What I Long for More than Miracles
While God occasionally displays his glory through miracles, he far more commonly displays it through the beauty of providence. Look for it and you will see it; see it and you will praise him for it.
I suppose it is possible that I have witnessed a miracle in my lifetime, but if so, I’m not aware of it. If a miracle is a “supernatural, extraordinary event that diverges from observed natural processes,” then I can’t think of a time that I’ve seen a clear example of one. That’s not to say that God can’t work miracles today or that he doesn’t. That’s not to say he hasn’t worked around and about me in extraordinary ways. It’s simply to say that I can’t look at a particular event in my life and say, “That was a miracle.”
And if I’m honest, this doesn’t bother me in the least. It doesn’t bother me in the least because on many occasions I’ve witnessed something I count equally significant or perhaps even more so: I have witnessed the evidence and the intricacy and the perfect timing of God’s providence. I have witnessed how God has carefully arranged circumstances so that events unfolded in a way that proved his detailed involvement in the affairs of man. I have witnessed situations in which things “just so happened” in such a way that I could only conclude, “The Lord did this.”
I recount one of these in Seasons of Sorrow, in the chapter I title “Angels Unaware.” I tell of a day when Aileen and I were particularly sorrowful, particularly overcome with grief. We went to the cemetery to mark what would have been Nick’s wedding day. And as we stood there weeping together, a lovely Christian couple approached us and explained that they had been reading my updates. They showed us where their son was buried nearby and then they prayed for us—prayed down God’s comfort upon us.
This was no miracle. This was not a supernatural, extraordinary event that diverged from observed natural processes. God did not summon these people from heaven or fabricate them from thin air or instantly transport them from afar. Rather, he arranged that they would visit their son’s grave on this day and at this time (even though this was not their custom) and that Aileen and I would visit our son’s grave on this day and at this time (even though this was not our custom). Long prior to this he had arranged that our sons would be buried close to one another—close enough that this couple would spot us across just a few rows of graves. He had arranged that they would be familiar with my website and with our story and that they would recognize our faces. He arranged all this so that, when we most needed comfort, two of his people would be there to provide it.
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The Curious Rise in Disability: How Changing Language Alters the Nature of Reality
By changing language, the state attempts to solve a metaphysical quandary, and something intangible changes about our reality. Our government’s rush toward one-size-fits-all solutions means the particularities of individual lives become lost in the maze of a bureaucratic process. Disability is a stark reminder of the human condition. It is more than a problem to be solved, although there are real problems for disabled people that need real solutions. Disability is a valuable teacher. It can catechize us on the nature of our humanity, and teach us about our mortality. We all can and should hope for redemption for our broken bodies.
My son is blind, immobile, nonverbal, and hearing-impaired, with multiple brain abnormalities and complex orofacial birth defects. Is he disabled? It depends on whom you ask.
According to Pew Research, thirteen percent of all Americans are disabled. However, the CDC considers more than twenty-five percent of all Americans as disabled, including seventeen percent of children. In contrast, the National Survey of Child Health considers just over four percent of American children to be disabled. These statistics represent alternate realities.
What is the reason for this wide disparity? Some definitions of disability are limited to activities of daily living, or ADLs, such as eating, walking, bathing, and toileting. Others are broader, including behavioral, mental health, and sensory impairments. While disabilities have increased for all Americans, children, in particular, have experienced a huge rise in disability. An NIH study uses the capacious “developmental disabilities” category for its analysis, incorporating recent rises in ADHD, autism, and learning disabilities, making up a majority of new inclusions. Under this definition, more than half of those children considered disabled have ADHD, with blindness by comparison only contributing to 0.16 percent of the total. More broadly still, one researcher defines disability in children as “activity limitations” including “anything that the parent identifies that their child isn’t able to do in the same way other children are able to do.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this definition resulted in a twenty-eight percent relative increase in childhood disability within well-off households relative to those in poverty. This definitional morass has significant implications for politicians, educators, and parents, as state resources are allocated using widely disparate disability markers.
Changing definitions of disability create policy headaches and alter our perception of reality. By broadening the definition of disability, the state sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy. Driving the state’s changing standards of language is both political self-protection and political reward. Lumping complex social factors under one label is the state’s sleight of hand. By using such a broad understanding of disability, and therefore limiting conversation about other social, environmental, or economic factors, the state can both absolve itself of needing to provide real policy solutions and proclaim itself the protector of a victimized class.
As the state mediates our social interactions by adapting our language to fit its own ends, our social fabric frays and Christian charity weakens. The church has a unique responsibility to use precise language to describe the full range of human brokenness, particularly in children, allowing us to accurately attend to the real needs of others while offering true hope in the renewal of creation.
