**4. Applying the Metaphor**

First, the application of this metaphor encourages us to consider the role that stories play in how we construct our role in climate change. The metaphor of the world as God's body is but one way to image God's relation to humans, and far from the dominant one. But, by applying the metaphor, we become more attuned to how it causes us to read the climate crisis differently from the way that the dominant metaphor does. Returning again to McFague, she writes in *A New Climate for Christology* that there is indeed a dominant story, a dominant narrative or metaphor about Christianity. She refers to this dominant

story as a "model" and explains that much of what we consider undebatable Christian theology is, in fact, "the Western story, anchored by a monarchical, all-powerful God" (McFague 2021, p. 2). McFague goes on to sugges<sup>t</sup> that, truthfulness aside, the usefulness of this particular story has worn thin,<sup>11</sup> and, in turn, it suggests that the Western interpretive story of Christianity is an essentially patriarchal story, one that pits male humans against a male God in a sort of cosmic battle rooted in individualism, Enlightenment ways of knowing, and capitalism (ibid., p. 3).

In terms of inter-human relationships, a consequence of this dominant story is that it allows some bodies to be privileged above other bodies. Humans collectively privilege their own bodies over animal bodies and the body of the earth. More specifically, humans also collectively privilege bodies with lighter skin over bodies with darker skin, as well as the bodies of those who identify as men over the bodies of those who identify as women (ibid., p. 6). Those who find themselves beneath the pinnacle of the most privileged body type therefore find themselves inhabiting a place of vulnerability. This vulnerability, moreover, is socially constructed in such a way that it becomes appropriate to exploit it.<sup>12</sup>

At the same time, it is also a story that allows for the earth's violation. The earth, in this story, is not a body at all, but rather an object and, as such, is designed to be subdued and dominated, in the spirit of a literal reading of Genesis 1:28. There is, in other words, a hierarchy in this story in which God is at the top, humans are directly underneath, and the rest of creation exists to be used at the convenience of these humans. We see the application of this story on a daily basis, in such subtle and insidious ways that we barely notice: Humans choose to drive cars that raise the planet's temperature and destroy its ecosystems. They manufacture and dispose of plastic, to the extent that islands of it have coalesced in the Pacific Ocean. They raise, kill, and consume large numbers of animals, most of whom spend their lives in cramped, contained, and unnatural habitats.

This kind of objectification is precisely the kind seen in inter-human sexual violations in which one human being sees another as an object to be used, rather than a subject with agency that deserves respect. In other words, while the physical forms of harm are not the same, the meaning of them and the goals of them are strikingly similar—to subdue, to dominate, to control. Moreover, that both of these forms of harm exist—and exist in a way that is so normalized—is a symbol of how powerful the dominant story of Christianity is. Applying the metaphor of the body of God becomes one way to disrupt the power of that dominant story, because it brings to light assumptions about the story that may have gone unquestioned by too many for too long.

It also provides a new story of the relationships between God, humans, and the earth that can guide our ethics going forward. In this case, the metaphor of the world as God's body makes it unthinkable to harm the earth, because to harm the earth would be to harm the most generative parts of God's self. To do that would be the very definition of sin, and therefore, the application of this metaphor requires that humans find ways to see the earth as a subject and to treat it with the reverence that we give to God.

## **5. Ecological Sin as Sexual Selfishness**

The second consequence of this metaphor's application is that it allows us to strike a parallel between ecological sin and sexual selfishness. Throughout her corpus, Sallie McFague adheres to the belief that solidarity and relationships are grounding principles of the Christian life, such that the violation of relationships become the basis for her understanding of sin. Phrased differently, if the relationship between God and humans, as modeled in the life of Jesus and the New Testament parables that comprise the rootmetaphor of Christianity (the fundamental metaphor through which others derive), then acts that betray the principles of that relationship constitute sin, such that sin becomes the act of ranking oneself above or apart from others, thereby eschewing relationships. Sin, therefore, manifests when individuals refuse to acknowledge that they are in a relationship or refuse to value the other with whom they are in relationship, resulting in their objectification. As McFague summarizes, "Our sin is plain old selfishness—wanting to have everything for ourselves . . . Sin is limitless greed" (McFague 1993, pp. 114–15).

