Powerless in Christ: A Romanian Orthodox Insight into Disability Theology

Abstract

Disability theology has long been an anglophone affair, with most debates taking place around lexical structures and semantic nuances specific to the English language. This paper claims that the Romanian word neputință – loosely translated into English as powerlessness – can make a significant contribution to the field. Drawing on interviews with Romanian Orthodox priests, the article argues that neputință can provide a Christological edge to popular concepts such as vulnerability and limits, while also adding an understanding of aging as a natural process that needs medical and social support, but not cure.

Keywords:

• Creamer
• Eastern Orthodoxy
• limits
• neputință
• Reynolds
• Romanian Orthodoxy
• vulnerability

Although the concern for the poor and those suffering represents the backbone of Eastern Orthodox life since its early dawns, it is fair to say that the articulation of this concern in the framework of disability theology is almost inexistent. While theologians from other traditions (i.e., Roman Catholic and Protestant) have already written an impressive amount of works,¹ their Orthodox counterparts—with few notable exceptions—are silent (Kinard, 2019; Maican, 2021a, 2022a, 2022b; Pekridou, 2014). The reasons are manifold ranging from mistrust in the concept of disability itself as too modern, to the cultural and historical legacy of the societies where Eastern Orthodoxy is traditionally the dominant strand of Christianity (Maican, 2021a). Even so, this lack of interest remains difficult to comprehend given the intensive social activity of the Orthodox Churches, especially the Romanian one. To be clear, I am not stating that there is no theological literature dealing with suffering or illness (depression seems to be a particularly discussed topic)² but that there is no literature engaging the paradigm of disability as it was developed in the last decades of the twentieth century,³ that is starting from the premises that (i) disability is a social construct that does not necessarily require healing and (ii) that one of the goals of Eastern Orthodox community life should be the integration of persons with disabilities.

To understand this silence, I decided to do a series of interviews with some of the priests involved in the social activities of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Choosing priests over laypeople or persons with disabilities was determined by two main factors. First, I reckoned that since all priests must have at least an undergraduate degree in theology, this will provide them with the necessary background for articulating a theological discourse around disability.⁴ Second, I assumed that they would also have at least a minimal knowledge of the vocabulary linked to disability. Most social centers run by the Romanian Orthodox Church depend to a certain extent on the funding coming from the Romanian national health service, which under the EU antidiscrimination legislation included terms such as disability in all its official documents. Thus, I thought the priests would be at least familiar with the terminology.

For this paper, I interviewed six priests, who either worked directly with persons with disabilities in various centers (ranging from emergency services to recovery clinics to centers for palliative care) or who had a personal experience with disability (one of their family members had a disability). The diversity of profiles and experiences could raise eyebrows, but it made sense not only practically—the number of centers run by the Church that are dealing with the same type of disability in a specific region is very limited—but also theoretically—since there is no single definition of disability. The characteristic that unites someone who has chronic back pain with someone who has cerebral palsy or someone who is in a comatose state is not always straightforward. Disability tends to be understood mostly as a mix between physical and mental impairments and the stigma and oppression constructed by society around them (Mawson, 2022, p. 5). Thus, not limiting the interviews to a specific type of experience of disability allowed a wider outlook on the meaning of disability in a Romanian context. A priest in charge of a center of palliative care will have a very different understanding of disability than someone dealing with persons who are recovering from car accidents or strokes or someone who works with children with intellectual disabilities.

In this paper, I will present the main insight I drew out of these conversations, namely that the word neputință—which in a preliminary but inexact English translation would mean powerlessness—is an excellent concept for nourishing a local disability theology and in an ecclesial context it has Christological undertones that are hard to find in English words such as limits or vulnerability. The onus of the article is thus on bringing to light an “untranslatable” word that could enrich the conversation while producing a reflection on disability that is not completely rooted in the realities of English speaking communities.⁵

The argument will be constructive, which means it has not been formulated as such by my interlocutors; it derives from my own reflections and observations starting from the interviews. The interviews took place in the summer of 2021 via videocall and lasted for about an hour. They were semi structured, with a list of five questions that have been asked to all participants: (1) Where does their interest in disability comes from; (2) for how long have they been interested in disability; (3) what was the theological narrative regarding disability they told to persons or families with persons with disabilities who asked for pastoral guidance or when they preached; (4) did they have persons with disabilities in their parishes; (5) if so where they integrated in the community. All the interviewees agreed to participate in the study and be recorded, but all preferred to remain anonymous.⁶

