Studying the concept of "God's body" from Sally McFague's point of view

Abstract

Sally McFague recommends both intimate and less intimate metaphors of God as mother, lover, and friend in order to move away from a transcendental theology that is centered on salvation and toward a creation theology that is focused on divine cognition. According to McFague, understanding God as a being renders the natural world devoid of any holiness and, by downplaying creation theology, reduces God to a very modest and constrained presence. McFague's main suggestion is to use the "body" model as a way of interpreting all things, where the body refers to all life forms and everything on the planet and the world and implies that the world and everything that exists is the body of God, in order to conceptualize God within the framework of a new fundamental and biological view of truth. He claims that God works internally and compassionately, not outwardly and alternatively, using the metaphor of the world as his body. God intervenes amid an incredibly intricate process of physical development and historical-cultural evolution that began in the past. God is not a being who occasionally intervenes in history and nature for good reasons (as in the king-sovereign-dominion paradigm), but rather a being who always watches over the world and cares for it with loving concern, much as a human cares for his body.