Would we not then feel obliged to love the earth with all its many bodies?
This should be required reading.
I was at a conference in 2019 and we were talking about climate change and the destruction of our environment. I piped up and said that I felt that perhaps the crucifixion event was a metaphor for our ultimate destruction of the planet. The creation being the incarnation of god on the macro scale and Jesus being an incarnation on the micro scale. Perhaps it will happen that we will destroy the incarnation of god (and in doing so destroy ourselves) and then the creative force behind it all will create something new (ie. a resurrection).
Someone that was sitting in that discussion group with me asked if I had read any Sallie McFague. I hadn’t. I bought this book and have been reading it on and off all year. Over and over. It is falling apart and I’m wondering how to hold the book together. I know I will refer to it over and over again. It is THAT good.
If we had this kind of theology, what an absolute difference it would make. I’ve underlined things on almost every page.
A few highlights:
“There is a profound difference between the early Christian notion of the cosmos animated by ..the Logos of God and the church as the body of Christ with Christ… as the head. The first is a sense of divine immanence in the entire natural order that includes all life-forms…. The second is a dualistic, hierarchical notion of exclusion, separating spirit from nature, human beings (and particularly Christians) from other creatures and the earth…”
“What if we saw the earth as part of the body of God, not as separate from God (who dwells elsewhere) but as the visible reality of the invisible God? What is we also saw this body as overlain by the body of the cosmic Christ, so that wherever we looked we would see bodies that are incorporated into the liberating, healing, inclusive love of God? Would we not then feel obliged to love the earth with all its many bodies?”
“…our current picture of god would be understood as a continuing creator, but of equal importance, we human beings might be seen as partners in creation, as the self-conscious, reflexive part of the creation that could participate in furthering the process.”
“The transcendence of God is not available to us except as embodied”
“The universe as God’s body is also, then a radicalization of divine immanence, for god is not present to us in just one place (Jesus) but in and through all bodies, the bodies of the sun and moon, trees and rivers, animals and people. The scandal of the gospel is that the Word became flesh; the radicalization of incarnation sees Jesus not as an enigma, but as a paradigm or culmination of the divine way of enfleshment”
Just read it.