Sallie McFague: Collected Readings

Introduction

Introduction David B. Lott Christian theology is the attempt to think about God and the world—who God is and who we are—in light of what the tradition has claimed in the past and what we must say in the present. Every Christian is a theologian; each of us has a theology. That is, each of us has a picture, a set of assumptions, usually not conscious, of how we think God and the world are related. And all of us can and do express through our words and actions who we think God is and who we think we are. These unconscious or implicit theologies are very powerful. They control many of our decisions and actions; we rely on them as justification for what we do personally and as a nation. Theology matters. –Sallie McFague (2008:5) Sallie McFague has spent the entirety of her long teaching and publishing career exploring the relationship between God and the world, showing us that theology indeed matters. This is, as she says, what theologians do. Yet, in McFague’s case, it has led her to explore how God and the world are inseparable from one another: how God is implicated as we seek to understand the world and how the world is revealed as God’s body. This fascinating exploration is traced in eight books, each of which represents a segment of a theological pilgrimage that begins in exploring the nature of theological language and is now culminating in an understanding of Christian discipleship as the practice of restraint. Using McFague’s own words, this volume follows her journey. It is an attempt to survey the terrain she explores, following her steps across an undiscovered landscape from one point to another. vii Reading Sallie McFague’s major books in order, from 1975’s Speaking in Parables to 2013’s Blessed Are the Consumers, is indeed like taking a trip with an eloquent, observant companion. In the preface to Life Abundant (2001), she writes, “I have written each of my books in an effort to make up for deficiencies in the last one.” These self-perceived deficiencies are surely apparent to the author in the way they are not to the reader, as her ever-probing mind is moving on to the next step in the journey, taking steps she did not foresee as she wrote each prior volume. The ostensibly freeform nature of this trek is hinted at in Super, Natural Christians (1997), where she suggests that the metaphor of the hike is a better one than that of the map to describe our relationship to the natural world. This same “hike” metaphor may also be applied to her theological project. As carefully crafted as each of her books is, there is no suggestion that she is employing some sort of theological GPS unit to plot a predetermined path. Nor is she content to stop in one place, as if each book were some final destination. Rather, all her writing continually asks, “Where to, next?” and immediately whisks the reader onto a new path, one continuous with what has been previously explored before, yet uncovering new and distinct terrain. McFague is not simply a companion or a guide; more than that, her writing demonstrates that she is a dedicated teacher, through and through. She repeats ideas in her books in order to instill them better within her readers. Stories and illustrations recur from volume to volume, often employed in very different ways from their original use. Like words shouted across a vast canyon, they echo back in varying tones, highlighting ideas and concepts one may not have heard before. Inasmuch as she describes her overall theological project as a “constructive” one, there is also a sense in which hers is also a practical theology, dedicated not so much to the arts of ministry, as the term is usually applied, but to “what we must say in the present” about God and the world, for the ways that speech serves “as justification for what we do personally and as a nation.” And, for McFague, this has meant considering how our understandings of God—including the language and metaphors we use to speak about God—shape how we regard the natural world and the human impact upon it, particularly in terms of environmental protection and thriving, nuclear arms, and economic justice. For this, she is one of the most essential North American Christian theologians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries...