Sallie McFague: Collected Readings

17. God and the World

17 God and the World It may seem odd to conclude this series of excerpts from Life Abundant with a selection that argues “If reality is defined by God, it makes sense to begin with God.” But this spiraling backward through this material—McFague’s most extended systematic work outside of The Body of God—sets up well the final three chapters of this anthology, which represent McFague’s most recent thoughts on God, anthropology, and the God-world relationship. “Beginning with God,” then, can mean here to return to the essence of reality, to step back from the ideas about Jesus and of human existence to reassess our assumptions about God—assumptions that, as seen in the early chapters on metaphor and models, are always shaped through human experience. But such reassessment also means confronting other dimensions of contemporary reality, including the economic and ecological models that prevail yet tell a false story about God and the world. Source: 2001:135–51 Beginning with God So, where should we begin—with God, with Christ, or with ourselves? Where can we start finding out what it means to live in reality as defined by love? John Calvin put the issue bluntly when he noted that we could start with either God or ourselves, but we had best start with God lest by beginning with ourselves, we overestimate our importance. Not bad advice. If reality is defined by God, it makes sense to begin with God: we are less likely, as Calvin suggests, to go astray. But how can we? What do we know of God? How can we know God—reality—is love? Many have insisted that we do not and cannot know God: hence, we must start with the revelation of God in Christ—here we learn who God truly is. The difficulty with this advice is that “revelation” 211 for Christians usually means the Bible, and the Bible is a collection of peoples’ experiences of God. So, we are back to ourselves and our own experience. Or, are we? One of the oldest and most abiding insights of the Christian tradition is that everything is from God, even our experiences of God’s love. These too are gifts, not human works; all knowledge of God, whether “natural” or “revealed” is from God’s initiative, God’s grace. We can only know God because God makes this possible for us. We were created to know God: intimacy with God is part of our birthright—it comes with our creation, so to speak. In one sense, then, it does not matter where we begin—whether with God, Christ, or ourselves, we are always beginning with God. But how we begin with God does matter. Dorothee Soelle says, “We can only speak about God when we speak to God.”1 What she means is that prayer precedes theology; being in relationship with God (acknowledging this as one’s actual state) comes before the conceptual, systematic task of talking about God. She is not claiming that we must each have mystical experiences of God or even affirm the “existence” of God; rather, we must, as many other liberation theologians have also claimed, acknowledge the presence of God in the world. What does this mean? Many things to many people, surely, but at base I believe it means becoming aware that reality is good. It came to me through nature: a sense of unity with the natural world, of give and take with it, of pulsating life of which I and everything else is a part. I felt I belonged and I gradually came to name this sense of belonging as God’s love. Nature was the route by which I came to knowledge of God’s presence in the world—or, more accurately, the existence of everything within divine love. There are many other routes. Since, for the Christian, God is always incarnate and present, there is no place on earth, no joy or wish that any creature experiences, no need or despair that they suffer, that is not a possible route to God. Wherever reality is seen as hopeful, joyful, and loving, God is there; whenever reality is experienced as despairing, cruel, and hopeless, God must be there also. If God is love, then where love is, God is; where love is not, God must needs be. In nature’s health and beauty, I see God; in nature’s deterioration and destruction, I see that God is here also. In the...