Three Models of Disability: Medical, Social, and Equity
Our government currently uses three models to define disability for both adults and children. The state categorizes human interactions and experiences of disability in definitions that both create and support a bureaucratic process. Language changes reality. These models, while emerging chronologically, are used simultaneously. The definition of disability has expanded under each subsequent model, moving from a limited definition under the medical model, to a more inclusive social definition, to finally a potentially unlimited definition of disability under the equity model.
First Wave: The Medical Model of Disability
The medical model, true to its name, views disability as a purely physiological issue to be handled within the bounds of the medical system. This is the oldest operative view of disability, with origins in the scientific model of medicine that began in the nineteenth century. Under the medical or pathological model, disability is primarily a disease, diagnosed by a physician, subsequently necessitating medical intervention to alleviate, manage, or cure. One cannot be both healthy and disabled. Under the medical model, disability is a function of the body, limited to the individual experience.
This paradigm views disability as purely a problem of the individual, disregarding quality of life concerns and communities of care outside of the medical system. Diagnostic terms and prognoses can be unnecessarily deterministic, potentially legitimizing social stigma against the disabled. The medical model is uninterested in the broader political and social milieu in which the disabled person finds himself. Naming disability as a disease implies a fixed reality to life with a disability that advocates adamantly protest. Interpreting disability through the medical model can seem like a life sentence to a diminished reality, one where the disabled individual is always diseased.
The medical model of disability is the original building block that has now given way to models that better fit current social values. However, vestiges of the medical model remain. The best example is the use of ADLs, or activities of daily living, to define disability. According to guidelines from the Health and Human Services Department, any survey form assessing disability must include six questions “representing a minimum standard.” These questions focus on an individual’s difficulty with vision, hearing, cognition, mobility, and self-care limited to dressing or bathing.
Using the medical model to define disability results in fewer disabled Americans when compared to other models. Under its definition, a 2019 report from the Census Bureau states only 4.3 percent of American children are disabled. A similar 2010 report from the Census Bureau found that 4.4 percent of those aged six and older needed assistance with one or more activities of daily living.
Second Wave: The Social Model of Disability
The social model of disability was introduced in the 1960s as advocates for the disabled preferred a more holistic approach to understanding disability. It stands in contrast to the limited medical model that many felt was discriminatory. Proponents of disability rights pushed back against the idea that disability was a disease to be cured, and instead advocated a definition of disability that recognized the relationships between individuals and society.
The social model distinguishes between “physical impairments” inherent to the body, and “disabilities” that advocates see as the limitations of society. As such, the disabling factor is not our biological reality, but society’s shortcomings. If we weren’t ableists, social model proponents claim, then impairments wouldn’t be disabling. The social model of disability discredits the medical model, claiming that health issues are not always disabling if the social environment is adequately accommodating.
To its credit, the social model introduced numerous benefits. It laid the groundwork for legally required accommodations in work and public life that are life-changing for many people, notably, through the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. The ADA includes in its definition protection for a range of physical disabilities as well as mental and behavioral health conditions, including dyslexia, ADHD, and autism, among others. The broadening category of disability under the social model leads to an increase in disability. As a result, according to the Social Security Administration, since the 1970s, the number of disabled beneficiaries has increased from 1.8 million to 9.2 million in 2021.
The social model of disability centers on the individual’s relationship to society, not the individual himself or his biological reality. On one webpage, the CDC defines disability as an “interaction with various barriers [that] may hinder . . . full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.” Disability is now a function of one’s social environment, not just how one functions within one’s social environment.
Disability has moved from a biophysical to a psychosocial marker, increasing those under disability’s umbrella. And yet another change looms on the horizon, as a recent press release from the NIH has redefined disability yet again.
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Study: A Manly Father is Good for Children
We have today what authors Warren Farrell and John Gray call a “boy crisis”—a crisis where boys fail to become men, struggle in school, get in trouble, and have difficulty finding wives. Would we see that crisis begin to be resolved if we encouraged fathers to practice and model their manly virtues?
In an age where feminism seems to rule, there’s a lot of pressure for fathers to start acting softer and more feminine in dealing with their children. Not a trace of that “toxic masculinity” should come through!
Perhaps that is why we see increasing condemnation of competition (“everyone gets a participation trophy!”) or “dangerous” activities like winter sledding (“little Johnny could hit a tree!”), or allowing children to stray a few blocks from home without adult supervision (“they might be kidnapped!”). Why would we want parents, particularly fathers, to stress the traditionally masculine virtues of competition and adventure to their children when we’re trying to root toxic masculinity out of society?
