucifixion in his hands and his feet (Luke 24:39-40). These wounds are permanent features of the glorified body. They are shown, touched, and declared. Eiesland names this the "Disabled God," not as provocation but as precision. The risen Christ enters the new creation bearing the marks of impairment, and in doing so he shares permanently in the bodily experience of those who live with disability, pain, and the stigma of non-"normative" bodies.

This presses directly on the central argument of this essay. If the wounds are permanent in the glorified body, then the glorified body is the body of one who was impaired,  pierced, broken, marked by trauma, and that impairment is carried forward into glory rather than erased by it. The transformation of the resurrection does not produce a body conformed to a cultural standard of physical wholeness or normativity. It produces a body in which the wounds of a particular history are permanently written, glorified, and shown. The Disabled God is the risen Christ, and the risen Christ is the Disabled God.

Eiesland's philosophical and literary sources illuminate this claim from several directions. She draws on liberation theolog, particularly Gustavo Gutierrez's preferential option for the poor, extended to those marginalized by bodily difference, and on feminist theology's insistence that the body as actually lived, rather than the body as idealized, is the site of theological encounter.12 She draws on the social model of disability developed by Michael Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, which reframes disability as a sociopolitical condition produced by the interaction between impairment and environments designed for normative bodies, rather than a medical deficiency to be cured or a spiritual burden to be borne.13 She draws implicitly on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, which insists that the body is the ground of all perception and experience rather than an instrument the self employs.14 Together, these sources allow Eiesland to argue that "wholeness" is a category of justice and social integration within the body of Christ rather than the absence of impairment, and that the church's tendency to equate healing with cure has misread both Scripture and its own sacramental life.

The implications for Episcopal liturgical practice are substantial, and the tradition has been moving, unevenly, toward receiving them. Eiesland's work calls for radical eucharistic inclusion: the table must be physically accessible, the eucharistic assembly must be ordered around the actual bodies present rather than idealized notions of what bodies should be able to do.15 The rites for healing in the Prayer Book tradition have been increasingly interpreted as ministries of wholeness rather than the expectation of cure. The laying on of hands, the anointing with oil, and the prayers for the sick are the church's solidarity with those who suffer rather than transactions for the removal of impairment. The Disabled God confirms this reorientation: solidarity is prior to cure, and the risen Christ does not present himself to the disciples as one whose wounds have been healed. He presents himself as one whose wounds have been glorified.

The church's reception of Eiesland's theology has been uneven, yet in some parts genuinely engaged. Disability studies in theology has grown substantially in the decades since The Disabled God appeared, producing a generation of scholars, Sharon Betcher, Amos Yong, Thomas Reynolds, and others, who have extended, critiqued, and deepened her work.16 Anglican and Episcopal communities have been among the more receptive, partly because the sacramental tradition already insists that bodies matter to God, and partly because the Eiesland reading of the resurrection appearances fits naturally within the framework this essay has been developing: the wounds are real, permanent, and revelatory.


VIII. The Guardrail: Eschatology

Eiesland’s insight should be received with a qualification that she herself does not consistently apply to her work, and Anglican theology is well-suited to providing. The risk at the precipice of disability theology (as with liberation theology more broadly) is that it becomes a realized eschatology: the resurrection is first and foremost an imperative for social change in this world, and the eschatological aspect (the risen body as the first fruits of the new creation; the promise of what will happen to all bodies at the general resurrection) gets subsumed by a social program of inclusion and accessibility. When that happens, grace gets smuggled out by ethics, and the resurrection gets reduced from what God does to the body of the crucified to what we decide to do with our neighbors who’ve been marginalized.

Anglican theology maintains the tension that a realized eschatology releases. The eucharistic community is the true foretaste of the kingdom, but true foretastes come with genuine obligations: those who gather around the table of the Disabled God are called to see that table accessible to all, that the gathered community visibly reflects the body of Christ in its full human diversity, that the ministry of healing is pursued without the implicit judgment that impairment is a problem God will fix before the person can be whole. Those are true obligations, and Eiesland rightly asserts them.

At the same time, the eucharistic community is a foretaste, not the thing itself. The risen Christ, whose wounds are permanent features of the glorified body, is the first fruits of the general resurrection, which is still future. The disabled body, the body in chronic pain, the body bearing marks of trauma, the body damned by society for failing to match some cultural ideal of wholeness, all of these bodies await the transformation that Jesus’ body underwent on Easter morning. Their particularity, their personal history, their wounds will not be dissolved by the new creation; they’ll be held by God and glorified.

This is the work of God in the eschaton, and no program of social inclusion (how faithful and necessary it may be!) replaces or constitutes it.

Our guardrail on disability theology is this: the resurrection initiates our inclusion, it does not get its justification from our inclusion. God raised up the Disabled God, wounded, particular, marked body of Jesus crucified, and therefore every wounded, particular, marked body on earth is declared to be held by God, loved by God, destined for glory in its full creaturely particularity. The social and liturgical obligations that reality precipitates are as real and urgent as they come. But they are the fruit of the resurrection. Received by grace. Enacted in the body of Christ that is made present in the church. Consequences of the resurrection, not the meaning of it. The meaning of the resurrection is still what God did to the body of Jesus on the third day, the first fruits of a creation where all things, bodies included, will be made new.