To explain the relevance of the insights arising from the word neputință and its cognates, I will proceed in three steps. First, I will refer to two of the most influential concepts in disability theology: limits (Deborah Creamer) and vulnerability (Thomas Reynolds). These concepts, I will claim, lack the strong Christological dimension that the word neputință brings to the fore. Then, I will move to discuss the meaning of the word neputință in the Romanian language, focusing on its occurrences in the ecclesial context: the translations of the Bible, the services of the Church, the theological reflection published in the official newspaper of the Romanian Patriarchate, Lumina [The Light] and its relationship with the word disability as it emerges from the interviews. Finally, I will explain the three ways in which this concept can potentially enrich contemporary disability theology: (i) by nurturing a local reflection on disability outside the English-speaking world, (ii) by strengthening the Christological side of concepts such as vulnerability and limits, and (iii) by providing an understanding of aging that takes into account the challenges associated with old ages, but does not see them all in need of cure.

Limits and vulnerability

Disability theology is a wide field of study with its own internal debates and sometimes irreconcilable perspectives (e.g. the healing of persons with disabilities in the eschaton (Brock, 2019, pp. 177–197). Yet, regardless of the position of the author on any such topics, two principles seem to make consensus: (1) that persons with disability should be integrated into Christian communities and (2) that impairment is neither a personal tragedy nor reason for stigma, but part of what it means to be human.

Various theologians tried their hand at proposing a vision of a Christian community that is inclusive and where disability is not an oddity to be stigmatized, but a common feature of all human beings.⁷ Deborah Creamer and Thomas Reynolds’ accounts proved to be among the most influential. Creamer spoke about disability in terms of limits that can lead to cooperation while Reynolds used the concept of vulnerability to more or less the same goal.⁸ Since it is part of the argument of this article that the word neputință has a deeper Christological significance than limits and vulnerability, I will offer below a short critical summary of Creamer and Reynolds’ position.

In Disability and Christian Theology (2009), Deborah Creamer begins from the observation already mentioned in the introduction, namely that disability is a broad concept gathering experiences as disparate as back pain, visual impairment and Down Syndrome. For Creamer, this lack of conceptual precision demonstrates how pervasive disability is in our lives. So pervasive in fact that it constitutes “an unsurpassable characteristic of humanity” (Creamer, 2009, p. 94). Thus, she argues, instead of thinking about disability as deficiency that has to be cured, we should approach it positively as a reason for cooperation and community building. We should reconceptualise disability as limits,

Approaching disability from the starting point of an assumed able-bodied “normality” leads one to think of “limited” and what is not. If we begin with a person who can walk and then look at one who uses a wheelchair, what is highlighted is what the person in the wheelchair cannot do. This has been our historically conditioned response to experiences of disability and is seen most clearly under the presuppositions of the medical model, where physical bodies are compared to a medical ideal and diagnosed in terms of what is lacking. However, an alternative perspective is suggested by the limits model. Approaching our understanding of humanity from the starting point of disability gives us a more applicable (or “normal,” in terms of what is actually seen across the scope of the human population) vision of human limits. Limits may then be compared and considered, but they are not seen as abhorrent or abnormal. (Creamer, 2009, p. 94)

What Creamer means is that a hearing impairment might limit one’s ability to perform certain actions but only within a particular context. For instance, not speaking Spanish when in a Spanish-speaking community is going to hinder my ability to communicate effectively. Yet, if others do not perceive my lack of Spanish proficiency as abnormal or stigmatize it (e.g. they associate Spanish proficiency with intelligence: you’re not that smart if you don’t speak Spanish) but try to integrate me by talking to me in English, then limits become reasons for cooperation. Creamer reads this understanding of disability as limits in the Pauline metaphor of the Church as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12), where each member brings his or her own gift to the community. To have limits means to allow space for the development of these different gifts and the community as a whole (Creamer, 2009, p. 95). So, my lack of proficiency in Spanish is a limit but one that offers the person who will talk to me in English the possibility to bring her own gift to the development of the body of Christ.

Creamer however goes further than this. She connects limits with God. Turning to the notion of imago dei (i.e., the idea that humans have been created in the image of God) she interprets the imago as referring to limits. We are limited because God himself has limits (Creamer, 2009, p. 112) and we tend to think otherwise because a disabled God would seem less of a God to us (Creamer, 2009, p. 112)

How do our understandings of self and God make sense of the fact that we all experience limits, that some limits are seen as more natural than others, and that limits are much more ambiguous than we often think? Rather than thinking of limits solely in a negative sense (what we, or what God, cannot do), this perspective offers alternatives for thinking about boundaries and possibilities. In an age of war, terrorism, economic injustice, and environmental risk, a recognition and theological affirmation of limits seems more responsible than apathy or omnipotent control and offers a perspective that can lead to hopeful possibilities of perseverance, strength, creativity, and honest engagement with the self and the other. (Creamer, 2009, p. 113) (My italics)

What Creamer attempts here is to create a symbolic environment that would be meaningful to persons with disabilities by allowing them to inhabit more easily not just the physical space of Christian communities (i.e., the parish church) but also their imaginary space, that of the theological culture she considers unwelcoming for persons with disabilities. “When we imagine an unlimited God, there is a subtle implication that the more limits we have, the less we are like God.” (Creamer, 2009, p. 112). Hence, to avoid the feeling of dissatisfaction with one’s own bodily and mental limitations influenced by the idea of a perfect and all mighty God, Creamer provides an alternative view of divine nature, one that she believes to be more accommodating for persons with disabilities.

Creamer’s vision deserves to be praised for multiple reasons: she effectively seeks to establish a universal definition of disability that gathers disparate experiences, she insists on the recognition of limits as an integral aspect of what it means to be human, and she sees the potential that limits have for community building. Still, as is almost always the case with constructive proposals, key theological points tend to remain underdeveloped thus opening the door for robust questioning. For instance, while Creamer’s rationale for a limited God is transparent—to create a symbolic space for persons with disabilities—the implications of such a move are neither fully discussed nor acknowledged.

To me, the main difficulty with positing limits into God is that the Incarnation and its main redemptive quality (i.e., the overcoming of suffering and death in the resurrection) is seriously called into question. A God who is not omnipotent might be there for those who suffer compassionately, but he will not be able to save them. For the sake of the argument, we might imagine God as a doctor having to perform brain surgery, but he is unable to do so because he is limited. God only knows how to perform knee surgeries. If this were the case then the Incarnation is only an act of divine pedagogy, where God sends Jesus Christ as a prophet and not as the Son of God who can heal our fallen nature and lead us to resurrection and union with God.⁹ Or to put it differently, if God has any kind of limits then the very ontological event that takes humanity beyond its natural limits (i.e., the resurrection) can be seriously doubted. There is no reason to believe that we will be raised from the dead and that our sufferings will end in the eschaton.¹⁰

The other influential attempt to show that disability is common to all comes from Thomas Reynolds in Vulnerable Communion (2008). Reynold’s goal is to support inclusive communities (Reynolds, 2008, p. 24) by emphasizing vulnerability as the main characteristic that all humans possess. According to Reynolds, vulnerability can encourage solidarity and nurture hospitable communities (Reynolds, 2008, pp. 25–26) He thinks that the awareness that we ourselves are prone to disability, stigma, and abuse can shift our perspective on life and others, from one of domination, individualism, and fierce competition into one of participation where we feel responsible for others (Reynolds, 2008, p. 28). “Vulnerability”, he says “is a gift radiating with an unconditioned power that can perhaps best be called divine (Reynolds, 2008, p. 277).”

Like Creamer, Reynolds tries to tie it all back to God through the notion of imago dei. He makes, however, a finer theological point than Creamer: God is not vulnerable per se, but through the Incarnation and death on the Cross God embraces vulnerability as life-giving. As Reynolds explains

In the end, because Jesus is the icon of a vulnerable God, the veritable crux of the Christian witness is an inclusive love of difference that is christological in shape. In the Christ event God’s enfolding love sympathetically enters into the midst of human vulnerability and suffering and resonates outward with unconditional regard for all persons. This means more than merely a confirmation of the basic human right to respect. The nature of this creative-redemptive love fosters a recognition and acceptance of human vulnerability and disability as bearing the image of God. And it does so in a gesture of trusting welcome. The moral thrust of Christian community has its origin here. (Reynolds, 2008, p. 208)

This vision of God who enters the world through the gate of vulnerability entails that “vulnerability can be life-giving”, “facilitate love” and most importantly becomes the pre-condition of Christian life (Reynolds, 2008, p. 455). Only by becoming vulnerable, that is by opening oneself up to others in Christ, we can truly be in the image of God (Reynolds, 2008, p. 368).

God’s creative and providential presence is vulnerable. Vulnerability, the capacity to undergo and suffer the other, is an inescapable part of giving. As God becomes relationally open to God’s gift of creation and lovingly embraces creatures as distinct and valuable beings, God shows vulnerability. God is voluntarily limited and qualified by creation, suffering its presence and being affected by it. (Reynolds, 2008, p. 355).