McFague describes sin in different ways, depending on the metaphor she is working with, though the priority of selfishness remains consistent between each. When working with her metaphor of God as a friend, she explains sin through the language of betrayal— because loyalty to the friend and the free choice to be in such relationships ground friendships, sin becomes the act of turning away from the relational loyalty to which one is committed (McFague 1989, p. 162). In contrast, when dealing with the metaphor of the world as God's body, McFague suggests that sin involves denying relationships not just with humans, but also with the earth. Indeed, a relationship with the earth is a precondition of human survival, because humans cannot live without certain fundamentals that the earth provides, including food from its soil, heat from its wood, and shelter from its stone. Hence, humans sin when they fail to acknowledge that they are in a relationship with other humans and with nature through virtue of their embodiment. This orientation is also known as speciesism.<sup>13</sup> To that end, McFague writes that:

"It is obvious, then, what sin is in this metaphor of the world as God's body: it is refusal to be part of the body, the special part we are as imago dei. In contrast to the king–realm model, where sin is against God, here, it is against the world. To sin is not to refuse loyalty to the Liege Lord but to refuse to take responsibility for nurturing, loving, and befriending the body and all its parts. Sin is the refusal to realize one's radical interdependence with all that lives: it is the desire to set oneself apart from all others as not needing them or being needed by them. Sin is the refusal to be the eyes, the consciousness, of the cosmos ... If Christian discipleship is shaped by solidarity with the needy, including nature as the new poor, then natural evil is not limited to what happens to me and mine, and sin becomes the limitation of one's horizon to the self" (McFague 1993, pp. 77, 174).<sup>14</sup>

McFague, therefore, concludes that humans make idols of their own identities by limiting their horizon of the self, and by privileging their own subjectivity above the subjectivity of other bodies, or, phrased differently, privileging their own power in a way that constructs the vulnerability of other bodies (McFague 2008, p. 15). Sin, thus, manifests because this form of idolatry refuses to acknowledge the reality that one is in a relationship with others who may have different needs, identities, and values from themselves. This can occur both intra- and inter-species. In cases of misogyny, for instance, men become capable of idolizing their own embodied identity and privileging their own subjectivity above the embodied identity of women, thereby allowing themselves to objectify women, construct women as vulnerable, and enact harm upon them. The corollary in the environmental crisis is that humans, at large, function as men do in misogyny—able to privilege their own subjectivity, to construct the earth as vulnerable by rendering it an object that exists for human use, and to exploit its body without a second thought because we believe that the earth's body belongs to us (McFague 1993, p. 115).

I'd like to build on McFague's conception of sin as selfishness to sugges<sup>t</sup> that the dominant discursive beliefs and practices that humans exercise in their relationship with the earth can be categorized as sin, because they allow humans to objectify and desire the earth in a fundamentally selfish way. The Trump administration's authorization of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge provides just one of many examples that support this assertion. Lawmakers and other powerful figures in governments and businesses make decisions that are driven by the short-term interests of humans, not of the earth. As a result, a decision like the one to drill in the Arctic is justified by the need for oil to fuel energy-inefficient vehicles that transport humans, as well as arguing that humans need their jobs in the oil and auto industries. Such an argumen<sup>t</sup> is, therefore, selfish insofar as it is driven entirely by the needs of human beings—as well as a failure of imagination—without regard for the earth and the damage done to it.

Relatedly, the ecological crisis can be understood not only as a sin but also as an act of sexual violation, because this objectifying orientation allows humans to presume that it is appropriate to penetrate generative parts of the earth's body without the earth's consent.<sup>15</sup> We frack the earth's crust, seizing gas from its innermost parts. We rip trees from soil intended to generate life. We litter the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane emissions that pollutes the very air needed for the creation and continuation of life. Humans do this without asking the earth, assuming that it is our right to use the earth's body, including its generative and reproductive capacities, as we please. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that humans have been raping the earth's body.