Within an eschatological Anglican grammar, Eiesland’s disability theology sheds light rather than destabilizes this essay’s argument. The permanent wounds of the Disabled God teach us that God will raise up every person in their particular bodily history. Our eucharistic obligations toward those with disabilities flow from and confirm that in the gathering assembly, we must embody that truth, a foretaste of what is to come. But the eschaton reminds us that the foretaste is not the feast itself; that even our most faithful embodied response to the risen Christ awaits the day when every wound will be glorified, every body vindicated, and the new creation displays what God always meant for bodies to look like.

IX. The Wounds Reclaimed

At the outset of this essay, the wounds of the risen Christ were proffered as the central image: the marks Thomas asks about and Jesus exhibits. Proof that the one standing in the upper room is the same one who hung on the tree. Over the course of the argument, those wounds have accumulated significance. Let me take a minute at the end to try and draw them back together again at a different weight than they began with.

The wounds began as proof of identity, evidence that the one raised was the same who died. They now bear the weight of the whole theological project. The wounds present on the glorified body say that the transformation God does not come at the expense of our particularity. Our particular selves, with our particular histories. The risen Christ declares that the body is the indispensable bearer of personal identity, such that even the glorified body does not give that up. It says that God’s response to evil, suffering, and human rebellion is vindication: the wounds will still be there, but they will be glorified wounds on the hands that now bless us.

Lastly, the wounds declare this: if these wounds remain on the risen Christ, every wound suffered by every human body is secure in God's hands. Carried in the glorified body of the Son of God, who will one day come again to transform every wound into its glorious future. The resurrection isn’t the end of the story, but its beginning: the first fruits, the penultimate act of the new creation. What God did to Jesus’s body on Easter morning is the sign and promise of what God will do for all the bodies of those who belong to him by baptism into death and resurrection.

They will be bodily raised as themselves, history and wounds included. They will be glorified as the distinct image-bearers they were created to be. They will be eternally secure in the love of the God who made them.

Good Friday showed us that God will not refuse to enter into every mode of human powerlessness. Holy Saturday showed us that no silence is too great for God to inhabit. Easter morning shows us that there is no human death that will have the last word over the bodies that God loved into being. On the cross, God was crowned with the powerless rather than the powerful. In the silence of the grave, God raised up the body of the crucified rather than abandoning it. On Easter morning, God declares every wounded body to be a glorified body.

In each of these, God is acting with the same love, for the sake of the same creation, and in the body of the same Son.

It is the third day. He is risen.



*This essay is largely taken from several of my books and offered here in a new form.

Footnotes

1 Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945). Ramsey's insistence that the resurrection is both genuinely bodily and genuinely transformed remains the most precise Anglican formulation of the position developed here.

2 Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1953). Bultmann's demythologizing program remains the intellectual ancestor of most spiritual-only resurrection positions in mainline Protestantism.

3 William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1934), 478. Temple's claim that Christianity is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions is an affirmation of the theological significance of creation and embodiment.

4 This diagnostic category is developed across the apologetics series. For the full five-question instrument, see the FRAMEWORKS reference document.

5 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35.

6 Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation (London: A. and C. Black, 1967), 62-66. Farrer's account of double agency provides the grammar for understanding God's action in and through the creaturely without abolishing the creaturely.

7 1 Corinthians 15:35-49. Paul's seed-and-plant analogy is the most sustained scriptural account of transformation-in-continuity, and Anglican theology has consistently returned to it as the structural spine of resurrection doctrine.

8 Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), 43-47. Williams's phenomenological analysis of recognition in the resurrection appearances remains essential reading for any Anglican engagement with the topic.

9 Luke 24:30-31. The Emmaus account is the paradigmatic eucharistic recognition narrative in the Anglican tradition, and it has shaped both Prayer Book theology and Anglican homiletics on the resurrection since Cranmer.

10 The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 2007), 335-336.

11 Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 58-60, 70-75, 99-101, 114-116. Eiesland's reading of Luke 24 as the textual ground for the "Disabled God" is the single most important contribution in disability theology to the doctrine of the resurrection, and it arrives here as a confirmation of the bodily resurrection argument rather than a revision of it.

12 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973). Eiesland extends the preferential option from economic marginalization to the marginalization of non-normative bodies.

13 Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan, 1990). The social model distinguishes impairment (the bodily condition) from disability (the social and environmental barrier), relocating the problem from the individual body to the systems that exclude it.

14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). Merleau-Ponty's account of the body as the ground of all perception rather than an instrument of the self provides the phenomenological basis for Eiesland's insistence that the body as actually lived is the site of theological encounter.

15 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 114-116. Her specific eucharistic recommendations include architectural accessibility, adaptation of liturgical gesture and posture, and the revision of healing rites to emphasize solidarity rather than cure.

16 Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007); Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007); Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008). Reynolds's development of "vulnerable communion" is particularly consonant with the Anglican sacramental tradition.




Bibliography

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