Surviving God: A New Vision of God through the Eyes of Sexual Abuse Survivors
Reviewed by Windy Cooler
August 1, 2024
By Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw. Broadleaf Books, 2024. 244 pages. $19.99/paperback; $17.99/eBook.
It is a provocative title for most religious traditions: Surviving God: A New Vision of God through the Eyes of Sexual Abuse Survivors. I immediately thought of the choice as a type of “chutzpah,” or the “spiritual audacity” referred to by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis as that which enabled one to argue with God—virtuously, as did Moses and Job. Through the lens of Quaker theology, this book can be said to be a spiritually audacious argument with God or with the Divine within each of us. But on its own terms—through its self-identified lens of process theology—it is actually an argument that God is not to be survived as one who opposes us. God is not the perpetrator or enabler of abuse that many of us have learned through a patriarchal church but a survivor accompanying each survivor of sexual abuse in this same church.
Process theology emphasizes a sense that the world and God, together in all things, are “becoming,” a concept that is close to the Quaker belief in continuing revelation—our theology of the Divine within us interacting with us to reveal new truth. Authors Grace Ji-Sun Kim (a Presbyterian) and Susan Shaw (a member of the United Church of Christ) tell us that through process theology we can see how metaphors for God have shaped our experience of God. They write:
[I]f we only use male images of God, we begin to think of God as male. If we think of God as male, we can accept patriarchy as a God-ordained system. If we think of God as Master, we may think of slavery as an institution of God’s will.
But what if we think of God as a mother? What if we think of God as a survivor? Is there anything stopping us from finding new empowering metaphors?
Kim and Shaw invite us into stories of sexual assault throughout the Bible, offering new interpretations. They admit that as deeply religious children and as survivors themselves, they had once accepted or ignored patriarchal violence but have found new ways to be in relationship with the text. They notice where Dinah, Tamar, Bathsheba, Hagar, and Vashti disappear and where each can be found to have agency that we did not hear of in Sunday school. God was with them, Kim and Shaw assure us, and God is with us, too.
Numerous testimonies of survivors grappling with their experiences of violence are interspersed with biblical scholarship and the creation of new metaphors for the God we encounter in Scripture. The authors have chosen to name themselves in the same style as any other survivor: giving testimony, writing from experience and scholarship.
Kim often writes of their new way of creating metaphors by relying on her Korean heritage with concepts like jeong, a kind of social responsibility:
It was the Relational God who reaches out to us in our times of suffering and pain and embraces us with love. It was the sticky love, like jeong, which suddenly enfolded my entire body to give me an assurance that God is with me. God is with me in happiness and also in much pain and sorrow.
In what may be the most provocative observation of the book, Kim and Shaw argue that Jesus would have been sexually violated, as was commonplace, before crucifixion. Shaw writes of her process for researching Surviving God:
In all my years in church, in seminary, in teaching religion, no one ever suggested to me that Jesus had experienced sexual abuse and sexual assault. The first I heard of this was when I started researching this book and read the historical scholarship on crucifixion. Realizing that Roman soldiers in all likelihood sexually assaulted Jesus was like a gut punch. My sorrow for the beaten, battered, crucified, and sexually assaulted Jesus nearly overwhelmed me. He had suffered the humiliation and trauma of sexual abuse amid his torture, and I felt a new kind of grief for him . . . and another layer of anger at what the church had covered up.
With this understanding of the Christian narrative, God is literally a survivor who can be with us in relationship as we engage in the hard work of surviving and, as Kim and Shaw tell us in their final chapter, discover joy.
Despite neither author being Quaker, Surviving God is relevant to Quakers. Having spent a decade in ministry addressing domestic and sexual violence in Quaker communities, I believe this book is for us. Many Quaker meetings are slowly adopting practices to prevent abuse, but survivor stories remain taboo. The question often is about why we would have to revisit a past that is hard and which may make some of us feel defensive. Surviving God, from the perspective of continuing revelation, invites us to find the Divine within ourselves and to accompany and thrive with our Friends, not as survivors of our meetings but as co-survivors and thrivers.
To prevent sexual violence, we must first acknowledge its presence in our lives. Kim and Shaw have done a brilliant job of laying out the conceptual framework for how we might engage in that process by remembering Eve and remembering Jesus, remembering themselves, and remembering the experiences of survivors who participated in the building of this tender, prophetic, and healing book.
Windy Cooler, a member of Sandy Spring (Md.) Meeting, has been the convener of Life and Power, a discernment project on abuse in the Quaker community, for two years. This listening project provided one-on-one reflective support for almost 40 Friends. A “common testimony” and invitation to corporate discernment on the topic will be widely available to meetings in 2024.
