Blindness and the Face of God: Toward a Theology of Disability
In: The Human Image of God
Author:
John M. Hull
John M. Hull
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Abstract
The image of God in the Bible is a projection of the normal human, raised to the highest degree. This excludes the human body which is different. Knowledge itself is based in bodily experience, and a starting place for a theology of disability may be found in the phenomenology of different bodies. When philosophers and theologians use the image of the face of God, this hegemony of the average is particularly noticeable. Blind people are only one of a number of human experiences without the face, and if the theological tradition is to be redeemed from the dominance of exclusion, the image of God must be poly-anthropomorphic rather than uniform.