Steph Judd: Well, Dr. Brock, it's such a pleasure to have you on the 2 cities.
Brian Brock: Thanks for having me
Madison Pierce: welcome, Dr. Brack. It really is wonderful to get the opportunity to learn more from you. I wonder if you could just give us an idea of what led you to this area, both in your career, and perhaps also in your in your life.
Brian Brock: Sure. I I started in this direction studying medical ethics.
Brian Brock: considered as an undergraduate studying medicine, and I sort of drifted laterally into medical ethics, and
Brian Brock: when I got there I vouted an uncomfortable discipline. I'd gone in to say there seems to be these real
Brian Brock: pressing issues that Christian should have something to say about. But when I got there I realized that the discipline is designed to to help
Brian Brock: grease the wheels of modern medicine. So it sort of asks things from the doctors perspective primarily with the AIM of
Brian Brock: smoothing out hiccups, and in the process. and in that context disability appears as a kind of
Brian Brock: speed by a kind of difficulty, and so I
Brian Brock: I noticed it pretty early on in my graduate studies.
Brian Brock: but it didn't really know exactly what to do with it, and it was only much lighter
Brian Brock: when I was doing graduate work when my first child, Adam. was born, who is now 19,
Brian Brock: and he has down syndrome and autism, and was pretty
Brian Brock: pretty sick in his first couple of weeks. And
Brian Brock: so now it's really a day-to-day experience, living with disability, and I I found that I had
Brian Brock: I use. I can put that kind of academic learning to.
Madison Pierce: Wow.
Madison Pierce: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. I wonder if I can follow up. I i'd love to hear a little bit more about how you might understand the difference between the field speaking to a medical professionals. And you know, speaking to people who are
Madison Pierce: meeting and living in and community with people who have disabilities. So what? What's in the framing that that you would. or that you I appreciate your work or a ways you've changed.
Brian Brock: Sure.
Brian Brock: I mean one of the common
Brian Brock: questions in medical ethics is how how to avoid paternalism, meaning
Brian Brock: In what ways can doctors or medical professionals proceed
Brian Brock: without imposing their view of how things should go on to patients, and that means I remember
Brian Brock: a sort of memorable moment in my own education was when they were having a big what's called a grand rounds, where they E. C.
Brian Brock: As as one of its initiation rights. You have to kind of cut the outer part of your ear off, and they're asking you as a doctor to do that do you do it or not?
Brian Brock: Those artificial kind of thought experiments are
Brian Brock: stock and trade in the discipline, but what
Brian Brock: I found
Brian Brock: unsettling what's the the kind of narrowness of the question being put, as
Brian Brock: does the doctor deploy their authority and power to indulge this essentially
Brian Brock: irrational request.
Brian Brock: and it's very hard to get the question out of that framework. So if you are living with
Brian Brock: people with disabilities, going into health care context, and being faced with
Brian Brock: people who see the problem of ethics in those terms. It it gives you a really different insight into how the how, how badly formed the question is.
Brian Brock: You know she doesn't encourage you to ask
Brian Brock: what is different about somebody from a gang coming in to get their ear cut off. Then somebody coming in to get their
Brian Brock: any other part of their healthy body cut off, which happens all the time, and nobody raises an eyebrow about it. So the kind of biases and the
Brian Brock: an authority of
Brian Brock: gatekeepers were being sort of reified and
Brian Brock: built up by the discipline in a way that I thought really disadvantaged.
Brian Brock: Those who are find it hardest to live in a kind of modern medical system that's designed for
Brian Brock: the average human being and not those who have special needs.
Madison Pierce: Yeah, thank you, Brian. That's really helpful.
Steph Judd: So, Brian, you've been working in the disability space for quite a long time now. And what are some of the
Steph Judd: the the headline areas of focus for you within that field.
Brian Brock: Well, I think in general I would see my own contribution as
Brian Brock: trying to harness the mainstream of traditional Christian doctrine to unpack
Brian Brock: disability in a in a much thicker and phenomenologically richer way. So the the discipline has tended
Brian Brock: to be dominated by liberation. Theology.
Brian Brock: and that's that's an important
Brian Brock: tradition to say that the best way to think about disabled people is as a something like a persecuted or ostracized, or even enslaved minority, and that they
Brian Brock: that Don't deserve to be in that position, and that the job of the theologian is to kind of help
Brian Brock: break down the machinery that keeps them in that place.
Brian Brock: One of the Nazi Eastlands, the disabled god, was one of the really seminal texts early in the tradition, and she just says straight out
Brian Brock: that i'm not talking about intellectual disability. So
Brian Brock: there are, in addition to
Brian Brock: liberation, theology having a relatively narrow set of doctrinal resources.
Brian Brock: It also
Brian Brock: it's very close to modern identity politics. Which means this.
Brian Brock: We're going to speak up for people, or we're going to have disabled. People speak up for themselves, and we're just going to bracket out people who can't speak for themselves.
Brian Brock: And again living with Adam, who's not verbal?
Not
Brian Brock: okay. Me kind of license to ask further about what's missing when we set the discipline up that way.
Brian Brock: So the the 2, the 2 headlines for me are.
Brian Brock: Disability is is impacts.
