**1. Introduction**

In August of 2020, the Trump administration authorized oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, allowing approximately 1.6 million acres, in the coastal plain region of the refuge, to be made available to companies who could extract natural resources from it. While the governor of Alaska hailed the move as an opportunity to create jobs, environmentalists and indigenous activists railed against the decision, arguing that it would devastate a delicate ecosystem and do irreversible damage to a number of species that call the region home.

This is but one anecdote of many in which governments and industries have assumed they have a right to control the earth's body; to understand the earth not as a living, breathing subject, but as an object designed primarily for human use and consumption. Christianity at large has been complicit in the anthropocentrism that permits the objectification and ecological destruction of the earth, thereby also becoming complicit in a seemingly endless climate crisis.<sup>1</sup> As Catherine Keller writes, "One upon a time we had ... time ... And now we seem to have lost it" (Keller 2018, p. 1).

Eco-feminists have recognized parallels between the subjugation experienced by the earth and the subjugation experienced by women in ways that mutually enable the perpetuation of patriarchal authority (Warren 2000; Dunayer 1995). These scholars observe that the feminized language used to describe the earth (i.e., Mother Earth/Mother Nature) and the pejorative terms that liken women to animals mutually support epistemic frameworks, as well as practices that allow for the control and manipulation of each (Adams 1990).<sup>2</sup> Both possess, in other words, identities constructed by patriarchal epistemologies that enable their violation. Meanwhile, feminist theologians have been attentive to a number of systemic forms of harm, including traumatic sexual violations inflicted upon human bodies, and while theologians at large are increasingly recognizing the need for theological analysis of the ecological crisis,<sup>3</sup> more work needs to be done, especially by theologians like feminists who are attentive to matters of power. As Rosemary Radford Ruether recognizes, there are "interconnections between the domination of women and the domination of nature" (Ruether 2012), and an awareness of these interconnections not only changes how we think about these relationships but how we inhabit them (Ruether 2012).

**Citation:** Tumminio Hansen, Danielle Elizabeth. 2022. The Body of God, Sexually Violated: A Trauma-Informed Reading of the Climate Crisis. *Religions* 13: 249. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13030249

Academic Editors: Pamela R. McCarroll and HyeRan Kim-Cragg

Received: 6 September 2021 Accepted: 10 March 2022 Published: 15 March 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

This article, therefore, builds upon these interconnections by providing a theological analysis of the climate crisis that emerges when using Sallie McFague's metaphor of the world as the body of God. I propose that this metaphor functions as an important hermeneutic—as well as a deeply challenging one—for theologically framing both the climate crisis, as well as God's identity and relationship to creation. In particular, I elucidate and develop McFague's metaphor to sugges<sup>t</sup> that there are parallels that can be drawn between the sexual violations that the earth experiences and the sexual violations that women's bodies experience. I unpack these challenges and then use this conceptualization as a way to reframe both the dominant denial that characterizes the human response to the climate crisis, and to propose a trauma-informed ethic for moving forward in humans' relationship to creation at large. Such an analysis develops a practical theology of the climate crisis insofar as it both encourages readers to think differently about their relationships to the earth, and to live out that relationship in a way that transforms the earth from object to subject.

Before proceeding further, however, a note of limitation: It is worth naming, at the outset, that women's bodies are not the only human bodies that are subjected to sexual violations. I will be limiting my analysis to women's bodies for the purposes of this article, in part because they constitute the majority of cases of sexual violations, and also because one of the goals of the article is to draw parallels between gender-based sexual violations and the violations inflicted by humans upon the earth.<sup>4</sup> In addition, the role that the systemic oppression of women's bodies plays in the normalization of sexual violations can be paralleled with the systemic oppression the planet faces, resulting in the vulnerability of each to continued harm. Indeed, one might argue that a rise in the awareness concerning the vulnerability of both occurred concurrently in the United States, as the height of the #MeToo movement collided with what might be named as a heightened call to climate action, initiated by Greta Thunberg's school strike. Parallels between the constructed vulnerability of women's bodies, the earth, and the trauma caused to each will be elucidated in what follows.

#### **2. The Body of God, Sexually Violated**

Sallie McFague is well-known for the development of metaphorical theology, which is a way of doing theology that considers how words and concepts have come to function as linguistic and conceptual idols, rather than metaphors for the Divine. She proposes in *Metaphorical Theology* that masculine language for God has come to function as such an idol, leading many who employ it to conclude God is essentially male, rather than the recognition that masculine terminology is only a partial and metaphorical representation of the "rootmetaphor" of Christianity, the metaphor from which all other Christian metaphorical language ought to emerge (McFague 1982, pp. 28, 194).<sup>5</sup> McFague proposes that the God– human relationship, specifically as represented in the vision of the kingdom of God, ought to ground the root-metaphor (Ibid., pp. 26–28).<sup>6</sup> However, McFague also postulates that the root-metaphor is, essentially, beyond language, which cannot in and of itself encapsulate the divine, because the divine is ontologically more expansive than language, and because language is subject to human influence, including the influence of sin, which distorts it. Language can, therefore, partially represent the root-metaphor but it cannot directly or fully encapsulate it.