Reynolds vision is not just inspiring, but far more nuanced and complex than I have the space to develop here. It is also worth noting that he does not paint vulnerability as completely positive. He acknowledges that human life in general, vulnerability included, can be sometimes tragic, allowing for the possibility that we find ourselves in less than pleasant situations (Reynolds, 2008, p. 228). Tragedy “is an undertow made possible by the wondrous good of relation and difference. Unlike the chaos of nothing’s potentiality for being, tragedy accompanies but does not necessarily serve or make possible this good.” (Reynolds, 2008, p. 161). While Reynolds stays on an abstract level and does not spell out what exactly he means by tragedy, it is not difficult to imagine that he thinks of all those situations where being vulnerable means being abused, taken advantage off or even being killed. (Mackenzie et al., 2013; Maican, 2021b; Tarasco Michel, 2014).

In a way, it can be said that Reynolds provides a balanced account of vulnerability and its relationship with Christ. What Reynolds does not stress enough in my opinion is the transformative impact that Christ has on vulnerability. The Incarnation does not just prove the goodness of vulnerability nor does it simply unveil the secret link between God and vulnerability; the Incarnation transforms vulnerability in a new experience in the same way it transforms death. Death can be thought of as good or bad at the same time but it is only in Christ that death receives another significance, namely that of gate to the resurrection. The main achievement of the Incarnation is not that it has shown death to be positive, but that death has been conquered by the very transformation of our own ontological configuration. Humans have not been created immortal, they received their immortality through recapitulation in Christ and his resurrection (See for instance Zizioulas, 2006, pp. 270–285). Paul Gavrilyuk articulates well this point in the conclusion of his book on divine impassibility: “The Word made human experiences his very own by transforming them from within: that which was violent, involuntary, tragically purposeless, and fatal for an ordinary human being was made voluntary, soteriologically purposeful, and life-giving in the ministry of the Word” (Gavrilyuk, 2009, p. 175).

This transformational aspect is important because to emphasize vulnerability and limits as positive realities that have been divinely sanctioned means to diminish the role and the significance of the Incarnation. As I will argue further, the word neputință, although it can be used as a synonym for limits and vulnerability, retains the tension between our current fallen state and the necessity of Christ’s intervention. Neputință captures both the human desire for the transformation of the negative experiences of death, suffering, and vulnerability into positive ones and our inability to achieve this transformation on our own, without Christ. Neputință is at the same time a cry for Christ’s help as it is the acceptance of our limited human condition.

The interviews with the priests

The word neputință describes a situation where one is in the impossibility of acting because she lacks the force, the possibility or the freedom to do so.¹¹ However, unlike vulnerability and limits which do not appear in the ecclesial or theological tradition as such, the word neputință appears in one of the most popular translations of the Bible from the past century,¹² in many of the services and prayers of the Church, and even in some theological reflections.¹³ In the Bible, the word neputință and its cognates appear twenty-nine times in the Old Testament and thirty-three times in the New Testament. Because my interest in this article is primarily Christological and because the space at my disposal is limited I will refer here only to the New Testament and even so doing, I will have to pick just several examples out of the thirty-three. In the New Testament, neputință is used in three ways: to refer to physical and moral weakness and to show the limitation of human nature by comparison with that of God. With the sense of physical weakness or disability, we find the word in Matthew: “And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction (neputință) among the people”¹⁴ (Mt. 4:23), or “Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness (neputință)” (Mt. 10:1) and also in Acts, where Paul heals “a man who was lame” and who had never walked (Acts 14:8).¹⁵

As moral weakness, neputință appears in the well-known injunction from Matthew: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak (neputincioasă)” (Mt. 26:41) Here, neputință is not connected with disability, but with the inability of human beings to act in a way that is morally right. It captures the sense of helplessness in front of temptations used also by Paul in Romans: “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.” (Rom. 7: 22-23)

Yet, the meaning of neputință that is the most relevant for the present discussion is that of a state of helplessness, physical or moral, which requires divine intervention. In the letter to the Romans, we read: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless (neputincioși), Christ died for the ungodly.” (Rom. 5:6)¹⁶ Similarly, in the same letter Paul’s reference to the powerlessness of the law to bring redemption is again translated with the word neputincios “For what the law was powerless (neputincioasă) to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering” (Rom. 8:3).¹⁷

These two meanings are retained in the services and prayers of the Church, although sometimes the first meanings—that of physical and moral weakness—tend to be prioritized. In the service for the anointment of the sick with oil, which is meant for the healing of the body and soul of the faithful, the word neputincios(și) appears 31 times. The priests pray to God for those who attend the service to be delivered from their weaknesses either spiritual or bodily. The first prayer reads: “O Lord, Who are without beginning, eternal, Holy of holies, Who sent down Your only-begotten Son to heal every infirmity and every wound (neputințele) of our souls and bodies, send down Your Holy Spirit, and sanctify this oil”.¹⁸

