Calling a Thing What It Is Disability as Ostracon and Schule Christi in a Lutheran Theologia Crucis

Abstract

Contemporary disability theology often advances as liberationist critique – naming ableism, condemning exclusion, demanding justice. Yet protest alone can be co‑opted by a normate imagination that still construes disability as deficit even while seeking redress. This essay offers a distinctly Lutheran alternative: reading disability within the theologia crucis, where God is known “in suffering and the cross,” and truth is spoken by calling a thing what it is. I frame disability as a cruciform pedagogy – Schule Christi – through which the Spirit trains the church in receptivity to promise, reconfiguring anthropology from performance to gift. To give the church a durable image, I take up the ancient ostracon: not the pristine vessel but the broken shard that becomes the very surface on which meaning is inscribed. So too, the church learns to recognize that God writes the gospel precisely upon creaturely fracture, such that disabled Christians stand not as anomalies to be accommodated but as theologians of the cross whose lives school us in dependence, patience, and mutual care.