Should We Escape Divine Judgement?

Abstract

Calli Micale’s critical question of Wondrously Wounded very helpfully foregrounds a theme that will remain important in several of my replies to other respondents. She also helpfully describes the hermeneutic substrate of my theological approach, which may be unfamiliar to some, setting the stage for a rich interplay of further engagements in responses to come. Influenced by early modern and Reformation theologies of the word (Dickson 1995; Luther 1968, 32) my theological work critically engages contemporary theology and church practice by exploring contours of biblical language and imagery that have become dead in the academic semantic universe that Micale and I inhabit. My aim is to challenge the hold of different biblical images and stories that stabilize widely held yet problematic understandings of disabled people among Christians. There can be no predicting beforehand which metaphorical constellations will be most illuminating in our time and place, which biblical symbols and images, when reanimated in our time by way of spiritual discernment, will reveal what God is doing and saying among us. As I will discuss in my response to Sarah Barton, such a procedure is not properly called a method, as, at root, it is a work of spiritual discernment. Micale is in general supportive of my use of alternative metaphorical constructions in pursuit of ethical criticism. She takes issue, however, with my use of martial imagery and language. Drawing on the work of queer and black Pentecostal theologians, Micale suggests that it would have been better if I had used the language of excess and abundance to describe how people with disabilities destabilize a morally problematic status quo by bursting common categories of perception in order to catalyze a redemptive remaking of denuding social-symbolic systems. I take this criticism to be one that is widely shared in contemporary theology and has been echoed by other reviewers of Wondrously Wounded (Kahm 2020). Martial images “import logics of imperial conquest (often figured through injured and violated women’s bodies) [and] images of https://doi.org/10.1080/23312521.2022.2049428