Sallie McFague

The language of theology

For McFague, the language of Christian theology is necessarily a construction, a human creation, a tool to delineate as best we can the nature and limits of our understanding of God. According to McFague, what we know of God is a construction, and must be understood as interpretation: God as father, as shepherd, as friend, but not literally any of these. Though such habits of language can be useful (since, in the Western world at least, people are more used to thinking of God in personal than in abstract terms), they become constricting when there is an insistence that God is always and only (or predominantly) like this.

Metaphor as a way of speaking about God

McFague remarks, ‘theology is mostly fiction’, but a multiplicity of images, or metaphors, can and should enhance and enrich our models of God. Most importantly, new metaphors can help give substance to new ways of conceiving God appropriately ‘for our time’, and more adequate models for the ethically urgent tasks humankind faces, principally the task of caring for an ecologically fragile planet.

McFague remarks that: ‘we construct the worlds we inhabit, but also that we forget we have done so’. In this light, her work is rightly understood as about ‘helping to unmask simplistic, absolutist, notions of objectivity’ in relation to the claims language makes about God. And such images are usually not neutral: in McFague’s understanding (and that of many feminist theologians), images of God are usually embedded within a particular socio-cultural and political system, such as the patriarchal one feminist theology critiques extensively - she asserts that ‘there are personal, relational models which have been suppressed in the Christian tradition because of their social and political consequences’. But the 'trick' of a successful metaphor, whether in science or theology, is that it is capable of generating a model, which in turn can give life to an overarching concept or world-view, which looks like a coherent explanation of everything – looks like ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. In McFague’s view, this is how the complex of ‘male’ images for God has long functioned in the Christian West – but it has done so in a way that is oppressive for all but (privileged) men. So, the notion of God as 'father', 'lord' or 'king' now seemingly unavoidably conjures up oppressive associations of ‘ownership’, obedience and dependency, and in turn dictates, consciously or otherwise, a whole complex of attitudes, responses and behaviours on the part of theistic believers.

Analysis – the nature and activity of God in McFague’s thought

McFague’s panentheistic theology stresses God as highly involved in the world (though distinct from it), and concerned (as seen in the life of the paradigmatic Jesus, for example) to see all of it brought to full enjoyment of the richness of life as originally intended in creation. This is not the omnipotent, omniscient and immutable God of classical theism and neo-orthodoxy: for McFague, God is not transcendent in any sense that we can know. This has led some critics to ask whether McFague’s theology leaves us with anything that may properly be called God at all. British theologian Daphne Hampson notes ‘the more I ponder this book [Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age], the less clear I am that it is theistic’.

A theology where God as creator does not stand ‘over against’ the creation tends to shift the focus away from God as personal. In which Jesus is a paradigm individual rather than the unique bearer of godlikeness. The role of the Spirit is emphasised in her theology, though there is little sense in which this is uniquely the spirit of Jesus. God as Spirit is not primarily the initiator of creation, but ‘the empowering, continuing breath of life’.

It follows, too, from this metaphor of God as involved in the world that traditional notions of sin and evil are discarded. God is so much part of the process of the world and its agencies’ or entities’ ‘becoming’ that it is difficult to speak of ‘natural disasters’ as sin: they are simply the chance (as viewed by human observers) trial-and-error ways in which the world develops. As McFague sees it, ‘within this enlarged perspective, we can no longer consider evil only in terms of what benefits or hurts me or my species. In a world as large, as complex, and with as many individuals and species as our planet has, the good of some will inevitably occur at the expense of others’. And because the world is God’s body, evil occurs in and to God as well as to us and the rest of creation.

Correspondingly, the notion of the individual in need of God’s salvation is anachronistic in a world ‘from’ which that individual no longer need to be saved, but rather ‘in’ which he or she need to learn how to live interrelatedly and interdependently. Redemption is downplayed, though not excluded: McFague emphasises, characteristically, that it ‘should include all dimensions of creation, not just human beings’ and that it is a fulfilment of that creation, not a rescue from it. This of course brings about a radical shift in the significance of the cross and resurrection of Jesus, whose resurrection is primarily if not exclusively a validation of continued human embodiment. There is, too, an insistence on realised, not final, eschatology. The earth becomes the place ‘where we put down our roots’, and we live with ‘the hope against hope’ that all will participate in the resurrection of all bodies. However, God is presently and permanently with humankind: we are ‘within the body of God whether we live or die’.

Criticism

Trevor Hart, a theologian from the Barthian tradition, within which McFague herself situated her early work, claims her approach, while it seeks to develop images that resonate with ‘contemporary experiences of relatedness to God’, shows her to be ‘cutting herself loose from the moorings of Scripture and tradition’ and appealing only to experience and credibility as her guides. Human constructions determine what she will say about God – her work is mere anthropologising. The lack of a transcendent element to her work is criticised by David Fergusson as ‘fixed on a post-Christian trajectory’.

McFague defends her approach as simply being about a refocusing, a ‘turn of the eyes of theologians away from heaven and towards the earth’. She insists on a relevant theology, ‘a better portrait of Christian faith for our day’, and reminds us that her approach is not intended as a blueprint, but a sketch for a change in attitude. It remains to be seen whether the disclosive power of such a shift in emphasis will be tested, and can successfully influence Christians’ approach to caring for the earth and all its inhabitants.