Brian Brock: and is opened up by every doctrinal lo locus in traditional theology, and
Brian Brock: it's it's brought to an acute point by asking the question of how do we speak about people who can't speak for themselves.
Steph Judd: And I think that's something that you you spend quite a bit of time in your book wondrously. When did trying to wrestle with, how how do I? How do I give an account of of
Steph Judd: the life that I live with with Adam?
Steph Judd: And I I appreciate that this is not really something you can do justice to in in a couple of minutes on a podcast. But could you please one of the issues that's come up even in us doing this series has been well.
Steph Judd: the the discomfort about speaking
Steph Judd: up on this area, you know people with physical disabilities. It's easier to to talk about that because you can get people on on the podcast.
But
Steph Judd: I i'd love to hear some of your wisdom that you've. You've gone it over over the the 19 years of living with Adam about how do you?
Steph Judd: How do you bear witness to that?
Brian Brock: Yeah, that's a that. That is a big topic
Brian Brock: I think
Brian Brock: one of the ways in is to say. even in liberation. Movements
Brian Brock: very often
Brian Brock: take Gandhi as an example.
Brian Brock: The champions of the people who weren't in the position to speak for themselves, were those who were highly articulate, and maybe from a different social class.
Brian Brock: You know that many movements of liberation were fronted by people who weren't from the oppressed class, and that that's
Brian Brock: not in itself proof that
Brian Brock: the the voices of the oppressed class are being swallowed by the one who's speaking out for them. So there's a precedent for
Brian Brock: the kind of speaking that i'm trying to do as a as a person and as a Christian. I think I've
Brian Brock: really large
Brian Brock: quite a lot about how much communication is happening all the time at all kinds of levels
Brian Brock: it between people, but also just in that
Brian Brock: in creation. so that it's given me
Brian Brock: a deep appreciation for a theology
Brian Brock: of of the word, which I would sort of gloss, has a theology of communication. There's
Brian Brock: lots of
Brian Brock: messaging going on all the time that that's coming toward us, and we are
Brian Brock: we meaning
Brian Brock: people with standard neurotypical functioning actually are screening quite a lot of it out. One of the ways to talk about autism is to say that it's.
Brian Brock: or or something like schizophrenia is, if the inability to filter some of that communication out.
Brian Brock: So
Brian Brock: i'm quite aware. I was just walking
Brian Brock: this week with a visiting colleague from Germany.
Brian Brock: and Adam went with us, and we walked for probably an hour, an hour and a half, and
Brian Brock: at the beginning Adam was
Brian Brock: being very vocal, and my colleagues said, you know, do we need to kind of do anything to make him feel more comfortable here? And I, said he's he's just communicating his presence and sort of testing the waters. And so by the end he had taken
Brian Brock: this guy's arm and was walking with him, and
Brian Brock: that
Brian Brock: the temporal development of those kind of relationships. Say
Brian Brock: quite a lot that if you're paying attention all of a sudden, the kind of term nonverbal gets less and less
Brian Brock: meaningful, and I think that is a journey that
Brian Brock: I wish every Christian would go on.
Madison Pierce: Thank you again, Brian. I'm. Really i'm enjoying getting to know your son and your family. Even in this interview. I I think what you raised there about this. That kind of idea of of him being nonverbal
Madison Pierce: is really interesting because it does kind of get towards some of your work on difference, and how we might understand that in relationship to things like wonder, or you know, in relationship with these other conceptions of disabilities. So could you see a little bit more about difference and wonder, and
Madison Pierce: and how you bring those those
Madison Pierce: themes into conversation.
Brian Brock: Yeah kind of open and wondrously wounded with retracing the story
Brian Brock: of
Brian Brock: the important. You know the sign
Brian Brock: in the in the ancient world when a comet happened, or a anomalous birth right like a you know.
Brian Brock: a Siamese twin, or you know, a child with an extra arm was born.
Brian Brock: The the actual world saw those things as really worrying occurrences, and they tended to think the gods are
Brian Brock: telling us
Brian Brock: they're trying to set us straight, and it's a warning that. And therefore.
Brian Brock: you know even the very body of these infants would be
Brian Brock: experienced as
Brian Brock: as painful and august. I start the book by talking about Augustine.
Brian Brock: These, I think, being asked by Christian parents.
Brian Brock: How do we respond to
Brian Brock: a birth like this? And
Brian Brock: he could have taken a couple of roots of answer in that question, but he decided
Brian Brock: to actually turn the question upside down and say.
Brian Brock: Well.
Brian Brock: important looks to us
Brian Brock: memorable because it is out of the ordinary. And but we know that
Brian Brock: God does everything, and God creates every human being specifically. And so
Brian Brock: it must be something that God has done so. That means there is something kind of special going on here, so that's where he would evoke it as
Brian Brock: something to which some special attention should be made as some kind of special work of God. And he used that then to elaborate a theology of difference
Brian Brock: by highlighting.