Now, I recognize that this assertion is, prima facie, problematic in its own right because of the way it anthropomorphizes the earth, constructing it in terms of a subset of human bodies. However, what might be beneficial about attempting, however clumsily, to identify the way in which both women's and the earth's bodies frequently experience a form of sexual violation is that it recognizes that the bodies of each have been constructed as vulnerable in such a way that that the vulnerability can be exploited in ways that become normalized, instead of being identified and responded to as real forms of wrongdoing. Put differently, I am following in McFague's footsteps by proposing a linguistic metaphor that hopefully will not function as an idol, but rather as an important addition that allows us to give speech to forms of harm in new ways. In turn, it also allows us to think about and speak about the relationship between women's bodies and the body of the earth in a new way.

Framing these human acts as rape or as a sexual violation has provocative implications for McFague's metaphor: If we are raping the earth, then are we raping God? What would be at stake were God—and not just the earth—vulnerable to this kind of trauma? This framework challenges us to think afresh about what role vulnerability plays in God's identity, and it also challenges us to consider the possibility that we have become perpetrators who take advantage of that vulnerability.

#### **6. The Dialectic of Trauma and a Proposed Ethic**

Sexual violations are, more often than not, traumatic for those humans who experience them. We know this from the numerous studies done on inter-human sexual violations— when one person sexually violates another, it often results in trauma, where the victimized party experiences symptoms of posttraumatic stress, including flashbacks and emotional numbing. These alternating symptoms of hyper-awareness and numbing are known as the dialectic of trauma, meaning symptoms that appear to be antithetical to each other but are, in fact, intimately linked. In the case of trauma, the dialectic symbolizes the desire to both remember the trauma, so it doesn't happen again (as exhibited by symptoms, such as flashbacks and hypervigilance) while also desiring to forget it because of how terrible it was (as symbolized by symptoms, such as numbing or forgetting aspects of the event).

If we apply the metaphor of the world as God's body to the climate crisis and understand the harm we are doing to the earth is a sexual one, in which the agency and generative parts of the earth are being violated by humans, then perhaps there is a traumatic dimension to the earth's violation. Indeed, framing the ecological crisis in terms of a series of sexual traumas undertaken by humans on the earth's body changes how we understand the earth's response, because it causes us to consider the ways in which the earth is a subject and, as a subject, is exerting agency in response to the horror humans are inflicting upon it.

It also calls us to recognize the ways in which trauma—which we often assume is only a human phenomenon—is actually a response that humans share with other parts of creation. Scientists are discovering that animals of all sorts experience traumas in ways that alter brain chemistry and induce posttraumatic stress symptoms, symptoms that include, what trauma theorist Judith Herman calls, a "dialectic" of intrusive and avoidance symptoms (Herman 1997, pp. 47–51). In the Canadian Yukon, for example, the snowshoe hare population rises and falls based not just on how many predators successfully kill the hares, but also based upon the trauma of living among the predators. Ecologists studying the phenomenon have found that snowshoe hare mothers experience such profound stress from living amongs<sup>t</sup> the predators that it causes changes in the brain, including a rise in cortisol levels, that resembles those found present in the brains of humans with PTSD (Sheriff et al. 2010). Interestingly, the researchers also found a generational component to the trauma, as the changes in the brains of the snowshoe hares passed from mother to daughter; both populations produce fewer young as a result of the changes in brain chemistry.<sup>16</sup>

Researchers have hypothesized that trauma works in the wild across species ranging from elephants, to rats, in ways that reminisce the human posttraumatic stress reaction (Zanette and Clinchy 2020). In other words, it appears to be the case that the animal world at large may experience intrusion symptoms—which include recurring memories and dreams about the trauma, flashbacks, emotional distress or flooding when one is reminded of the trauma, and flashbacks—as well as avoidance symptoms, such as attempts avoid locations or people associated with the trauma, as well as dissociation, emotional numbness, attempts to avoid thinking of the trauma, and difficulty remembering the trauma. In addition to those symptoms that are emblematic of the dialectic, posttraumatic stress is also marked by symptoms including guilt, shame, difficulty sleeping, difficulty concentrating, outbursts of anger, and a heightened startle response.