Similarly, the prayer for the ordination into deacon, priest or bishop speaks also about the moral weakness (neputință) of the future clergy: “The divine grace, which always heals that which is infirm (neputincios) and completes that which is lacking, ordains the most devout Deacon (name) to the office of Priest.”¹⁹ Even the texts of the most common prayers used by the faithful, the akathists—hymns dedicated to the saints—contain this word. In the Akathist of the Mother of God: Joy of All Who Sorrow, the word appears nine times, in most of the cases describing the position of physical or spiritual powerlessness of the person who prays. Mary is asked to intercede with Christ either to return to a state of physical strength or for protection in vulnerable circumstances. These vulnerable circumstances are not precisely described, because the prayer is meant to be generic and read by anyone who finds herself in a difficult situation, from illness to suffering, to exploitation by the powerful to any circumstance that can disturb one’s inner peace. For instance, the third kontakion reads: “With power from on high, do Thou strengthen me, who am afflicted in body and soul, O good Lady, and vouchsafe me Thy visitation and provident care, dispelling the gloom of despondency and sorrow which enfold me, that saved by Thee I may unceasingly cry out to God”. (https://pravoslavie.ru/87480.html)

What the interviews revealed was that for the majority of the interlocutors, the word neputință was more theologically significant than disability. They tended to use disability (dizabilitate) mostly when they felt they had to play the role of manager of a health-related institution or when I would insist on the word itself in the conversation, but almost never when talking about theology and rarely for describing persons in their parishes. For instance, when I asked the priests who had parishes outside the healthcare system (for some, the hospital or the center is also their parish) whether they have persons with disabilities attending the services regularly, they generally pointed out to just one person with a physical disability. This could be plausible in the case of parishes with twenty members, but not in urban parishes with hundred or even thousands of families. So, when a priest from a midsize Romanian city told me that there was only one person with disability in his parish, I rephrased the question. “Do you have families with children on the autistic spectrum in your parish?”²⁰ He replied: “Yes, quite a few of them.” Then he talked about his pastoral efforts for these families. Disability was not a concept he fully appropriated.

However, I noticed that whenever we discussed theological or pastoral issues, the priests preferred the word neputință to disability. Given the ubiquity of the word neputință in the translation of Scripture and the services of the Orthodox Church, their preference seemed quite natural. I also reckoned that the vague meaning of disability and its relative newness in the Romanian language might have made these priests consider it a technical term, imposed by an outside authority. Hence, they treated the word disability as administrative jargon, good only for filling out official paperwork or formal discussions with the authorities or anyone outside the church.

To check to what extent this intuition was true and whether it could be extrapolated further, I turned to the website of the official newspaper of the Romanian Patriarchate, Lumina (The Light) and searched for the usage of the words: disability and neputință in its articles, from 2007 to 2021. At singular, the word disability (dizabilitate) appeared 59 times, while in its plural form, it appeared in 1288 articles. The content of these articles varied from news about the charitable work of the church to news about changes in the Romanian legislation regarding persons with disabilities, to personal testimonies of persons with disabilities, to articles about health-related topics (e.g. depression or how to live a healthy life), yet no article used the word disability in a theological context.

The situation proved completely different with neputință, the word being included in an impressive range of texts with theological overtones. In its singular form neputincios was employed in 388 articles, while in plural form neputicioși in 653. Many of the entries were prayers, but there were also sermons, op-eds, and religious poetry. In an op-ed on spiritual warfare, the author warned those who wish to dedicate themselves to spiritual life that they will face many difficult moments when they will experience treason, fear or helplessness (neputință) (Agachi, 2020b). In a poem meant to express gratitude to God for the day that just ended, the author asked God to always help her fulfill his will, since she feels powerless (neputincioasă) (Stoica, 2022). A sermon contrasted the unchecked authority of the imperial Roman soldier with his powerlessness in helping his ill servant. The Roman centurion comes to Jesus because although politically he can do as he wants, he is powerless in regard to the health of his beloved slave (Vatamanu, 2021). It is this latter point—the relationship between our powerlessness as creatures in comparison with God—to which I will return a bit later to show how it can complement the reflections of Creamer and Reynolds on a Christological level.

But before doing so, I would like to discuss another point that came out from the interviews, namely the distinction between disability and neputință. One of the priests explained that disability and neputință have different meanings: children have disabilities—that is impairments which if they are incurable raise the difficult question of theodicy—while old persons have neputințe—that is physical and psychological limitations caused by old age. Yet, for him, these limitations could not be classified as a disability because they were something to be expected and even embraced.

