Sallie McFague: Collected Readings

13. The Christian Paradigm

13 The Christian Paradigm This selection from Models of God steps back into the world of parable and metaphor to explore how a metaphorical approach might change how we understand and practice Christian faith. The earlier exploration of Jesus’ parables is here put into service to set forth a new understanding of Jesus himself and of his ministry, focused particularly on those parables, his practice of table fellowship, and the cross, as “a paradigm of God’s relationship to the world.” For McFague, this reinterpretation of the faith is imperative, necessitated by the ecological sensibility that emphasizes interdependence rather than the triumphalist and hierarchal understandings that have marked Christian tradition. Source: 1987:45–57 The material norm of Christian faith involves a specification of what distinguishes this faith. It involves risking an interpretation of what, most basically, Christian faith is about. Such interpretation is, of course, not done in general or for all time; it is always a partial, limited account of the contours of the salvific power of God in a particular time in light of the paradigmatic figure Jesus of Nazareth. To see the story of Jesus as paradigmatic means to see it as illuminative and illustrative of basic characteristics of the Christian understanding of the God-world relationship. These characteristics are not known solely from that story nor exemplified only in it, but that story is a classic instance, embodying critical dimensions of the relationship between God and the world. A metaphorical theology . . . does not take the Christian constant, in either its formal or material mode, as the only source and resource for theology. The question as we approach the issue of the paradigmatic figure Jesus of Nazareth is not whether everything we need in order to do theology in our time can be generated from that figure but whether there are clues or hints here for an interpretation of salvation in our time. That is to say, are there distinguishing marks of the story of Jesus that are relevant to a holistic, nuclear age? If one understands the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth as a parable of 167 God’s relation to the world, and if to be a Christian means to be willing to look ‘“God-wards” through his story, then one is constrained to say in what ways that story is significant now.1 This will involve understanding the story differently from in the past, but, I believe, in a way that has “demonstrable continuities” with the past. My perspective on that story is similar to that of the so-called liberation theologies. Each of these theologies, from the standpoint of race, gender, class, or another basic human distinction, claims that the Christian gospel is opposed to oppression of some by others, opposed to hierarchies and dualisms, opposed to the domination of the weak by the powerful. These theologies, however, unlike the short-lived death-of-God or play theologies, are not just another fad; like other major revisions of the Christian paradigm, they are a new way of understanding the relationship between God and the world, a new way of interpreting what salvation means. These theologies are not marginal, strange, or even particularly novel enterprises, relevant only to the groups from which they emerge. Rather, they are in the classical tradition of fundamental reformulations of Christian faith, just like the theologies of Augustine, Luther, and Schleiermacher. In the case of each of these writers, something about the writer’s own experience did not fit with current understandings of Christianity: his experience presented an anomaly that could not be contained in the contemporary paradigm. A changed interpretation was imperative if the writer was to continue to identify himself as a Christian—and if Christian faith was to speak to the critical issues of the times. These theologians, however, believed they were interpreting Christianity not just for themselves or their own kind but for all. From a particular perspective came a universal claim. These two notes of fundamental revisionist interpretation—experience and universality—are present also in the liberation theologies. The experience of being oppressed by gender, race, or poverty does not limit the theology that emerges to women, people of color, or the poor. Rather, the particular experiences of oppression serve as glasses bringing into sharper focus what one asserts the heart of the gospel truly to be for one’s own time. There are important differences among the liberation theologies, but there are common notes as well, and they stand in...