God is present in disabled lives now, before any cure. John Swinton, professor of Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen, places that presence in two places: the Holy Spirit, who works beneath and beyond words, and the body of Christ, in which every member is necessary. The harder part of his answer is aimed at everyone else. The label “broken” rests on a picture of normal humanity that Scripture never gave us.
That answer only lands if it is built in order. Many readers carry an unspoken assumption, sometimes called the deficit view, that a disabled body or mind is a standard human being with something missing. While that assumption stands, every comforting word sounds like a postponement: God loves you, and someday he will fix you. Swinton’s theology removes that assumption one support at a time, and each step depends on the one before it.
What are we measuring disability against?
To call someone abnormal, you need a picture of normal. In Swinton’s reading, “the Christian tradition tends to assume that there’s a single way to be normal.” He describes that way with a joke that is also a diagnosis: we tend to assume everyone should look like us. Two working legs, a certain level of sight, a familiar height and color.
Then comes the question that dissolves the picture. Look around a real room. Who exactly represents normal? Every person differs from every other in countless ways. Societies select a few differences, call them disability, and leave the rest unremarked. Swinton’s verdict is blunt: “We kinda make it up as we go along.”
He also supplies a replacement. He argues that “as Christians, the only real model of normality that we have is Jesus,” pointing to Paul, who calls Christ “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature” (Colossians 1:15). If Jesus is the measure of what a human life is for, then the measure is faithfulness, love and union with the Father. Leg strength, hearing and processing speed were never on that list.
This is the first prerequisite. With it in place, the question changes. We are no longer asking how God relates to people who fall short of the human standard. We are asking how God relates to people.
The power of a name
The second step concerns language. Genesis 2 records that God brought the animals to Adam, “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19). Naming is one of the first tasks given to human beings. Swinton draws out a corollary: the task includes naming rightly, because a name shapes how we treat what we have named.
Stigma is misnaming. “The stigma is when you reduce a whole person to one part of them,” Swinton explains. If all anyone ever mentions about a man is the size of his nose, eventually he is just the man with the big nose. “That’s what stigma does. It takes away your personhood and simply makes you that one thing.” He applies this especially to mental illness, asking why a church would call someone a schizophrenic instead of calling him David.
The deficit view is a naming habit. It leads with the condition and lets the person trail behind. A church that learns names before diagnoses has already loosened its grip.
Where is God when someone cannot say the words?
Swinton’s own work focuses on dementia, mental health and profound intellectual disability, including people who cannot speak or use symbols yet desire to be Christians and belong to the Christian community. That raises a sharp question about salvation. Some people with autism or intellectual disability cannot follow an explanation of the gospel or give a spoken confession of faith. Where does that leave them?
Swinton begins with the Holy Spirit. Paul writes, “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26). The older English word infirmities means weaknesses. In context Paul is describing every believer’s weakness in prayer, not disability in particular, so applying the verse to cognitive disability is an extension and should be held as one. The extension rests on something the verse plainly says: the Spirit’s work reaches past what we can put into words.
From there Swinton turns to the worshiping community. People there, he says, “maybe they can’t understand the words, but they can understand the worship,” along with the relationships around them. Being unable to articulate faith in the expected way does not mean having no relationship with God, “Because in the power of the Spirit, that’s what the Spirit does.”
He stops short of a rule about who is saved. He states two convictions, that God is good and just and that the Spirit is mysterious, and then hands the community a task: “the key is always to give people the benefit of the doubt.” The responsibility falls on the people around the person. The church’s job is to open spaces where those who do not think in conventional ways can still feel, sense and experience Jesus within the body of Christ.
This restraint has a real objection to answer. Scripture does connect confession and salvation: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Romans 10:9). Many Christian traditions treat a personal, spoken response to the gospel as essential, and they differ on how God deals with those who cannot make one, a question Christians have also long faced about infants. Swinton’s position leaves confession intact as the response expected of those able to give it. What he refuses is the reverse inference, that inability to speak proves exclusion. Salvation is God’s gift by grace through faith, and his caution keeps the church from quietly making verbal ability the price of admission to that gift.
Why the church needs every member
The third step moves from the individual to the community. Swinton came to the field through justice. People considered different are often excluded and financially disadvantaged, and in many societies they are among the poor Jesus kept pointing his followers toward. The deeper he went, the more he saw that “what’s at stake is the nature of what you think it means to be a human being.”
Here 1 Corinthians 12 carries the weight. Paul writes, “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.” Then he goes further: “Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary” (1 Corinthians 12:21-22). Paul’s word is necessary. The weaker-seeming members are required for the body to function.