Brian Brock: How incredibly rare it is that that identical twins are born that we can't actually tell tell apart. So actually
Brian Brock: difference is
Brian Brock: kind of the way God works, and sometimes some differences stand out to us as out of the ordinary, but he says it's only because they're unfamiliar and rare, not because they're necessarily bad or
Brian Brock: threatening, and they certainly aren't sign of divine punishment. Rather they
Brian Brock: could well be taken the other way around as a sign of divine
Brian Brock: interest in this thing that's happening out of the ordinary, and that so I think he
Brian Brock: at that moment I call that a kind of inversion of perception, something which seems
Brian Brock: ugly and threatening. gets
Brian Brock: turned into something which is promising, and in a way wonderful in being out of the ordinary, and I think in the in the book I
Brian Brock: so go to some length to suggest that that's somehow an elaboration of
Brian Brock: the Christian experience of looking on a State execution
Brian Brock: which is a very ugly thing
Brian Brock: as the the kind of salvation of the world, and
Brian Brock: that
Brian Brock: the the juxtaposition of that oddness. I think, sort of saturated Christian thought in a way that should
Brian Brock: give us pause; for, because we generally.
Brian Brock: I think we meaning Christians in the modern West
Brian Brock: Tantu find difference
Brian Brock: awkward. And I think people who are different
Brian Brock: can sense that awkwardness?
Madison Pierce: Thank you.
Madison Pierce: Yeah. I think you're right that so frequently, or versus what we expect to the extent that that maybe at some point we should start to expect it. But I really appreciate your answer.
Steph Judd: and I think that
Steph Judd: at that macro level there is this.
Steph Judd: our responses to difference, our responses to disability. and not necessarily straightforward.
Steph Judd: I think that there is often a sense of uneasiness or confusion. And even in this, in this series, with one of the themes that's come up, quite a lot is.
Steph Judd: Should we respond with grief and loss? Or is it is it a gift and just that kind of confusion around the responses that we are
Steph Judd: to have to these kinds of things when they present themselves in in our lives?
Steph Judd: Are you able to explain to us to some of the handholds that you have developed as you've thought about this.
Brian Brock: Yeah, I think it's important to let all those responses in and to kind of pray through them and
Brian Brock: admit them.
Brian Brock: And one of the stories I tell.
Brian Brock: the kind of one of the sort of unifying threads in wondrously wounded is trying to tell it
Brian Brock: Type of conversion narrative
Brian Brock: along that plot line about how living with Adam has
Brian Brock: provoke a sequence, a development of
Brian Brock: lament and joy and appreciation and wonder and consternation.
Brian Brock: And what you know, one of the kind of tag lines I use for that is
Brian Brock: talking about Adam as the healthiest guy now, even though he has had a range of medical problems. but he's never had. He's never worried about this being disabled, and he's never
Brian Brock: felt paint that he won't, go to college or drive.
Brian Brock: and he almost certainly won't.
Brian Brock: so that one of the ways that I deal with the problem of
Brian Brock: speaking for him is saying
Brian Brock: objectively speaking, he's not disabled right. He doesn't suffer from it. He doesn't regret it. He doesn't wish he could be anything other than he is, and from a theological standpoint
Brian Brock: he's, therefore
Brian Brock: a paradigm of how
Brian Brock: to receive our creatureliness, and
Brian Brock: so that that sort of forced me to ask questions about
Brian Brock: some of my early reactions of you know disappointment about what you would think
Brian Brock: your first child would go on to do in life, or
Brian Brock: which is, of course, all projection right? So every parent really needs to think about those issues anyway, but a disabled child forces that
Brian Brock: up to the surface much more quickly.
Brian Brock: So there's the problem of projection, which is
Brian Brock: again, one of the core themes of disability. Theology is
Brian Brock: that a kind of grading sensation that people with disabilities have in being
Brian Brock: in in the assumptions people make about how they experience their life and what they want from their life, and what they are disappointed about not being able to do
Brian Brock: so. Adam couldn't himself. Feed that feed that response back to me. But it was pretty obvious that you.
Brian Brock: if he's not bothered about it, it's only me that's bothered about it. And
Brian Brock: on then down that road I've I think. come to the perhaps
Brian Brock: counterintuitive
Brian Brock: belief that
Brian Brock: I can't explain
Brian Brock: all of why God made Adam the way he has, but he has never been other than Trasomy
Brian Brock: 18 right? So from the beginning
Brian Brock: that's been
Brian Brock: how he was made, and I can either say, as most Christians do say
Brian Brock: that. Well, that's you know that that kind of stickiness of those 2
Brian Brock: chromosomes produced his being, and that's it.
Brian Brock: And the stickiness is part of the fallen nature of the universe.
Brian Brock: and
Brian Brock: locate him as a tragic effect of the brokenness of the universe. For
Brian Brock: could
Brian Brock: entertain the thought that.
Brian Brock: following or not, stickiness of gene, replication or not
Brian Brock: God, let him be that way, or even actively.
Brian Brock: made him that way, for
Brian Brock: whatever he has to do in this
Brian Brock: time and place as as a part of the body of Christ.
Brian Brock: And that to me is it
Brian Brock: is where the kind of wonder and praise can began to come up, because I can begin to treat him like he's a Christian, like all the rest of us, and that is so counterintuitive
Brian Brock: and counter-cultural that it constantly throws up
Brian Brock: wondrously surprising experiences.
