Witnessing a Wounded World: A Theology of Ecological Trama

Timothy A. Middleton. Witnessing a Wounded World: A Theology of Ecological Trama. New York: Fordham University Press, 2026. Pp 360. Endnotes, bibliography, index. Paper, $30.

A major focus for EcoFaith readers is on how collectively we can reverse the harm we are causing Earth through our emissions of greenhouse gases and destruction of habitats.  Without discounting those efforts, Timothy Middleton wants us to attend also to the fact that we have already caused irreparable injury to our planet and to consider the possibility that Earth has been traumatized.  Witnessing a Wounded World is a deep exploration of this idea.  As a theologian at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University, in the UK, Middleton grounds his exploration of the question in the biblical witness.  The first three of his six chapters investigate from several perspectives whether Earth is an entity that can experience trauma.  The second three chapters look at what we can learn from the theology of trauma to minister to Earth.

One of the first questions Middleton addresses is what to make of the numerous passages in the Bible in which entities in nature have agency and can express themselves.  Citing Terence Fretheim, he notes more than fifty references in Psalms and Isaiah in which entities in nature, animate and inanimate, express themselves.  Valleys shout for joy, the desert lifts up its voice, trees clap their hands, all flesh worships.  In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the Pharisees that if his disciples are silent, stones will shout, and in his letter to the Romans, Paul says that all of creation has been groaning in labor pains.  Do the biblical writers really mean that these nonhuman entities in nature can express themselves, or are the passages mere metaphor?  Middleton cites biblical scholars arguing both positions, and he reports approvingly of St. Francis asserting that Earth can indeed cry out.

But that leads to a next question: Is Earth conscious?  Middleton reviews several schools of thought going back to Plato, including panpsychism, the Gaia theory, ecopsychology, and animism that have addressed the question.  After presenting a few dissenting voices, and without agreeing with any of the schools that attribute consciousness to Earth, he concludes: “One of the primary desires of panpsychists, Gaia theorists, ecopsychologists, Indigenous communities, and animists of all stripes—not to mention biblical authors and Pope Franicis—is to relate to the Earth in a caring and sustainable way, and only secondarily to affirm any special beliefs about the Earth.” (p 35)

Ecological ethicists and ecotheologians have traditionally tried to apply reason to articulate ethical ways humanity can relate to our planet.  Middleton cites a number of scholars who are concluding that we have moved beyond such ways of thinking, because the calamities humanity is inflicting on Earth go beyond rational comprehension.  How can we think rationally about the sixth era of mass extinction of species that we are entering?  Its scale is beyond what we can imagine.  Reading these passages in Witnessing a Wounded World, I thought of the massive flood that recently struck Nepal and Tibet.  It is even beyond this level of injury to our planet that brings Middleton to invoke the idea of trauma to characterize what is happening to our planet.  Wondering then how God is experiencing the harm being inflicted on our planet, Middleton returns again to the Christian Bible, which tells us of the divine sharing in the trauma of human lives through the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, through the violence committed against Jesus’ body.  Jesus expressed his anguish in, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Can we hear creation calling out in the same anguish?

Middleton’s third chapter outlines his belief that theologians of trauma should expand their scope beyond the trauma humans experience to embrace our traumatized physical environment.  Just as people are traumatized when they are seriously violated, “We are witnessing the violation of the integrity of creation,” to quote Serene Jones (recently retired as president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City), who has written extensively about trauma and grace.  Middleton cites researchers, for example, who study trauma and have now been able to discern PTSD in elephants.  Drawing threads together, he also notes the large percentage of New Orleans residents who lived with PTSD long after Hurricane Katrina struck, and he wonders at the lasting injury the storm did to environment.  The hurricane was a natural event, but there are other injuries inflicted on Earth by human-caused climate change and destruction of biodiversity.

Middleton draws on Shelly Rambo and Karen O’Donnell to characterize human trauma through three ruptures: in communication, to the flesh, and in time.  Human survivors of trauma often cannot communicate the violence they have experienced; it is “beyond both cognition and language.” (p 5) Although not all human trauma involves physical injury, that is the most usual way that a person is violated, inducing trauma.  This is the rupture of the flesh.  The rupture of time concerns the fact that, while lesser injuries heal and can be relegated to the past, the violation that induces trauma lasts with the survivor a lifetime through flashbacks and nightmares.  In the last three chapters, Middleton considers how each of the three ruptures is happening to creation, and he suggests how theologies of trauma can address them.