Swinton draws the conclusion directly. The church has to recognize that “each member of the body is important no matter what shape or form you are,” however articulate or inarticulate, because “you’re necessary for the body to be the body.” A body missing a member is incomplete. A congregation that keeps disabled people at the edge has diminished itself.
Friendship as the way of Jesus
The fourth step tells the church what to do, and the answer is small. One of Swinton’s biggest discoveries was how simple it is to form a community where difference stops mattering, and how complicated that simplicity proves to be.
He reads it off Jesus’ ministry. “He spends his time with tax collectors, sinners and prostitutes.” Those were the people religious and civil society had already rejected, unreformed. Then he goes to the incarnation. God, utterly unlike us, becomes human and offers friendship. Jesus says, “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (John 15:15).
Ordinary friendship runs on likeness. Most of our friends look like us, go to the same places and attend the same church. “That’s not what you see in Jesus. Jesus seeks out and offers friendship to people who are different.” For Swinton this was a turning point: “the simplicity of friendship is the gift that we can give to one another that can create the body of Christ in the way that it’s faithful and open.”
Here the deficit view loses its grip in practice. A program can be run for people from a distance. Friendship puts two people on the same level, each receiving something from the other. Swinton calls these Christlike friendships the essence of discipleship, and once the church hears this as “the heart of the gospel and the heart of discipleship, then things begin to change.”
Who are you when your memory fails?
The fifth step tests everything against the hardest case, the person whose mind seems to be leaving. As a nurse and hospital chaplain, Swinton spent years with people living with dementia. People who seemed distant most of the week would lock in the moment he began the Lord’s Prayer or the sacraments.
Many assume the person with dementia disappears. Swinton disagrees: “you’re always the person that you are.” The common assumption, in his account, comes from a cultural belief that we are what we remember ourselves to be, as if each of us builds a self out of memory. Paul offers another basis for identity: “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). A disciple is who he or she is in Christ.
So Swinton can say of a person with dementia that “somebody lost their memory, but they haven’t lost themselves because God continues to remember them.” He names the grief of families who remember their loved one differently, and he still insists that for a Christian “it’s not what we remember that’s important, is who we’re remembered by.”
He adds a second observation: “your body remembers things.” Years of prayer, Scripture and sacrament leave their mark beyond conscious recall. In his reading, the movements he saw at the Lord’s Prayer were a kind of remembered spirituality carried in the body, and in them he found profound hope.
Doesn’t the Bible promise that disability will be healed?
This is the strongest objection. Jesus healed blind and lame people. Isaiah looks ahead to a day when “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped” (Isaiah 35:5). Wanting healing for yourself or someone you love is no failure of faith. Does all this mean disability is a defect God intends to remove?
Three things need separating. First, the healing stories are real, and in the Gospels Jesus’ friendship comes before any healing. No verse promises a particular healing to a particular person now, and no one should promise it in his name.
Second, Swinton points to the shape of the resurrection. Paul writes, “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44), and “we shall all be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:51). Swinton reads this as transformation: “our bodies are transformed.” He sees the same pattern in Revelation, where John sees “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven” (Revelation 21:2). The new comes to the old and renews it.
Third, Scripture does not tell us in detail what any particular resurrected body will be like, and Christians read the specifics differently. Swinton fills that gap with a story. In one of his courses, a woman without hearing described, through her interpreter, a dream of meeting Jesus in heaven, and she said his signing was amazing. Swinton’s lesson: “her vision of what heaven was, was not that she could hear, but that everybody could communicate in the same way that she does.”
He uses the dream to expose a habit: “sometimes when we’re imagining heaven, we imagine it through the eyes of what we can already see and know.” Hearing people picture heaven as hearing. She pictured it as signing. Both are guesses shaped by present bodies, and the deficit view simply assumes the able-bodied guess is right. Swinton’s own conclusion is humbler: “I just think heaven’s gonna be a really interesting and surprising place.” Everyone will be changed, and everyone will be surprised.
What disabled members show the church
Each of these steps exposes something the deficit view hid from everyone. Swinton notes that our culture treats the mind as the essence of a person, prizing thinking that is clear, quick and clever, while the biblical picture holds body, mind and soul together as one. If being human meant cognitive performance, all of us would be losing our humanity a little more each year.
Disabled members make visible what is true of every member. We are received rather than self-made. We are necessary to one another. God knows us before we can explain ourselves, and he keeps remembering us when we can no longer remember ourselves.
That is why Swinton could begin with justice and end with the question of what a human being is. The church that welcomes its disabled members as friends receives an education from them in what it means to be the body.