Madison Pierce: I really I I appreciate this threat that you're beginning to unravel there, Brian, and
Madison Pierce: what it raises for me. You know, thinking back to your talk about Adam walking with with your and your colleague. I was thinking of how there's difference in the way that he relates to people. And then. Now, what I'm beginning to hear is, there's even difference.
Madison Pierce: and how we might conceive a flourishing.
Madison Pierce: which is, of course, the his. For all of us, anyway. But I I wonder if i'm trying to give you such a broad question sort of out of the blue. But I wonder if you could give us a picture of what you would understand flourishing to be, and perhaps how your relationship with Adam has informed that
Brian Brock: I think that we, the modern Western imagination is relatively.
Brian Brock: hermetically sealed within a medical picture of flourishing, which means, like our body, is working right, meaning, like everybody else's works.
Brian Brock: even on a good day. Adam's body is not working like everybody else's work, so he's statistically an outlier.
Brian Brock: and on bad days he can have pain. I,
Brian Brock: you know, from illness, or
Brian Brock: he has, for instance, a sort of condition in his eyes that that makes them hurt.
Brian Brock: I got it so. That question of what is flourishing boils down to?
Brian Brock: I think our default setting is well. If he doesn't have pain physically. then he's flourishing, and I I simply don't think that's the
Brian Brock: Biblical picture. I think the Old Testament vision of Shalom and the New Testament vision of the kingdom.
Brian Brock: our
Brian Brock: interpersonal.
Brian Brock: I constellations.
Brian Brock: So I think
Brian Brock: another way to put it would be. I think the fall is the fall into isolation, and that
Brian Brock: disabled people suffer when they're in hospital.
Brian Brock: or when they have pain. Not because they are.
Brian Brock: you know, in a noisy place where they can't sleep, or because they have pain. I mean that that hurts, or that's annoying, but suffering happens when you are
Brian Brock: isolated from relationship, and and that's a whole different level of
Brian Brock: alienation and pain. And I think that is
Brian Brock: what
Brian Brock: Christ comes to heal, to sort of embed us in
Brian Brock: a loving community where people take our paints seriously and are joined seriously, and we
Brian Brock: together in them.
Brian Brock: I and I think. when that's happening.
Brian Brock: physical pain sort of spades
Brian Brock: into the background.
Brian Brock: you know. I think, for instance, end of life
Brian Brock: issues. People are afraid to have pain, or
Brian Brock: there's
Brian Brock: their mental acuity.
Brian Brock: but they suffer from dying alone. And so this this kind of account of wholeness doesn't require
Brian Brock: seamless medical
Brian Brock: perfection. It it sort of operates
Brian Brock: perfectly well in states of ill health, and and we need our definition of of wholeness to
Brian Brock: to not be upset by
Brian Brock: sort of illness or
Brian Brock: physical
Brian Brock: limitation.
Steph Judd: and that's something that I think you you really explore in in a lot of your work about how kind of the
Steph Judd: the assumptions about, you know modern.
Steph Judd: but the bottom by medical industry and more ancient notions of
Steph Judd: what health and wholeness mean, and and this things back into. Why, why it is that you say that you know Adam is the healthiest person that you know.
Steph Judd: before we pivot into kind of a conversation about healing, because I think that that would be a really helpful thing for our listeners.
Steph Judd: Could you just kind of sketch out what some of those key differences between what was comprehended by the notion of healing in the ancient world. This is what what are the the assumptions that we kind of tacitly import without really realizing it? Sure.
Brian Brock: I I
Brian Brock: really summarizing
Brian Brock: last night. Mckinney, here by sort of cataloging, 6
Brian Brock: characteristics of modern views of sickness
Brian Brock: and cure. Medicine, for instance, first is a is a science scientific
Brian Brock: application to cure sickness. Second, sickness is
Brian Brock: focused on individual bodies, functioning or not functioning according to statistical norms
Brian Brock: in the population. Third, that
Brian Brock: when you go to the doctor. The doctor usually says you're going to have to quit smoking, or whatever right so there's a
Brian Brock: There's a
Brian Brock: a demand for change in your behavior designed to
Brian Brock: make your body function better. And fourth, medical professionals are
Brian Brock: essentially experts on getting bodies
Brian Brock: functioning properly. Or perhaps, if their psychologist minds functioning properly.
Brian Brock: Faith Medical professionals
Brian Brock: tend to be experts in certain body systems.
Brian Brock: and they don't claim to treat the whole person. Might they? They might give you a drug that has a side effect
Brian Brock: in some other part of the way the body functions, and they'll say, Well, I think it does that. But I don't know how it's going to affect you, and you'll have to talk to the endocrinologist to kind of work that out.
Brian Brock: So those those 5
Brian Brock: assumptions I think fit pretty badly with
Brian Brock: the healing that Jesus is doing, which is clearly not
Brian Brock: the objective scientific expert
Brian Brock: coming before people. He he heals people
Brian Brock: who
Brian Brock: the Gospels sort of constantly remind us, are looking for the Messiah, or treating Him, calling to him for salvation as the Messiah he doesn't
Brian Brock: He doesn't set up its stall for physical healing
Brian Brock: and the healing that he does is also
Brian Brock: we integration into community. So the lepers who are
Brian Brock: he'll always go to get certified
Brian Brock: by the priests.
Brian Brock: which means that they are no longer outcasts.
