Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril

Christian Century, Sept 26, 2001 by Paul H. Santmire

Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril. By Sallie McFague. Fortress, 251 pp., $18.00.

INSANITY HAS BEEN defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results each time. Why does nothing change when Christian preachers and teachers keep talking about ecological responsibility and social justice to congregations whose members love nature and care about the plight of the poor? Could it be that there is something fundamentally awry with the preaching and the teaching, on the one hand, and with the love and the care, on the other hand?

Sallie McFague believes that our planet is in such peril that doing the same thing over and over again is no longer acceptable. In this stunning volume, perhaps her best book in a line of distinguished studies (most recently: Metaphorical Theology, The Body of God and Super, Natural Christians), she argues insightfully that we must be liberated from both our economic and theological assumptions if we are truly to love nature and care for the poor.

This requires, in the first place, a radical critique of the neocapitalist worldview that we all take for granted because we all have bought into consumerism. Most of us, in fact, understand "life abundant" in terms of consumption, despite all our protestations against materialism and for faith. And consumerism, which presupposes the exploitation of both nature and the poor, is, in fact, the root of our world's evil.

McFague's learned discussion of "the contemporary economic model and worldview" is perhaps the single most important chapter of this lucidly written and tightly argued book. Her probing unearths what virtually all of us North American Christians believe much more deeply, passionately and constantly than the faith we proclaim.

Once we have grasped the pervasive and destructive power of the neocapitalist worldview, then, obviously, another worldview must take its place. Informed by a number of sophisticated, postcapitalist economic thinkers, McFague argues for an "ecological economic model and worldview." And "ecological economics begins with sustainability and distributive justice, not with the allocation of resources among competing individuals."

Ecological economics comprehends the Great Economy, the whole household (oikos) of the earth, the needs of nature and the poor included, which must no longer be regarded as "externalities." The ecological and economic worldview presupposes that we humans are primarily communal beings who become unique individuals through help from and response to others. The ecological and economic paradigm consists of sustainability, the capacity of the natural and social systems to survive together indefinitely, and justice, the promotion of mutual well-being through the sharing of resources.

What does theology have to do with all this? Theology, McFague believes, always exists within and in tension with a worldview. Speaking from her own postmodern standpoint as an affluent North American feminist, McFague proposes a theology meant to inculcate the core convictions of the Christian faith, with a call to sacrificial moral action and radical social transformation. Her reflections in this volume both summarize and helpfully expand, clarify and simplify a number of her earlier arguments. For those new to her writings Life Abundant is an excellent introduction to her thought.

The three concluding chapters lay out her substantive, trinitarian theological vision, driven by the commitment to change lives and institutions (praxis), not just to speak the truth (theoria). Her discussion of "God and the World" summarizes her, by now, signature teaching that the world is God's body. The world, in this sense, is the primary sacrament. McFague eschews both the excessive transcendentalism of classical theism and deism and the excessive immanentalism of classical pantheism, in favor of a metaphorically projected panentheisln. In her view, then, the command to love others as ourselves and nature, too, is as fundamental as the command to love God, because the whole creation is God's body.

In her discussion of "Christ and Salvation," McFague constructs what might be called an Abelardian Christology. For her, Christ is the chief and most compelling example of the general incarnation of God's love in the whole creation. She draws on some recent life-of-Jesus research to underline how the incarnate love of God in Jesus was predicated on the commitment to social transformation, especially for the sake of the poor. Faithful followers of Jesus and his self-giving love will, she tells us, themselves walk along the same self-giving, socially transformative road toward deification ("we are God incarnate"). That road she then further describes in terms of "Life in the Spirit," focusing especially on the exemplary, saintly lives of personal and social revolutionaries such as John Woolman and Dorothy Day.

Will this book gain the widespread hearing it deserves? Some theological ideologues will doubtless write it off as one more predictable product of the theological left. But most pastors who have been preaching and teaching love of nature and care for the poor to congregations predisposed so to love and so to care, yet seemingly to no avail, will surely want to give McFague's analysis a careful hearing.