While I could not find this distinction anywhere else, his understanding of neputință was echoed by an article from the newspaper Lumina entitled “The right time of youth and old age”. In the article, the author seems to have the same understanding of neputință as my interlocutor. His reflection on the stages of life starts from the book of Ecclesiastes: “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens” (Eccl. 3:1-8). He argues that youth is impatience for the right time, mature age is about the effort in creating the right time in order to leave one’s imprint upon the world, while old age is “that beautiful and noble stage when you are allowed to do everything but you are too weak (neputincios) to do it”(Agachi, 2020a) Neputincios is not pejorative but quite the contrary, it is associated with the noble stage in one’s life where it is only natural to lose one’s physical strength. Thus, in a way it supports the view that aging is not problematic and it is not something to be cured.

To summarize, what I tried to do so far was to show that the word neputință was deeply rooted in the ecclesial life of the Romanian Orthodox Church and unveil some of the meanings relevant to disability theology. In this sense, I have emphasized that neputință describes a situation where the human being is so limited, so powerless, and so vulnerable that she requires God’s salvific intervention. I also mentioned that the word can be used in relation to old age, in a way that shows understanding for the natural process of growing old and losing one’s strength.

Now, I will move to explain the three ways in which the word neputință can be directly relevant for disability theology: (1) it can provide the starting point for a robust reflection on disability that does not simply transpose contemporary disability categories into Eastern Orthodox language but engages constructively with them; (2) it strengthens the Christology of Creamer and Reynolds’ proposals; (3) it expresses a positive, but not romanticized, understanding of old age. I would like to add that it is not my purpose to develop here a full theological discourse around this word, but only to unveil its potential. Thus, all I will do is gesture in the directions I consider fruitful.

The first and the most obvious way in which neputință is important is by working as a bridge concept that could provide a starting point for an Eastern Orthodox engagement with the theology of disability, albeit in a Romanian context. Due to its many nuances, I would not translate neputință as impairment nor as disability. I would rather place it on the same level with vulnerability and limits, as a common attribute of human nature. In my view, this word could serve as a basis for creative and enriching reflections on disability similar in kind to what Creamer and Reynolds propose when employing vulnerability and limits. For instance, neputință contains a strong sense of organic development and death, as when it is used for describing old age. To be neputincios is to have limits or vulnerabilities in the abstract sense, but also to grow old and die, that is to follow life’s normal cycle and feel powerless in front of decay and death.

The second contribution is Christological. The word neputință emphasizes the need that humans have here and now for Christ’s transformative intervention whether this intervention is understood as physical or mental healing, as help in everyday occurrences that are outside of our own control or ontological (i.e., facing the fear of death). One of the critiques that I raised when discussing the works of Creamer and Reynolds was that they seem to think that limits and vulnerability are positive attributes of human nature. For Creamer, limits are so desirable that she insists they exist in God’s nature. Reynolds refrains from doing so with vulnerability, but he is convinced that vulnerability is a positive attribute that can lead to solidarity and communion. Their reason for doing this is to break some of the negative stereotypes surrounding disability. If disability is presented as positive and common to all, then the integration of persons with disabilities in Christian communities will go smoother. While I do not contest the overall intention of the two authors or the validity of their reasoning, I tend to think that the word neputință, through its close link with powerlessness and in an ecclesial context with death, reminds us that we are in a state where not only we need Christ’s help to face various challenges from physical and moral to social exclusion and abuse, but also learn how to transform these realities into steps that can improve our relationship with God. The early martyrs did not ask Christ to be spared from death, they asked to receive strength in front of the executioner, since martyrdom was for them a way of getting closer to Christ.²¹ Human life is full of limits and vulnerabilities, which can turn out to be either positive or negative depending on the context. Thus, the word neputință represents a reminder of our dependency on God’s grace and of the importance of Christ’s transformative presence.²²

A recently discussed topic in disability studies and theology, on which the word neputință touches is ageism. In a recent article from 2022,²³ Michael Mawson warned against the increasingly popular view that aging is a disability that has to be cured (Mawson, 2022). This view is reflected in the emerging field of biomedical gereontology which aims to learn how to slow down or reverse the processes that provoke aging (Mawson, 2022, p. 12) and the general tendency to discriminate against the elderly. The response of disability advocates to this trend is to focus on the notion of rights, tending “to neglect or downplay negative, bodily aspects of aging” (Mawson, 2022, p. 13). The solution proposed by Mawson is to acknowledge “that aging is not inherently problematic” while allowing for medicine to develop treatments for those aspects of old age that would be disruptive for the elderly person. “Negotiating the embodied limits of aging, even while often painful, allows for a rich and complex way of being in the world”. (Mawson, 2022, p. 14)

Neputință captures precisely the naturalness of aging as well as its complexity. As pointed out above, for one of my interlocutors, but not only for him, neputință describes the state of old age as one riddled with various illnesses and an increasing lack of physical and mental strength, but one that is not problematic at all. Medicine is required to alleviate all the negative aspects of old age, but the feeling of powerlessness is still expected to dominate the end of human lives. This is not the glorification of old age or powerlessness, but an attempt to show how Mawson’s point is supported by the word neputință and how it can also gain Christological resonances.

