Defiant Afterlife

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-232
Author(s):  
Kevin Timpe
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Union With God

Many Christian theologians have struggled with how people with disabilities could be perfectly united to God in the afterlife. For some, union with God requires that those with disabilities will have their disabilities ‘cured’ or ‘healed’ prior to heavenly union with God. Others have suggested that certain disabilities preclude an individual’s ability to be united with God, thus suggesting, even if only implicitly, that such individuals have no eschatological place in the Body of Christ. In this chapter, I develop an argument for the possibility of individuals retaining their disabilities in the eschaton and nevertheless enjoying complete union with God (and through God to others). While I don’t think that the argument I develop here applies equally well to all disabilities, I think it gives us good reason to consider heavenly disability as a plausible part of speculative theology.

Not whole without us: Including people with disabilities in our understanding of the church, the gospel, and the world

2021 ◽  
pp. 009182962110488
Author(s):  
Rochelle Scheuermann
Keyword(s):  
Cape Town ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Statement ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Church

The Lausanne Movement famously organizes Evangelicals around the need for “the whole Church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.” Years of reflection on what this means has led the movement to make more and more explicit statements about who is included in mission, what that mission looks like, and whom that mission is directed toward. In its most recent statement, the Cape Town Commitment expressly calls for us to “think not only of mission among those with a disability but to recognize, affirm and facilitate the missional calling of believers with disabilities themselves as part of the Body of Christ.” This is the first time that people with disabilities are explicitly included in this evangelical conversation and yet, though it has been over 10 years since Cape Town, scholarship on what this means in terms of theology, ecclesiology, and missiology remains underdeveloped. This article explains why disability must be part of our understanding of whole church, whole gospel, and whole world, and will suggest that when it is, we will change the ways in which we talk about and do mission.

scholarly journals RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND DISABILITY IN ZAMBIA: APPROACHES AND HEALING IN SELECTED PENTECOSTAL CHURCHES

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Nelly Mwale ◽  
Joseph Chono Chita
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
The Devil ◽  
The Church

Zambia has recently witnessed the growth of Pentecostal churches that publicly claim to be healing disabilities. This paper explored how some Pentecostal churches in Zambia’s pluralist society claimed to be healing disability. Interviews, documents and video recordings from three different Pentecostal ministries depicting healing and disability were analysed. The paper observes that some Pentecostal ministries exemplified disability as that which could be healed through the work of the Holy Spirit, and disability was attributed to the work of the devil. The paper argues that the disability healing messages and miracles indirectly victimised people with disabilities, despite its potential to offer social capital. This created a need for deconstructing views on disability. Disability issues in the church also had to go beyond healing and miracles to appreciating the contributions of people with disabilities to the body of Christ. 

Double Affirmation: Medievalism as Christian Apologetic in the Arthurian Poetry of Charles Williams

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-96
Author(s):  
Sørina Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
European History ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
Embodied Theology

In his unfinished cycle of Arthurian poems, Charles Williams developed a totalizing mythology in which he fictionalized the Medieval. First, he employed chronological conflation, juxtaposing events and cultural references from a millennium of European history and aligning each with his doctrinal system. Second, following the Biblical metaphor of the body of Christ, Blake’s symbolism, and Rosicrucian sacramentalism, he embodied theology in the Medieval landscape via a superimposed female figure. Finally, Williams worked to show the validity of two Scholastic approaches to spirituality: the kataphatic and apophatic paths. His attempts to balance via negativa and via positiva led Williams to practical misapplication—but also to creation of a landmark work of twentieth century poetry. . . . the two great vocations, the Rejection of all images before the unimaged, the Affirmation of all images before the all-imaged, the Rejection affirming, the Affirmation rejecting. . . —from ‘The Departure of Dindrane’ —O Blessed, pardon affirmation!— —O Blessed, pardon negation!— —from ‘The Prayers of the Pope’

Choir

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Pryce
Keyword(s):  
Formal Group ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Contemplative Practice ◽  
Ritual Action ◽  
Important Relationship ◽  
Positive Knowledge

Expanding on the notion of “keeping intention,” introduced in Chapter 2, Chapter 5 shows how contemplative Christians refine their capacity to “keep attention” and cultivate “contemplative senses” through formal group rituals, body awareness techniques, and the construction of aesthetic environments. It notes the contemplative Christian concept of the Body of Christ in which individual bodies and the collective body are perceived as interconnected entities with expandable and contractible boundaries. The chapter describes the monastic Daily Office and how non-monastic contemplatives adapt monastic rites to their lives outside monasteries. Introducing the important relationship between agency and habitus in contemplative practice, the chapter also develops a model that explicates the process of changing perception, called “contemplative transformation,” as an ever-moving ritualization between “posture” (intentional cataphatic ritual action and positive knowledge) and “flow” (apophatic, ambiguous “inner gestures” and “unknowing”).

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