Doctors, psychiatrists, and others in the healing professions help people recover from their wounds.  Folks who minister to survivors of trauma recognize that a feature of trauma is that a part of a survivor will not heal, so ministering entails accompanying the survivor in the trauma, staying with the survivor, bearing witness to the on-going suffering.  Middleton cites numerous trauma theologians who reflect on the wounded Christ as bearing divine witness to human trauma.  One theologian calls this the divine co-suffering with humans.  There is great tension in the theology of trauma, however, because on the one hand, merely co-suffering can seem futile, while on the other, rushing to seek a solution to the trauma can leave a victim who remains traumatized feel unworthy for not being healed.  Setting aside for a moment that Witnessing a Wounded World goes beyond human trauma to consider the possibility of ecological trauma, I found the book a good introduction to the nuances of trauma, to the field of trauma studies, and to approaches of ministering to trauma, areas about which I know little.

Chapter five, “Rupture of Flesh,” asks us to consider what it means that the divine became flesh in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.  Our human flesh is made of star dust, just as is everything else on Earth.  Can we say, then, that Christ shares in the “flesh” of all creation?  And if so, to what extent then is Christ sharing in the wounding of the world, as Christ in the crucifixion shared in the wounding of human bodies by a brutal empire?  The biblical witness is clear that Christ shares in human suffering.  To what extent does the biblical witness conclude that Christ is sharing in the suffering of all creation?  As with the other questions that Middleton explores, he cites an impressive number of scholars who are delving into these questions.  The bibliography to the book is impressive.

The last chapter, “Rupture of Time,” draws on the parallels between the lifetime trauma of survivors and the fact that much of the injury humanity is inflicting on Earth, in this era many now call the Anthropocene, will be with our planet as long as it exists.  A noteworthy portion of this chapter concerns how we conceive of resurrection.  Are the wounds to the living body somehow eliminated in the resurrection? Or are the wounds a feature of the resurrected body? Middleton notes that Martin Luther had trouble conceiving of Christ’s wounds still being present in Christ’s resurrection body, because Luther associated wounds with sin.  Similarly, John Calvin believed it would have been better had Thomas, the disciple, simply believed that Christ was resurrected, because Calvin wanted Christ’s resurrected body to be a kind of perfection of the flesh.  But the biblical witness tells us that Christ’s resurrected body still included the wounds to his hands and side, and that Thomas was able to put his fingers in those wounds and thereby believe.  Those wounds are the physical signs of the trauma Jesus endured in the crucifixion.  They are a feature of the resurrected and ascended body of Christ.  Those wounds are permanent, as are the wounds humanity is inflicting on Earth.

With those thoughts in mind, I call attention to the 1986 painting by Mark Tansey on the cover of Witnessing a Wounded World.  It is called “Doubting Thomas.”  It shows a man kneeling and putting his hand in a crack in the pavement, a rupture to Earth’s surface that extends up the cliff behind the car.  Middleton calls Christians, even as we work to reduce the irreparable injury we are causing to Earth, to bear witness to the trauma we have inflicted on our planet.  Without specifying rubrics, he encourages us to bear that witness in the eucharist, in which the bread and wine, broken elements derived from nature, are re-assembled as nonidentical repetitions of a trauma that occurred 2,000 years ago.  They can also be re-assembled, nonidentical re-enactments of the wounding of our world.

Witnessing a Wounded World is not easy to read, but it is a worthy to read for anyone who is troubled by the realization that collectively we humans have waited too long to try to avert disaster. Perhaps by collective action we can keep things from being even worse in the future, but many of the calamities that lie ahead have already been put in motion.  We read in the news of trauma our fellow humans have sustained this year by floods and other climate-related events, and next year promises to be worse.  Witnessing a Wounded World informs us not only of how to bear witness to the traumas people are experiencing but also to bear witness to the trauma being experienced by trees, birds, rivers, glaciers, and other entities in the beautiful creation we share with them.

Fredric L. Quivik