Perhaps most valuably, using a trauma-informed lens to understand climate change as a form of trauma inflicted upon the earth's body allows humans to reframe the events we are seeing in terms of concrete harm: The overall warming of the globe that appears in tandem with periods of striking cold can be understood as a dialectic, an earthquake as an earthly startle response, a hurricane as an outburst of anger. The earth is speaking in its own language, a language of wind, heat, water, and magma. Insofar as we see the world as God's body, this response can also be understood as God speaking through the earth's suffering in order to signal that the violation that humans inflict on the earth breaches the root-metaphor of Christianity and needs to change.

Recognizing earth's speech is essential to responding to the climate crisis for the same reason that it is essential to respond to the speech of other members of creation who experience forms of trauma. It affords them a form of epistemic credibility. By way of an example, research on human traumas shows that affording epistemic credibility to victims is both paramount for their healing and is also countercultural.<sup>17</sup> When victims tell others about traumatic events in their lives, it is not uncommon for witnesses to respond with denial because, as trauma theorists like Judith Herman postulate, it is easier to live in a world where one assumes the victim is lying than to accept the pervasiveness of violence and the reality that we may be complicit in it to some degree (Herman 1997, pp. 7–33). This denial is not helpful to either victims or witnesses. Victims are unable to recover without the ability to speak, to craft a narrative, and to integrate trauma into the reality of their lives. They need witnesses who will listen and respond to isolation with community, to harm with safety (ibid., pp. 155–213). Meanwhile, witnesses who adopt a stance of denial are avoiding both painful truths and the opportunity to serve as supporters and advocates.

If we think about the climate crisis as a form of trauma inflicted upon God's body, then human propensity to deny earth's speech makes more sense. Human denial of the earth's trauma mirrors their denial of the trauma inflicted upon human bodies; in both cases, it remains more convenient to blame the victim than to acknowledge the reality that one lives in a world in which such horrors can occur.<sup>18</sup> Yet, the earth persists in her efforts to be heard, just as human survivors of traumas refuse to be silenced. Melting glaciers, hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes can be read as acts of divine speech that perhaps mirror the words of Jesus on the cross, "Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?" or "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:36; Psalm 22:1, NRSV). Ethically, then, we must listen to the testimony of trauma and consider what needs to be done to make things right, because to continue to ignore what is being said is to continue being complicit in the trauma itself.

Lastly, the earth's traumatized speech can be read as an act of resistance undertaken by the earth to draw our attention to the reality of its traumatization, calling humans out of denial to be witnesses. Humans are uniquely responsible for the climate crisis, or, put differently, they are uniquely the perpetrators of the earth's trauma. It is, therefore, imperative that humans find ways to move from a stance of denial to undertake the work of active witnessing and active solidarity. Only by actively witnessing, recognizing, and naming the harm being done can we grow in awareness of it, and awareness is the first step to change, because it allows us to recognize our individual complicity as well as a systemic need for accountability.<sup>19</sup> In other words, if McFague is right in that sin is a form of selfishness, then one way to counteract its power is through a radical practice of empathy that extends beyond our own species and to creation at large, even including the God who made it. Only through that empathy can we begin to comprehend the enormity of the wrong we have done, as well as starting to take concrete steps to listen to what the earth is demanding needs to be done in order to make things right. Such steps would return agency to the earth, and while experiencing the return of agency is a necessary step in healing for any trauma survivor, it takes on a new dimension when we consider its meaning in light of the guiding metaphor of this paper. If, indeed, the world is God's body, then returning agency to the earth is an active step that humans would take to not only make things right for the earth, but also to make things right between themselves and God. It comes as an act of recompense, a form of confession, and a way of atoning for sin.
