Ableism is when you try to heal me, and fix me and promise that I will walk, or see, or hear or that I will be everything I was really meant to be … one day in heaven Ableism is believing that heaven is an able-bodied place where broken bodies finally become ‘whole’ – Maria…

How often do you wonder what your personality will be like when you no longer have to think about trying not to be grumpy when you are tired? Have you ever asked what your inner world might be like when you never have to try not to think uncharitable thoughts? Have you ever been tempted…

For many of us who acquired our disabilities after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Nancy Eiesland’s seminal work, The Disabled God (1994), disability is not a source of shame but a source of pride. After I was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in graduate school, many of my initial encounters with…

Yes, we will be fully healed of our bodily and mental disabilities in the resurrection. Actually, that is too easy an answer. Why? Because it is strictly speaking impossible to be ‘disabled’ in heaven. Because ‘disability’ has come to refer to a problem in social relationships, where we fail to care for one another as…

The question whether (all) disabilities will be (completely) healed in the resurrection resonates deeply with me on a personal level. I write as a man who was born with a physical disability, a neuromuscular disorder resulting from in-utero exposure to rubella, or German measles. The effects of this exposure were primarily mobility-related, though I do…

Joni Eareckson Tada has lived for more than fifty years as a person with quadriplegia, the result of injuries sustained in a diving accident when she was a teenager. She uses a motorized wheelchair for mobility. When envisioning what it will be like to meet Jesus for the first time in eternity, she imagines herself…

Our purpose in what follows is to help answer the following question: what do Christians mean when they confess that creation is good? This question is both timely and difficult. Admittedly, creation’s goodness is not always self-evident to us. Evils in this world are often more apparent to us than its goodness, especially in times…

The resurrection of the body, writes one seventeenth-century Christian theologian, is the “peculiar treasure” of the Christian church. The resurrection is peculiar because it is not a product of unaided reason but relies upon a definitive revelation in Jesus Christ. Our only confidence that our bodies are destined for glory—and not mere dissolution—lies in the…

The resurrection is good news for us, but do we treat it as good news for others, or are we content to have won eternity ourselves? What did Christ himself teach us to do? A Lutheran theologian and pastor, Johannes Brenz (1499–1570) preached the Reformation message in Schwäbisch-Hall, Württemberg, and Tübingen. Here, Brenz teaches that…

Women were the first to share the good news of the resurrection. Though they were not believed, then, we live now in the light first shone by these our mothers and sisters. In this excerpt from his postil on the Gospel reading for Easter Sunday, the Lutheran pastor, teacher, and amateur playwright Johann Baumgart (1514–1578)…

Martin Luther looks forward from Adam to resurrection and Consummation (Genesis 2:21-22) But the sleep of Adam—so sound that he was not aware of what was being done to him—is a picture, as it were, of the transformation which would have taken place in the state of innocence. The righteous nature would have experienced no death but…