Brian Brock: and it's really quite clear that Jesus
Brian Brock: cares about the whole person and he heals
Brian Brock: non-functioning body parts.
Brian Brock: in order to bring the person into integrated wholeness, not to sort of
Brian Brock: fix
Brian Brock: some part, and that one of the
Brian Brock: classic ways in which that's evident is that he'll when people come to him.
Brian Brock: He sometimes asked them, what what do you want? He doesn't assume that.
Brian Brock: Oh, well, here's somebody who's blame, and they want to be healed. That's that.
Brian Brock: If he was
Brian Brock: seeing healing as a medical doctor it would just be obvious, and I mean to me the reason this theme came up in the book is that many disabled people feel really quiet.
Brian Brock: put out by the experience of being in churches and having people spontaneously.
Brian Brock: or ambush heal them them of their disability. I mean, you know, almost. If you're around
Brian Brock: Christians
Brian Brock: with disabilities, you will almost inevitably hear a story of a deaf person going up.
Brian Brock: as I heard last week, wanting prayer for cancer, and like getting getting sort of hands laid
Brian Brock: on her ears
Brian Brock: for healing her deafness, and like not even being asked
Brian Brock: what she was up for. So I think I think Jesus is a is a
is substantively different from
Brian Brock: the way we understand doctors and healing today, and that that difference is something that the Church needs to reappropriate.
Madison Pierce: Yeah, I I think that's a really helpful reminder for us, especially as we engage with people with disabilities to continue to
Madison Pierce: honor their agency and not to make assumptions. But I also appreciate the threats that you're bringing out in terms of the ministry of Jesus.
Madison Pierce: And I think that what is the assumptions that you sort of comb that in the book is that Jesus he hills everyone that he meets. I I've been translating through some of the Gospels, and
Madison Pierce: he he definitely feels a lot of people, but he doesn't kill everyone. So could you say a little bit more about that?
Brian Brock: Yeah, I think another way to sort of asked the question is, why did
Brian Brock: even the lot of a lot of people that he did heal is. you know, a microscopic fraction of even the disabled people
Brian Brock: in the world at the time, or even you know that he passed on the road. so there! There must have been lots of people
Brian Brock: who he could have healed, but didn't, and if we think about the ancient world, I mean, think about how many people you see wearing hearing Aids today. There would have been a lot of people kind of stubbing their feet because they didn't have glasses and
Brian Brock: hard of hearing. And Jesus could have spent all day
Brian Brock: handling
Brian Brock: those kind of you know things
physical conditions that can be quite
Brian Brock: disabling.
Brian Brock: But he.
Brian Brock: the way the Gospels tell the story is that he is healing People who call to Him as the Messiah. They want to be made, but made clean and redeemed
Brian Brock: the the man who's
Brian Brock: brought down by through the roof by his friends, for instance.
Brian Brock: he he forgives his sins.
Brian Brock: and so then the crowd is saying he can't forgive. You can't forgive sans. And he said, oh, well, if
Brian Brock: if you want something else, i'll make him walk too right? So the sequence is always running from his divinity. and healing is just something he can do.
Brian Brock: but it's it's not.
Brian Brock: It's not the reason why he's there, and it's not the the the AIM of His of his ministry.
Brian Brock: And the story of blindness is is that in Mark 10 is that story where Jesus
Brian Brock: actually asks, what do you want?
Brian Brock: And that that is a kind of thrown room. Set peace right when the King of the Universe, when you come before the king the
Brian Brock: the beginning of Nehemiah.
Brian Brock: If you ask the King for something that is
Brian Brock: sort of dangerous thing, and a King, who will. as an open-ended question like that is also
Brian Brock: risking
Brian Brock: exposure of the limits of his power, so it's it's a side of
Brian Brock: caring about the agency of bottom I guess that Jesus asks him. What do you want? And it's a display of the scope of His power that he can ask a question like that and
Brian Brock: and answer it in any way that that barbecue asks. And But the the story is sort of emphasizes that
Brian Brock: this is catalyzed by Bardermain, saying, Jesus son of David had mercy on me
Brian Brock: not
Brian Brock: Hey, Jesus! Come, come, you know, make me see
Brian Brock: which is all I mean. You would never say to the doctor. have mercy on me. I So you know that there's a pretty stark difference between the 2 things that are going on if we take
Brian Brock: the Scriptural text seriously. So I just. I would like
Brian Brock: people with disabilities and Church to have more of experience of Jesus, and less of experience of the doctor.
Madison Pierce: That's really helpful, Brian. Thank you.
Madison Pierce: And I I think it's also really important for these narratives, I mean, I'm. I'm a New Testament scholar. So you just go go off on these, but I think it's it's. It illustrates your point further that Jesus doesn't heal people in the same way every time
Madison Pierce: that he sometimes he chooses to touch them. Sometimes he pronounces something audibly; sometimes he doesn't from a distance; in fact, he he often does it from a distance, and then the very next story gets in trouble for waiting to to go somewhere, you know. So there are these these tensions that come in the narratives that are really funny.
Madison Pierce: So I think that that points us to the idea that it's not actually about the healing that there's something further there. So just just a sign comment, but I really appreciate your answer. Thank you.
