Disability theology has rightly critiqued intellectual assent and the overabundant role which rational knowledge claims have played in Xm discipleship, but IMO one of its challenges moving forward will be to craft understandings of how knowledge remains at play in discipleship.

It’s wrong to suggest that disciples must intellectually assent to particular rational claims in order to follow Christ. However, it’s also wrong to suggest that people with intellectual disabilities have no capacity for any sort of knowledge.

What is difficult is that we don’t know what others know, but we know that there is a capacity for a particular kind of knowledge. Eg., people I support may not be able to craft an eloquent treatise on the function of the Trinity, but they know who I am when I walk in the door.

This recognition is manifested in different responses, yet remains a fundamental aspect of those who I have supported. This recognition is a particular form of knowledge.

I don’t have an answer to what the place of knowledge in disability theology will look like moving forward (although I hope to sort out a preliminary understanding of that sometime over the course of my dissertation).

But it’s important to note that even in our critiques of intellectual assent that we do not come to think of people w/ID as having no intellectual capacity whatsoever, even if this intellectual capacity looks different than what we’re used to, because that is simply false.