Conclusions

What I wanted to do in this paper was to present the conclusions I drew from a series of discussions on disability that I had with six Romanian Orthodox priests who either worked in health related institutions or had a family member with a disability. As stated from the beginning, my intention was not to provide a sociological or ethnographic account of these interviews, but my own theological reflection these discussions stimulated. While the experiences of these priests were different, they seemed to always return to the word neputință when talking about disability in an ecclesial context. This seemed normal at first because the word is found in the Romanian translation of Scripture and it is part of many of the texts used in the services of the Church. On second thought, however, I realized not only that the word itself could function as a bridge between the anglophone theology of disability and the Eastern Orthodox one, albeit of Romanian flavor, but more importantly that it can supplement the Christological vision of Creamer and Reynolds—by stressing that Christ is not there to simply sanction our vulnerabilities and limits, but to transform our understanding and experience of a situation into a new reality that brings us closer to union with Christ.

My argument is of course far from perfect. As anyone with a minimum interest in linguistics knows, not only that words have multiple meanings and nuances and all the statements trying to pin down the exact significance of a word are slippery (See Cassin et al., 2014). To actually arrive at a fixed meaning for a word, especially in a theological context, takes years if not centuries of common reflection. It took a long time for the words ousia and hypostasis, the first example that comes to mind, to receive the meaning we give them today. The same was the case with the more recent sobornost, a word that gained its reputation by being clarified by a long series of illustrious Russian theologians. By this, I do not mean that there could be a chance of disagreement over what the word means and how it is used, but that its significance could be developed further in order to become part of an Eastern Orthodox theology of disability.

Another aspect of my article that requires a bit of clarification is its engagement with Western theology. My approach should not be read as a triumphant statement about the genius of Eastern Orthodoxy in general or that of Romanian Orthodoxy in particular. This is not the case. It is simply about mutual dialogue and enrichment through resources that otherwise would not be accessible. Key concepts from various languages have been translated and presented to a public that does not necessarily know that particular language (e.g. the German Dasein, the French laicite, or the English care) This is similar to a certain extent to the effort made in explaining them and how these concepts can provide a fresh perspective on commonly discussed topics. (See Cassin et al., 2014)

Despite these limitations, I do hope that the article will be taken for what it is, a pioneering attempt to enrich Eastern Orthodoxy with insights from disability theology and vice versa. The goal is both to draw attention to this yet uncharted territory and to stimulate and persuade Eastern Orthodox theologians to examine their own linguistic and cultural heritages in order to build more inclusive communities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It suffices to check the articles published in the Journal of Disability and Religion in the past ten years in order to see that disability theology is dominated by authors coming either from Catholic or Protestant backgrounds.

2 See for instance: (Adveev, 2021; Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the USA, 2020; Athanasiadi, 2018; Depression. According to the Fathers. | A Russian Orthodox Church Website, n.d.; Overcoming Depression: Cognitive Scientific Psychology and the Church Fathers | Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, n.d.).

3 The books of Jean Claude Larchet are an excellent example in this regard. Larchet deals with notions that would normally be placed in the framework of disability, such as mental illnesses, but he does not mention or engage with disability theology or disability studies (Larchet, 1992, 1994, 2015).

4 All the priests of the Romanian Orthodox Church are required to have at least an undergraduate degree in theology and pass an examination called “capacitate preoțească” in the metropolis where they apply for a parish. See ( Statutul Pentru Organizarea Și Funcţionarea Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 2020, art. 123).

5 “To speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating. But this indicates that their translation, into one language or another, creates a problem, to the extent of sometimes generating a neologism or imposing a new meaning on an old word. It is a sign of the way in which, from one language to another, neither the words nor the conceptual networks can simply be superimposed” (Cassin et al., 2014, p. xvii).

6 Transcripts of the conversations can be provided, although as pointed out above they are not relevant to the argument.

7 The list of examples is long, but to give just a few: Brian Brock (Brock, 2011, 2019), John Swinton (Swinton, 2012b, 2012a) or Amos Yong (Yong, 2007).