Brian Brock: That was it's Bethany Mckinney Fox. I don't know if there is a way to leave that in
Brian Brock: inter inter weave that when I sort of list the 5 things that typify
Brian Brock: medical definitions of healing. But
Brian Brock: for that for the re
Brian Brock: re-editing.
Madison Pierce: these are the 5.
Madison Pierce: Yeah.
Brian Brock: I'm. Really just summarizing Bethany Mckinney Fox's
Brian Brock: account of medical healing in distinction from I.
Brian Brock: What the healing that Jesus is doing in the Gospels
Brian Brock: here.
Brian Brock: Okay.
Steph Judd: we did.
Brian Brock: Okay.
Steph Judd: And I think that's part of the reason why.
Steph Judd: You know, Unfortunately, people with disability have that experience so commonly of just people assuming making assumptions about what their needs are, rather than paying attention.
Steph Judd: paying attention to them and and inquiring of them. And and you know, sitting alongside, is that
Steph Judd: partly we we defer to these readily accessible scripts that we just kind of. maybe subconsciously draw on.
Steph Judd: and I know that that's something that you've spoken about. Like, what what are the scripts that we we adopt with that really thinking about it? And and you've spoken a bit about? Well, how do we broaden out
Steph Judd: our vision of what Christian discernment should be when we encounter disability in our own life or in the life of other people. Could you unpack what you mean by that? A little bit more?
Brian Brock: Yeah. let's start with that kind of simple point that
Brian Brock: we're all going to lose
Brian Brock: capacities that we have to do things right. So if
Brian Brock: if disability is the negation of ability.
it's coming all of our way.
Brian Brock: And I think my starting observation is that i'm. I was pressing into the question of healing, because people with disabilities
Brian Brock: have to get going much earlier in their lives with getting
Brian Brock: coming to terms with who they are, and what they can and can't do. So what's going to happen to all of us
Brian Brock: when we're 50 or 60 is that we're going to be able to see less well than we used to, and we're going to be able to.
Brian Brock: We're going to be less athletic, and you know here or less well, and you
Brian Brock: we're going to end up as facing the same sort of problems of discipleship that disabled people face quite early. Right? So
Brian Brock: one of the reasons why I
Brian Brock: got on to the topic of healing, and became increasingly
Brian Brock: uncomfortable with the scripts that we
Brian Brock: neurotypical people
Brian Brock: import when we experience disabled people in church is that it?
Brian Brock: It down plays or discounts the work that they've done to come to terms with who they are. So
Brian Brock: Very often I disabled people when they come into church.
Brian Brock: just find it offensive that they they're not allowed to think. Yeah, i'm. Okay, how I am. I'm: deaf. And I'm.
Brian Brock: That's okay. Right. That's how God made me. I'm going to be deaf. I And there are so many Christians who
Brian Brock: really become
Brian Brock: unpleasant people when they turn 70, and they their knees go out, and they can't go skiing. or they can't do some something that they used to be able to do, and they just sort of turn in and become grumpy that I think
Brian Brock: there it's a it's a sort of obvious
Brian Brock: lack of
Brian Brock: discipleship that
Brian Brock: we're missing here that we can't see the work that's going on for people
Brian Brock: with without the abilities that that would make them normal.
Brian Brock: Who've learned to live with that, and don't want to be other than that they feel like they might be.
Brian Brock: and and and the mainstream sort of resists, seeing that, or can't see that, and that means at the end of their own lives. They
Brian Brock: can't make the exact transition that they've seen displayed all the time around them in the lives of disabled Christians, who have probably put up with a lot of misunderstanding to be to even be in church.
Brian Brock: So that's a that's a kind of opening
Brian Brock: move that I think really goes
Brian Brock: quite a long way to getting us started asking, what what else do we need to say and learn? Now come back and elaborate your question for me, Steph.
Steph Judd: Well, I think that that that, like I, i'll pivot to a follow on question, which, because this is where my brain was going, as you're speaking which is around.
Steph Judd: I don't know how to say this.
Steph Judd: I'm trying to get to the idea that you you frame around.
Steph Judd: You know what what are the one of the concrete tools that we can use to to have a different script.
Steph Judd: I think I got it. Okay.
Steph Judd: One of the one of the questions that you you provide in your book about. Well, what what are one of the the tools we can adopt in order to to kind of, not flip the script, but maybe expand. The script is to take, to take, to, to pause, and to ask, Well, what story is this person living with God?
Steph Judd: And you kind of you know you. You. You look at different characters in in the in the Scriptures that have had a different journey, and so their their relationship with God. Their relationship with the community of God looks different.
Could you just hash out what? What? That? What you mean by that?
Brian Brock: Yeah. I I introduce that theme by contrasting
Brian Brock: Johnny Arson to a very famous American quadriplegic, who was paralyzed from the neck down as a teenager. and when she is
Brian Brock: resurrected wants to be able to the able-bodied again. And Chantelle Hunick, who basically has had a condition that met. She's always
Brian Brock: close to quadriplegic and
Brian Brock: has come to terms with that. It feels like she was
Brian Brock: made that way, and doesn't expect to be
Brian Brock: anything different. or doesn't feel like God owes it to her to make her something different in the resurrection. So I
Brian Brock: these 2 women have different life courses, different life experiences, one once was able-bodied, and and then was no longer for most of their life, and the other never was.
