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5 A Meditation on Exodus 33:23b The metaphor of the world as God’s body that McFague introduces in Models of God forms the core for her fourth book, The Body of God (1993). Here once again the God-world relationship is key to her argument, and she analyzes the four major models for this connection: the deistic, the monarchical, the agential, and, most importantly, the organic. However, the organic model that she introduces here differs from the classic model, which she regards as too spiritualized and androcentric. Her organic, or ecological, model instead is built from the common creation story emerging from the sciences. It radicalizes both unity and difference—a panentheistic understanding based in a model of God “as the spirit that is the source, the life of breath of all reality.” She continues, “Everything that is is in God and God is in all things and yet God is not identical with the universe, for the universe is dependent on God in a way that God is not dependent on the universe” (149). But first, she offers this brief biblical meditation, grounded in the sort of biblical hermeneutic suggested in her earlier work, underscoring God’s embodiment and radical immanence and transcendence. Source: 1993:131–36 “And you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen” When Moses in an audacious moment asks of God, “Show me your glory,” God replies that “no one can see me and live,” but he does allow Moses a glimpse of the divine body—not the face but the back (Exod. 33:20-23). The passage is a wonderful mix of the outrageous (God has a backside?!) and the awesome (the display of divine glory too dazzling for human eyes). The passage unites guts and glory, flesh and spirit, the human and the divine, and all those other 61 apparent dualisms with a reckless flamboyance that points to something at the heart of the Hebrew and Christian traditions: God is not afraid of the flesh. We intend to take this incarnationalism seriously and see what it does, could, mean in terms of the picture of reality from postmodem science. Were we to imagine “the Word made flesh” as not limited to Jesus of Nazareth but as the body of the universe, all bodies, might we not have a homey but awesome metaphor for both divine nearness and divine glory? Like Moses, when we ask, “Show me your glory,” we might see the humble bodies of our own planet as visible signs of the invisible grandeur. Not the face, not the depths of divine radiance, but enough, more than enough. We might begin to see (for the first time, perhaps) the marvels at our feet and at our fingertips: the intricate splendor of an Alpine forget-me-not or a child’s hand. We might begin to realize the extraordinariness of the ordinary. We would begin to delight in creation, not as the work of an external deity, but as a sacrament of the living God. We would see creation as bodies alive with the breath of God. We might realize what this tradition has told us, although often shied away from embracing unreservedly: we live and move and have our being in God. We might see ourselves and everything else as the living body of God. We would, then, have an entire planet that reflects the glory, the very being—although not the face—of God. We would have a concrete panorama for meditation on divine glory and transcendence: wherever we looked, whether at the sky with its billions of galaxies (only a few visible to us) or the earth (every square inch of which is alive with millions of creatures) or into the eyes of another human being, we would have an image of divine grandeur. The more we meditated on these bits of the divine body, the more intricate, different, and special each would become. Such meditation is a suitable way for limited, physical creatures with lively imaginations such as ourselves to contemplate the divine being. It is enriching for it does not occur only at one place but everywhere and not just in one form but in an infinite myriad of forms. It is neither otherworldly nor abstract, but is a this-worldly, concrete form of contemplating divine magnificence. It is a way for limited, physical beings like ourselves to meditate on divine transcendence in an immanent way. And it is based on the...

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