McFague proposes linguistic multiplicity as a possible antidote to language's limitations and fallibility, which is why multiple metaphors are important to her. If one metaphor cannot fully represent the Divine, then perhaps many, when used together, can more closely do this linguistic work. Thus, rather than discarding the metaphor of God as a father or the biblical texts that support it, McFague asks readers to consider the extent to which the metaphor—and the biblical texts that name it—may be incomplete or not intended for literal interpretation, even as she simultaneously encourages readers to consider other metaphors that could illuminate previously undeveloped aspects of Christianity's rootmetaphor, thereby opening the possibility for humans to deepen their knowledge of, and

relationship with, the Divine (TeSelle [McFague] 1975, p. 29). McFague, therefore, suggests that the issue with using masculine language to name the divine is not its existence, but its dominance. In other words, the exclusivity of its use reinforces the power of the linguistic idol, and so the solution is to disrupt the power of that idol by creating more linguistic frameworks which, together, might do a more comprehensive job of representing God.

McFague proposes various metaphors in the corpus of her work, including the metaphor of "friend" (McFague 1989, p. 160; McFague 1982, pp. 178–94)<sup>7</sup> but here I would like to focus particularly on the metaphor of the world as God's body, a metaphor she develops at length in *The Body of God*. McFague argues that the metaphor of the world as God's body is an important supplement to the dominant human male metaphor, because it draws upon the inherent embodiment present in the incarnation itself, such that bodies of all sorts—including the earth's body—matter because God chose to incarnate Jesus into a body. As McFague explains,

"We will sugges<sup>t</sup> that the primary belief of the Christian community, its doctrine of the incarnation (the belief that God is with us here on earth), be radicalized beyond Jesus of Nazareth to include all matter ... As long as we refuse to imagine God as embodied, we imply . . . that the body is inferior" (McFague 1993, p. xi).

The incarnation, therefore, justifies the overall theological import of the body, including the embodiment of the earth upon which Jesus lived and through which he procured sustenance, clothing, and shelter. This does not mean that the earth and its contents can be equated with God, but it does mean that we can know God through the world, the locus where God chooses to self-mediate. As McFague writes:

"The world, creation, is not identified or confused with God. Yet it is the place where God is present to us. Christianity's most distinctive belief is that divine reality is always mediated through the world, a belief traditionally expressed in the Chalcedonian formula that Christ was "fully God, fully man" ... In both instances, the Word is made flesh, God is available to us only through the mediation of embodiment ... Incarnationalism, radicalized, means that we do not, ever, at least in this life, see God face to face, but only through the mediation of the bodies we pay attention to, listen to, and learn to love and care for" (ibid., pp. 135, 134).

As a result of this fundamental tenet, McFague makes the provocative argumen<sup>t</sup> that in destroying the earth, we are participating in the destruction of God, because, while "a panentheistic model does not reduce God to the world ... God is in the young woman killed in the accident and in the baby with birth defects as well as in those who suffer the loss or diminishment of their loved ones" (ibid., p. 176). To that end, God participates in our losses, in suffering, in an embodied, intimate way that not only affects us but also affects God. In turn, the embodied world—creation—becomes not only the site of divine–human suffering, but also of redemption, because if God is in creation, then salvation must take place within it (ibid., pp. 179–80).

McFague's metaphor of the world as God's body has significant implications for both constructing the body theologically and relationally (ibid., p. 101). Because God is part of creation, and because God is, in essence, good, so too are bodies good. To that end, privileging the body's goodness becomes a fundamental priority for McFague, for in the metaphor of the world as God's body, each of our bodies—indeed, the bodies of all creation—are part of God. However, this awareness also means that bodies are connected through their relationship to God, who inheres in each one. As she writes, when one accepts as axiomatic the metaphor of the world as God's body, then it becomes evident that,

The "God-part" will take care of itself if we can love and value the bodies. That is what an incarnational theology assures us: it is right to have a nature spirituality. In fact, we should have one ... All of us, living and nonliving, are one phenomenon, a phenomenon stretching over billions of years and containing untold numbers of strange, diverse, and marvelous forms of matter—including

our own ... [Therefore] I belong not only to my immediate family or country or even my species, but to the earth and all its life-forms. I know this now. The question is, can I, will I, *live* as if I did? Will I accept my proper place in the scheme of things? Will *we*, the human beings of the planet, do so? (ibid., pp. 97, 113, 211).

The theology that McFague proposes, therefore, maps the body of God metaphor for the purpose of developing a distinctly practical theology. The goal is not just to think about our relationship to the earth differently, but to act differently, because our awareness of that relationship causes us to regard the earth as subject instead of object. Hence, the reader observes how McFague's process of transforming the vocabulary that expresses the divine–human relationship has a broadly performative effect, because it calls us both to experience the ontology of the earth differently and, symbiotically, to act differently.

How, then, might this metaphor of the world as God's body cause us to see ourselves and our relationship to the earth differently, in light of the climate crisis?