But while this mindset is subtly promoted by today’s culture, it is now being challenged by a new study published in the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinities. The study lists the stereotypical masculine characteristics—“competitive, daring, adventurous, dominant, aggressive, courageous and standing up to pressure”—as positive traits, and fathers who demonstrated these were “rated as showing good parenting behavior.”
Researchers expressed surprise at this link between masculine qualities and good parenting. The study’s lead author, Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, acknowledged, however, that “fathers who see themselves as competitive and adventurous and the other masculine traits tended to be really engaged with their kids.”
Perhaps this is surprising to those living in a “woke,” politically correct, feminist society, but it shouldn’t be to those who look at fathers through history. Take Teddy Roosevelt, for example. In a letter to a friend in late 1900, Roosevelt explained how he had been a sickly child—likely the type who would have been teased and labeled a sissy by other boys his age. His father helped him through this difficult childhood, not only through gentleness, but also through his manly character. Roosevelt explains:
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Retrieving Christus Victor
It is impossible to ignore the motif of victory in Christ’s work. Therefore Aulén’s contention that Christus Victor has been understated among Protestants is worth consideration. Towards the beginning of his book, Aulén outlines four reasons he believes the classic view has been neglected. One of them is his claim that many moderns find conflict imagery to be disagreeable, even primitive and crude. I saw this myself when sharing Oh, Sleeper lyrics with a friend. In one their tracks, God sings to Satan: “You’ll bow at my feet, or I’ll rip out your knees / and make of your face, all the carnage you crave.” My friend thought the imagery was unnecessarily violent and unsettling. But then so is a lot of what we read in the Bible.
Despite the criticisms levelled against Mel Gibson’s The Passion, especially from Protestant quarters, his portrayal of Gethsemane is profoundly theological. After pleading with the Father to be spared the cross, Jesus stands up and crushes a snake’s head. This striking imagery alludes to God’s promise in Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This has traditionally been called the protevangelion, meaning ‘first gospel.’ It promised that even though the reality for fallen humanity would be conflict with evil powers (Genesis 3:14), the promised end of that strife is victory. As Gibson depicts, Christ’s life was marked by conflict. Yet it ended in God’s promised conquest.
But where was that victory won? Identifying the serpent as Satan, in Revelation 12:11-12 we read that Satan was conquered by the blood of the Lamb. Mysteriously then, it is through his death—and resurrection—that Christ triumphs over evil and brings us back to God. To use an old but obscure word: at the cross Christ achieves ‘atonement.’
Atonement Theories
In my own experience, we often tend to downplay this dramatic struggle between God and evil when speaking about the atonement. But standing at either end of history we see a promise of conflict; and that same struggle climaxing in God’s victory. For these reasons, the Eastern Orthodox tradition (following the early church fathers) has long treated the Christus Victor view of atonement as primary—sometimes exclusively so. This view of the atonement received renewed attention amongst Protestants in the 20th century, thanks to Gustav Aulén.
Aulén outlined three views of the atonement: classic or dramatic (Christus Victor); objective (Latin); and subjective (Christus Exemplar). But for Aulén these were not three aspects of Christ’s unified work. Rather he set his classic view, or Christus Victor, over against the other two. Aulén’s view of the atonement centred on “divine conflict and victory.” However, the New Testament speaks of Christ’s atoning work in a variety of ways. These are related, even mutually dependant. Thus Kevin Vanhoozer urges us to think of a plurality of metaphors rather than polarised models.
In the remainder of this post I will briefly unpack Christus Victor using Aulén’s book and point out some of its undervalued strengths.
Introducing Christus Victor
In Aulén’s presentation of Christus Victor, Christ’s victory over the evil powers brings about a new relation between God and man, which we might call reconciliation or atonement. In the work of the Son, God reconciles man to God through conquering mankind’s enemies. This victory was dramatic, not dryly rational. In fact, Aulén described this divine drama as contra rationem et legam (against reason and law). It was not man atoning God through bearing his righteous judgment in our place, appropriated by an intellectual faith and resulting in imputed righteousness.
As Robert Letham writes: “Today there is almost universal distaste for thinking of God and salvation in legal categories.” Aulén certainly felt that the Latin (objective) view of the atonement was too rationalistic and abstract. There is some validity in his criticisms. Where Aulén comes unstuck is in claiming that Christ suffering the legal penalty for sin in our place cannot be fitted with the motif of victory.
An Atonement Theme; Not the Whole
One of the church’s leading historians, Justo González, writes: “From the very beginning the church proclaimed Jesus as its Saviour, and in the Patristic age there had been a variety of views as to how Christ saves sinners.” Thus Aulén overstates his position in claiming that Christus Victor dominated the church’s doctrine of salvation for the first millennium of its existence. Might we not see, in this variety of positions on the atonement that none can exclusively address the whole work of Christ?
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