From this metaphor develops another - the metaphor of the world (or cosmos) as God’s body. McFague elaborates this metaphor at length in The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. The purpose of using it is to ‘cause us to see differently’, to ‘think and act as if bodies matter’, and to ‘change what we value’[14]. If we imagine the cosmos as God’s body, then ‘we never meet God unembodied’[15]. This is to take God in that cosmos seriously, for ‘creation is God’s self-expression’. Equally we must take seriously our own embodiment (and that of other bodies): all that is has a common beginning and history (as McFague puts it ‘we are all made of the ashes of dead stars’[16]), and so salvation is about salvation of all earthly bodies (not just human ones) and first and foremost about living better on the earth, not in the hereafter. Elaborating further, McFague argues that sin, on this view, is a matter of offence against other parts of the ‘body’ (other species or parts of the creation) and in that sense only against God, while eschatology is about a better bodily future (‘creation is the place of salvation, salvation is the direction of creation’[17]), rather than a more disembodied spiritual one. In this metaphor, God is not a distant being but being-itself, a characterisation that has led some to suggest McFague’s theology is a form of monism. She defends her views as not monist but panentheist[18]. The world seen as God’s body chimes strongly with a feminist and panentheist stress on God as the source of all relationship, while McFague’s understanding of sin (as essentially a failure of relationality, of letting other parts of the created order flourish free of our control) is also typically panentheist.