8 The literature on vulnerability is rather extensive and goes way beyond Reynolds. See for instance Petre Brock (Brock, 2019), Martina Vuk (Vuk, 2021), the issue edited by Talitha Cooreman-Guittin and Petre Maican in The Journal of Disability and Religion with the topic “Vulnerability and Power” (Cooreman-Guittin & Maican, 2021) or the edited volume on vulnerability and survival (Petkovsek & Zalec, 2022). The reason I decided to engage with Reynolds is that he is the only one who has elaborated a fully-fledged Christological vision in relation to vulnerability. And since I am examining vulnerability from the perspective of Christology it seemed appropriate to deal with the strongest version of the argument.

9 While the perspectives on the ultimate shape of human relationships with God in the light of the Incarnation

diverge across Christian traditions – and my critique comes from an Eastern Orthodox standpoint with a very high Christology – I still think that the overall consensus remains that Jesus Christ was more than a simple prophet.

10 It can be argued that Creamer’s understanding of limits can be used without its Christological implications. This is certainly true, but then the question is what would make Creamer’s proposal a theological one since it seems to me that in and of itself, the idea that limits help us better cooperate can be used easily to ground a secular ethical discourse.

11 See for instance, the website DexOnline, which gathers online the most important editions of Romanian dictionaries published by the Romanian Institute for Lingusitics of Romanian Academy. (See Dexonline, n.d.).

12 I’m referring here to the edition of the Romanian Bible printed in 1982 under the Patriarch Teoctist Arăpașul (1915–2007). (Despre BibliaOrtodoxa.Ro, n.d.). All the quotes in Romanian that are found in the footnotes are from this edition.

13 The Romanian word captures three layers of meaning: physical weakness due to limitations of old age, moral imperfection, and the impossibility of doing something, as in the expression of “With man this is impossible (cu neputinta), but with God all things are possible” (Mt 19:26). Due to the limited space, I will refer here only to the two meanings of the word.

14 Şi a străbătut Iisus toată Galileea, învăţând în sinagogile lor şi propovăduind Evanghelia împărăţiei şi tămăduind toată boala şi toată neputinţa în popor.

15 I would note here however that the word neputintă is not used in two of the most important biblical references for disability theology: 1 Corinthians 12:22, where Paul speaks about the weakest members of the body of Christ, and 2 Corinthians 12:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” The actual word used in Romanian as weak (slab).

16 Căci Hristos, încă fiind noi neputincioşi, la timpul hotărât a murit pentru cei necredincioşi.

17 Pentru că ceea ce era cu neputinţă Legii – fiind slabă prin trup – a săvârşit Dumnezeu, trimiţând pe Fiul Său întru asemănarea trupului păcatului şi pentru păcat a osândit păcatul în trup.

18 Cel ce esti fara de inceput si fara de sfarsit, Sfinte al sfintilor, Care ai trimis pe Unul-Nascut Fiul Tau sa tamaduiasca toata boala si neputinta sufletelor si trupurilor noastre, trimite Duhul Tau cel Sfant si sfinteste untdelemnul acesta.

19 Dumnezeiescu har, care pe cele neputincioase le vindeca si pe cele cu lipsa le implineste, hirotoneste pe (N) intru preot.

20 I referred here to autism because the majority of the educated population in Romania is aware of this disability. On the one hand, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, there were well-known voices who contested several vaccines for children (MMR) saying they provoke autism (Olivia Steer, noi controverse despre vaccinuri, 2017). On the other hand, because there are many young influencers who have children on the autistic spectrum or who are interested in supporting those who have their experiences (Drumul Meu ca Părinte de Copil Cu Autism—Prințesa Urbană – Blog Cald de Familie, 2022).

21 Ignatius of Antioch felt in “the pangs of birth” and begged the Romans to allow him to be born in Christ and not “delude him with the things of the world” (Louth, 1987, p. 87) See also (Gavrilyuk, 2009, pp. 69–75).

22 A certain amount of parallelism can be drawn between this conclusion and that of Topher Endress, from his article ‘Skin in the game: Towards a Christological and death-focused model of disability’. Endress criticises the medical and social models of disability because they ignore the reality of human embodiment. Disability is neither something to be cured but it is neither solely something social. It is also something that affects our bodies profoundly. To acknowledge this last aspect of disability, we should understand disability as located in the death and resurrection of Christ. “Deficiency locates disability in a cosmic order, while medical models find disability in the body of the individual. Social models locate disabilities in the policies and ideologies of a society, and my contention is the death-without-sting model locates disability in the expression of humanity’s experience with Christ in the liminal state between life and death, inclusive. This understanding allows us to define disabilities theologically without erasing bodily needs, communal experiences, or political actions. Other key differences between these models may emerge, especially in the practical expressions, but any future outcomes would still depend on this initial locational divergence” (Endress, 2019, p. 315). This parallelism can be developed further.

23 I have decided to engage with this particular article because it is among the most recent and because it allows for a clearer articulation of the potential the word neputință has in this area.