Sallie McFague

McFague was born May 25, 1933 in Quincy, Massachusetts. Her father, Maurice Graeme McFague, was an optometrist. Her mother, Jessie Reid McFague, was a homemaker. She had one sister, Maurine (born 1929). McFague earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 1955 from Smith College, and a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School in 1959. She then went on to earn a Master of Arts degree at Yale University in 1960 and was awarded her PhD in 1964 – a revised version of her doctoral thesis being published in 1966 as Literature and the Christian Life. She received the LittD from Smith College in 1977.

At Yale, she was deeply influenced by the dialectical theology of Karl Barth, but gained an important new perspective from her teacher H. Richard Niebuhr, with his appreciation of liberalism's concern for experience, relativity, the symbolic imagination and the role of the affections.[3] She was deeply influenced by Gordon Kaufman.

Sallie McFague was Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology, British Columbia, Canada.[2] She was also Theologian in Residence at Dunbar Ryerson United Church in Vancouver, British Columbia. For thirty years, she taught at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was the Carpenter Professor of Theology. She was a member of the Anglican Church of Canada.[1]

McFague married Eugene TeSelle in 1959. They had two children, Elizabeth (born 1962) and John (born 1964). They were divorced in 1976. McFague later married Janet Cawley, and they were together until McFague's death.

She died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on November 15, 2019.[2]

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[4]), they become constricting when there is an insistence that God is always and only (or predominantly) like this.

This understanding of the shifting nature of language in relation to God underpins McFague's handling of the 'building blocks' that have long been considered foundational to accounts of belief, primarily Scripture and tradition. But neither is privileged as a source of conversation about God for McFague - both ‘fall under experience’,[9] and are, in their different ways, themselves extended metaphors of interpretation or ‘sedimentations’ of a linguistic community's interpreted experience’. The experience of Jesus - his parables, table fellowship and healing ministry in particular - makes him a rich source of the ‘destabilising, inclusive and non-hierarchical’ metaphors Christians might profitably borrow from him as paradigmatic, a ‘foundational figure’.[10] But he is not all they need. Experience of the world, and of God's relationship to it, must add to that illustration and re-interpret it in terms and metaphors relevant to those believers, changing how they conceive of God and thus care for the earth. As McFague remarked: ‘we take what we need from Jesus using clues and hints…for an interpretation of salvation in our time’.[11]

McFague's panentheistic theology stressed 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’.[20]

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 emphasized 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’.[21]

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 saw 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".[22] And because the world is God's body, evil occurs in and to God as well as to us and the rest of creation.[23]

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 emphasized, 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.[8] 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 realized, not final, eschatology. The earth becomes the place ‘where we put down our roots’,[24] and we live with ‘the hope against hope’[25] 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’.[23]

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’,[26] 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 anthropologizing.[27] The lack of a transcendent element to her work is criticized by David Fergusson as ‘fixed on a post-Christian trajectory’.[28]

McFague defended her approach as simply being about a refocusing, a ‘turn of the eyes of theologians away from heaven and towards the earth’.[8] She insisted on a relevant theology, ‘a better portrait of Christian faith for our day’,[29] and reminded us that her approach was not intended as a blueprint, but a sketch for a change in attitude.[30] 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.

Literature and the Christian Life. Yale: Yale University Press (1966) [31]

Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1975) [31]

Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1982) [32]

Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1987) [33]

The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press (1993) [34]

Super, Natural Christians: How we should love nature. London: SCM (1997) [35]

Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Searching for a New Framework). Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress (2000) [36]

A New Climate for Theology: God, the World and Global Warming. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress (2008) [37]

Blessed are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint. Minneapolis: Fortress Press (2013)