“What Is Man That You Are Mindful of Him?” by Jacob Thielman

Jacob Thielman

Jacob Thielman is Internet marketing assistant at Eerdmans. 

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I want to share a book with you — a beautiful, devastating book that you might not notice otherwise: Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics by Hans Reinders.

“Profound disability” is a term I had never encountered before. By it, Reinders means people with intellectual impairments to basic cognitive functions like thought and agency. Reinders’s book could not be gentler in its tone, but this only adds to the monumental force of his argument. He asks a simple question: Is a person with such profound disability created in God’s image?

Nobody in their right theological mind would deny it. But if this is so, can we say that what makes a person human — that is, what reflects God’s image in them — has anything to do with what they can do…