Frances Young - Christianity and Disability

Christianity and Disability

Frances Young is notable for an extensive work in 1985, extensively revised in 1990 on Christianity and Disability, entitled "Face to Face: A Narrative Essay in the Theology of Suffering", which explores both theological and pastoral matters. She has also given talks on this subject, which draws its impetus from her faith, and the need to make sense of her severely disabled son Arthur within the framework of Christianity.

Here she notes that "we are a psychosomatic whole. We cannot be divided into soul and body. I was even more convinced of this by the experience of Arthur. A damaged brain means that the whole personality is damaged, and lacks full potential for development." The biblical view of a person she sees as a whole creature, which is where the idea of resurrection speaks of restoration of the whole; it was later Christianity that brought in Greek ideas about immortality of the soul, and this strangely dualistic way of seeing people. "Granted all the difficulties in asserting a doctrine of bodily resurrection, it does at least preserve that profound integration of our selves which is inescapably part of being what we are in this world and experience"

This also throws up the problem of such suffering and evil and a good God. "The phenomenon of handicap can produce a naive sentimentality which refuses to admit it is an evil, but everything in me protested against it as cruel and unnecessary. And if every individual is important to God, how could he even afflict one of his creatures in this way... denying them the possibility of fullness of life."

She saw her questioning like the story in which Jacob wrestles with God; and will not let God go even when he is marked by the struggle, wounded, a thigh dislocated; he keeps on struggling until he receives a blessing: "In the end Jesus did not waft away the darkness of the world, all its sin and suffering and hurt and evil, with a magic wand. He entered right into it, took it upon himself, bore it, and in the process turned it into glory, transformed it. It is that transformation which the healing of the blind man foreshadows."