Book Reviews
bodies: the more the rights of the unborn child are championed,
the more the woman has to 'endure' the consequence and become
a mere 'vessel', a system of uterine care. The defilement of the
body is focused for women by rape. There is nothing new in
this, but, as the author says, in Yugoslavia it is shown as 'a
weapon which is cheaper and more effective than tanks and
napalm'.
For men the body is a darker continent, frequently ignored
until it is challenged by sickness and old age; both may provide
(but frequently do not) a fuller understanding of the body and
the created order so that the limitations of the body become the
occasions of possibility. The healing ministry of Jesus suggests his
compassion and concern for the broken bodies which he en-
countered, but in the early Church the soul was elevated above
the body, and the male above the female; St Jerome said that 'if
a woman wants to serve Christ more than the world, she will
cease to be woman and will be called man because we want all
the perfect to be exalted to become man' (p. 43). Rare souls like
Hildegard of Bingen saw that the soul expressed itself in and
through the body, but the concept was not made easy by the
ready assumption that the Church is the body of Christ, a body
whose parts might in the worship of Protestant churches be
limited to singing and listening.
This book is suggestive; the ideas need unpacking and it ignores
the history of art at its peril: it is hard to see Renaissance painters
as regarding women as mere vessels; and there is more to be
said about the history of the Church than the thoughts of its
theologians. But if this book expedites a fuller one which deals
with the Church and the body, it will have served a good purpose.
Margaret Bowker
Cambridge
The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of
Disability, Nancy L. Eisland (Abingdon Press 1994), 139 pp,
£10.99 pbk
In the book's first half, Ms Eisland gives an introduction to the
disability rights movement. She highlights historical and social ele-
ments, from the role of disabled service personnel to the effects of
language on attitude formation. Also identified is the Church's
contribution: largely ignoring the movement, or hindering it with
ineffectual goodwill and self-contradictory policies that mask dis-
crimination and prejudice.
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Book Reviews
However, this is not simply a critique of establishment: crucial to
Ms Eisland's own ability to live within her 'non-conventional body'
was a personal 'epiphany' of a wheelchair-using God. This vision
of the disabled God, incorporating herself and other disabled people
as imago Dei, is developed as a symbol with the power to redeem
the very injustices previously outlined: the resurrected Christ, from
whose body was not removed the evidence of his empowering
impairment, and through whom repentance and reconciliation are
made possible. Exploring this 'hidden image of God' provides the
stimulating and refreshing theological perspectives of the second
half of the book.
The daily struggle for survival is identified as a characteristic
value in disabled people: in this they epitomize the 'mixed blessings'
for all humankind of embodiment. From this perspective, where the
demands of the body are central, Ms Eisland offers many refreshing
alternative emphases; for example, God's interdependence with us
rather than aloof inaccessibility, Christ's physicality rather than
maleness, the Church's own brokenness in body being the op-
portunity for reconciliation, the Eucharist, where the disabled God
is encountered, as 'a bodily practice for justice'.
Another characteristic value she identifies is realism: both pas-
sionate and balanced, her own arguments demonstrate this well.
Her experience as a disabled person informs but does not intrude
(for example, the experience she gives in detail is of two other
disabled women). Similarly, the reconciliation she seeks is mutual:
'We need symbols that call both people with disabilities and able-
bodied to conversion.' A carer myself, I find this a breath of fresh
air: at last, someone doing theology in realistic terms with the taboo
experience of people who live with disability. Ms Eisland calls this
book 'a beginning'; I hope she stimulates much more.
Simon Horne
Queen's College, Birmingham
Power and Christian Ethics, James P. Mackey (Cambridge
University Press 1994), x + 241 pp, £32.50 hbk
Despite its title this is really a book about the exercise of power in
the Church, de potestate ecclesiae, one of the central topics of the
later Middle Ages. The argument is familiar: 'The criterion which
distinguishes power in the form of force from power in the form of
authority, which determines its place on this range for any particular
exercise of power, is the operative presence of the properly moral
factor' (pp. 35f).
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