© 2020 University of Notre Dame.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Notre Dame Press.

Note: This excerpt is from Disability’s Challenge to Theology: Genes, Eugenics, and the Metaphysics of Modern Medicine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 137–40.

Reconciling the goodness of creation with the corruption of nature in the fall has been a difficult task in Christian theology, and one that appears to bear directly upon the status of disability in any Christian conception of ontology, or what it means to be a human being created by God. If humanity is sinful and all creation groans and suffers with us (Rom 8:22), then how can creation still be counted as good? As noted in chapter 2, thinkers such as Francis Bacon have gone so far as to assert that all of nature is corrupted as a result of humankind’s fall and so humans must exert mastery over nature in the service of our neighbours whose bodies bear the brunt of our fallenness. On this view, disability is a univocal indicator of original sin, so the fragility of the body is a result of humanity’s sinfulness. The causal connection between sin and disability has been difficult for many people to reconcile with their belief in created goodness and mercy. Either people have been given disabilities because they in particular have sinned or their bodies bear the universal marks of original sin. As long as sin and disability are easily correlated, those who appear unwell in the eyes of society either will provoke moral revulsion and become excluded from our moral projects or (via their disease) will become the focus of intensive efforts aimed at spiritual or medical cure.

To understand our fallen situation, we ought to look to Christ’s incarnation for guidance. Although direct knowledge of God’s will remains hidden for Christians, in Christ, God’s intentions are most transparent. In Christ’s assumption of human nature we find further clues about human nature. Christ took on human form to unite human beings with God once again, but he was able to do so without sinning. Understanding how Christ could be both God and human in the Incarnation, therefore, may provide a framework for understanding how fallenness and sin are related to human nature. Looking to Christ as an exemplar of human nature might seem strange, considering that Christ, as God, bears a fundamentally different relationship to God than the rest of fallen humanity. As was made clear through the Chalcedonian Creed (451), however, Christ was both fully divine and fully human. The church fathers affirmed that Christ had to take on human nature in order to save it. Against those who denied that Christ had a human mind, Gregory of Nazianzus writes, “For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.” Unable to reach God on their own, humans needed God to come to them, to suffer as they suffered and be tested as they were tested (Heb 2:17–18). If Christ had not assumed human nature, he could not have saved humankind, but if he had not been God, he could not have completed his task of salvation without sin.

But if Christ took up the fallen nature of humankind, how was able to live a sinless life? After all, humans are estranged from God as a result of original sin. The Chalcedonian understanding of “hypostasis” (or “person”) helps to clarify Christ’s relationship to human nature, fallenness, and sin. The distinction between a hypostasis and a nature allowed early Christians to understand how Christ could have both a divine and a human nature without compromising his divinity. Traditionally, one’s hypostasis has been distinguished from one’s nature and serves as the ontological basis for distinguishing a “who” (the person as agent) from a “what” (the person as historically conditioned, fallen, and so on). The will allows us to believe the human is not fully described as a something, but rather as a someone. Environmental and genetic factors may play a role in shaping our will’s desires, but they can never fully explain human behaviour as long as persons experience their self as an “I.” The obvious difference between Christ’s hypostasis and our own is his will. Unlike the rest of humanity, Christ was able to direct his will to God’s will perfectly, even while being tempted to sin as humans are tempted. Christ’s ability to take on humanity’s fallen nature without sinning reveals that sinfulness is properly attributed to our hypostasis rather than to our nature.

Christ’s exceptional hypostasis points us toward the fundamental difference between fallenness (a property of nature) and sin (a property of hypostasis, or person). A nature can be damaged and fallen, but a nature cannot sin, because sin is ascribed to agents. In all humans besides Christ, however, the will’s fallenness is experienced hypostatically as one’s own sin rather than as damage that exists apart from one’s own agency. Ian McFarland explains that Christ shares in our nature without sharing our sin: “He reveals sin as a function of the will that is nevertheless prior to any act of the will . . . and thus allows it to be understood as an ontological rather than an axiological category.” This does not mean human beings are ontologically evil but that they are bound to sin. Human sinfulness itself is a mystery, but it is a function of who the human is, even while it resists explanation with respect to cause. Thus the will is not the cause of our sinfulness but the place where our sinfulness is experienced. We therefore cannot talk of sinful natures. Even a fallen nature is good and not evil. Unlike our sinfulness, our nature cannot separate us from God because it only exists in God. In other words, our human nature as created by God is good because all of creation is good. McFarland asserts, “The assumption by Christ of a fallen human nature simply reinforces this basic point: if the nature God assumes is itself damaged and yet is taken on by God as God’s own humanity, then the damage our natures suffer is clearly not an occasion for divine revulsion.” Taking on human nature, Christ shared in human fragility and vulnerability and was subject to disease, disability, and death, but these  frailties did not separate Christ from God. In other words, Christ’s own mortality did not follow from his sinfulness. Thus human nature does not stand in the way of God’s love.

If disease, disability, and finitude are constitutive parts of our fallen human nature (our whatness) but theoretically distinguishable from our sinful wills (our whoness), then our bodily limitations are loved  rather than despised by God. The fragility of our bodies is part of our natural state of existence; therefore, physical vulnerability, illness, and disability are natural components of God’s good creation, albeit in its fallen state (the only state of existence we know). Understanding bodily disease and disability within the category of natural human finitude rather than estrangement or alienation from God, the Christian community may be encouraged to alter its conceptions of naturalness in light of a diverse group of bodies. Rather than viewing people with disabilities primarily as a sign of humanity’s sinfulness, Christians should be encouraged to see them as part of the natural human condition—lives and natures that are gifted and continually loved by God.