Brian Brock: So there's 2
Brian Brock: narrative arcs which are traveling in very different directions, and you can add to that.
Brian Brock: A those who are.
Brian Brock: for instance, you know, as I talked about
Brian Brock: wrestling with
Brian Brock: being a parent, for instance. But Aren't
Brian Brock: disabled themselves.
Brian Brock: You can talk about people who were disabled before they became a Christian, and feel like they are.
Brian Brock: They were liberated by becoming a Christian, and want to be part of the ministry team. Let's say
Brian Brock: what is going on, for any one person at
Brian Brock: any moment in their life has to be unpacked in
Brian Brock: some detail to ask what disability is for them in a theological sense. And and when I say for them that i'm not saying it's, it's, it's nothing but what they they subjectively think it is, I I think, that
Brian Brock: I'm thinking of another friend, and Andrea, who is, has severe palsy, and is also in a wheelchair, and
Brian Brock: she is a committed Christian, and she's been in a
Brian Brock: church. They're much in Indiana that she just is committed to helping them
Brian Brock: be a church that's genuinely welcoming of
Brian Brock: people like her, and that's her. Her vocation is to sort of keep
Brian Brock: pushing like this Lift just doesn't work. And here's why I know deaf Christians who had the same same sort of calling. So the
Brian Brock: I've given about 5 examples of
Brian Brock: Why. the idea that we have said all that we need to say when we say the because of the fall, there's disability is just woefully impoverished, and that
Brian Brock: closer attention to what's going on with specific people's lives may
Brian Brock: show us that some of them are
Brian Brock: wrestling with a sense of lament and tragedy, and some of them are really excited about being
Brian Brock: part of the kingdom of God, and some of them may feel called to ministry, and some of them may be survived trying to survive because of a broken social system, and that
Brian Brock: what we can
Brian Brock: offer them, and receive from them as fellow Christians, but will be radically different in those different cases
Steph Judd: as a springboard off. Of that question about. I know that. Certainly. It's been true in in my life that until I have to really think about
Steph Judd: disability and and
Steph Judd: you know, resurrection, hope, and what and what concretely, that what I was imagining about about that was.
Steph Judd: you know, the assumption I had was that all of this was a result of the fall. Something that i'd like to ask you about is in terms of our resurrection type, and i'm. I appreciate that this is a highly speculative endeavor. But i'm going to go there anyway.
Steph Judd: Something I've been thinking about is about whether the the given realities of our body.
Steph Judd: whether that
Steph Judd: signifies and anything
Steph Judd: about what normatively we should be hoping for in in a world that is. he'll restored, forgiven, and made well.
Steph Judd: And so you know, for example, does the fact that I have an I with an optical nerve, signify that I should have sight in in an ideal circumstance, or in in my case, the fact that I have 2 arms
Steph Judd: and 2 legs, 2 hands. I can only use. One set of them does that in in an ideal world should I be hoping for
Steph Judd: use of all my limbs. Essentially so, I guess the question is.
Steph Judd: is there this grain of the kind of created order that informs
Steph Judd: what normativity is, and in a way that shapes what our resurrection hope
Steph Judd: should be, and maybe that that language of should be is is not really useful. But i'd love. I'd love to hear
i'd love. I'd love your help in thinking about that.
Brian Brock: Sure.
Brian Brock: the I
Brian Brock: The classic case of that question is.
Brian Brock: I mean it's it's a kind of uncomfortable case
Brian Brock: for a male theologian in the first in the third century and today, but like that.
Brian Brock: there's going to be no children. So there's going to be no dancing. So there there should be no breast in the resurrection
Brian Brock: right? Those are useless appendages.
Brian Brock: So
Brian Brock: disability theologians have. Recently.
Brian Brock: Yeah, Candide a moss is is written a book.
Brian Brock: She's a Biblical scholar, and she's unpacking. Some of these questions, I mean, for instance, Jesus seems to assume that the answer to the question.
Brian Brock: Would you rather.
Brian Brock: you know, be blinded and in heaven. or.
Brian Brock: you know. cited in and help right? So he he
Brian Brock: and he, the answer appears to be
Brian Brock: blind in heaven.
Brian Brock: There's a few other kind of dismemberment images that run along those lines, and their tradition.
Brian Brock: august and sort of ruminations about
Brian Brock: Why, we would have useless appendages like breasts in the resurrection or women. It is another way to get around those to sort of try to handle those questions.
Brian Brock: I tend to take a
Brian Brock: relatively apathetic or agnostic
Brian Brock: line with those questions, because I think it's really very easy to fall into
Brian Brock: essentially Greek aesthetics
Brian Brock: like the right body, is the proportionate body that's
Brian Brock: neither
Brian Brock: fat and
Brian Brock: too short or too tall.
Brian Brock: you know, too dark or too light
Brian Brock: to hairless. Or Harry, and
Brian Brock: if we say something's just not right or Christian or biblical, about
Brian Brock: that motive of speculation.
Brian Brock: then I think we're that opens the door to saying
Brian Brock: we'll have the bodies that
Brian Brock: we need to have to live redeemed communion
Brian Brock: when we are resurrected, and that actually
Brian Brock: quite a lot of diversity fits with that. And I think that
Brian Brock: that mode of theological speculation
Brian Brock: fits really well with Jesus imagery of the
Brian Brock: kingdom as a banquet which never.
Brian Brock: even hence, that people need to be sort of dressed up, or cleaned up or healed to be part of the banquet, so that
Brian Brock: I mean one of my kind of technical contributions, as I see it, is to reprioritize the question of the bodily
Brian Brock: physical order of the resurrection
Brian Brock: downplay, that in relation to the social order which is, I think the
Brian Brock: the focus of those having images.
Madison Pierce: Thank you, Brian. That's really helpful. It also reminds me another place that we see difference in terms of what is to come is maybe spatial. And so and it
Madison Pierce: i'm using this as an analogy. So we see in like the vision of the new heavens and the new earth that in some instances of this city, and sometimes it's a garden, and I've tried to my students about this, and I I had to see no one say, I really hope that it's not like a city.
Madison Pierce: And I said, Well, good news is also. We also have the possibility of hanging out in the garden section of the new heavens. So yeah, I think that this kind of idea of
Madison Pierce: God being capable, of course, of of crafting it in a way where we're able to worship. Well, so yeah, and we're doing the beautiful things that you said a little bit, but
Brian Brock: not at all.
Madison Pierce: I wonder if, just as we sort of rap if we can turn towards some some of your excellent kind of practical wisdom for people in churches in particular, so
Madison Pierce: is I. I don't know if you're You probably are regularly engaged in counseling churches, and how to serve a disabled community as well. Could you let us
Madison Pierce: in on some of the tips that you give them, or some of the wisdom that you provide there.
Brian Brock: Sure, a lot of the way that I start with these discussions is to say that
Brian Brock: everyone is now familiar with just physical accessibility. You know there's wheelchair ramps everywhere. I mean whether those, in fact.
Brian Brock: like buildings accessible to the people that want to be. There is another question, but at least the kind of blunt
Brian Brock: moral responsibility to, to not
Brian Brock: demand that Anybody who comes to church climb up 15 stairs to get in is is now well understood.
Brian Brock: and I so I've I've tended to see that one of my tasks is to
Brian Brock: really press the second.
Brian Brock: Sorry about my belt.
I
Brian Brock: the second sort of leg of that journey, which is that even when people are there in church
Brian Brock: they don't necessarily feel
Brian Brock: like they're among friends. They still feel like they're outsiders. So a mere presence. Or inclusion is
Brian Brock: sub-christian is a theme I've been trying to press so practically. What would I say?
Brian Brock: Spend concerted time getting to know someone with a disability, especially people with intellectual disabilities. But anybody Really.
Brian Brock: I understand that disability is all around you. A lot of it's invisible like I.
Brian Brock: A lot of people struggle with Ocd. Or chronic pain or chronic fatigue, and you can't necessarily see that, but it really shapes their experience of the world and what they can and can't do.
Brian Brock: And I think another
Brian Brock: shortcut that needs to be resisted is kind of delegating
Brian Brock: responsibility to to a committee to find an expert to get it set up a ministry that there.
Brian Brock: and it's not because i'm against special needs, ministries of various types, but because it is a deferral of the responsibility of the whole Church to actually understand
Brian Brock: how to to be present to all sorts of people, especially people that seem
Brian Brock: that that are experienced as awkward or other.
Brian Brock: I
Brian Brock: I also try to encourage Christians and churches, not to get hung up on a really obvious but uncomfortable
Brian Brock: aspect of this whole field. And that is that the the language like, what what do I? How do I? How do I call
Brian Brock: mit ctl, and what you have right like that? That's just so. Even now it's trying to describe what the problem is, I refer to that as the hesitation blues 150,
Brian Brock: and I think
Brian Brock: anyone who's
Brian Brock: kind of different in all the ways human beings can be different from your standard standard average, everyday church guru. They they feel it if
Brian Brock: they're experienced as
Brian Brock: generate an intake of breath, so i'd say, practice
Brian Brock: kind of proactive welcome and accompaniment, and
Brian Brock: that can be just as simple as we're glad you here, and you're here. And is there anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable.
Brian Brock: And I think that that kind of endpoint of all of this is trying to discover how it feels to actually experience
Brian Brock: everyone that comes into church as the bearers of the gifts of the Spirit for the up building of the community.
Brian Brock: rather than as a kind of a demand for some sort of support, or
Brian Brock: or service, or you know a kind of ministry, and I think that it's an understandable but it's. It's a short-circuiting kind of first impulse. So that that's my kind of
Brian Brock: outlined the practicalities
Steph Judd: Thank you so much, Brian, and I think that even in you know the the ways that your work has helped me understand
Steph Judd: that
Steph Judd: that there that the the of of I mean
Steph Judd: i'm gonna refresh that.
Steph Judd: Thank you so much, Brian, and I think that coming back to that, this motif of wonder.
there's an opportunity to
Steph Judd: to pause and to disrupt our expectations and assumptions, and to pay attention more deeply to the gifts that are on offer. And so we're really grateful for your work, and we're really grateful for your time in joining us.
Brian Brock: Thanks so much. It's really great to talk to you.