Sallie McFague

Sallie McFague (May 25, 1933 – November 15, 2019 She was deeply influenced by Gordon Kaufman.

McFague was Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology, British Columbia, Canada. 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.

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 on November 15, 2019. but a multiplicity of images, or metaphors, can and should enhance and enrich our models of God. Most importantly, new metaphors can help give substance to new ways of conceiving God appropriately "for our time", And such images are usually not neutral: in McFague's understanding (and that of many feminist theologians), images of God are usually embedded within a particular socio-cultural and political system, such as the patriarchal one feminist theology critiques extensively - she asserted that "there are personal, relational models which have been suppressed in the Christian tradition because of their social and political consequences". ), in her search for models 'appropriate' to our needs. She stressed that all models are partial, and are thought-experiments with shortcomings: many are needed, and need to function together. Her work on God as mother, for example, stressed that God is beyond male and female, recognizing twin dangers: exaggeration of the maternal qualities of the mother so as to unhelpfully essentialize God (and by transference, women as well) as caring and self-sacrificing; or juxtaposition of this image to that of father, unhelpfully emphasizing the gender-based nature of both male and female images for God. Nonetheless, she saw in it other connotations, which she maintained are helpful in re-imaging God in terms of the mother metaphor.

In particular, God as mother is associated with the beginning of life, its nurture, and its fulfilment. These associations allowed McFague to explore how creation of the cosmos as something 'bodied forth' from God preserves a much more intimate connection between creator and created than the traditional model whereby the world is created ex nihilo and sustained by a God distanced and separate from the creation. However, this same 'mother' who 'bodies forth' the cosmos cares for it with a fierce justice, which demands that all life (not just humankind) has its share of the creator's care and sustenance in a just, ecological economy where all her creatures flourish. For McFague, God is the one 'who judges those who thwart the well-being and fulfilment of her body, our world'. ), and so salvation is about salvation of all earthly bodies (not just human ones) and first and foremost about living better on the earth, not in the hereafter. Elaborating further, McFague argued that sin, on this view, is a matter of offence against other parts of the 'body' (other species or parts of the creation) and in that sense only against God, while eschatology is about a better bodily future ('creation is the place of salvation, salvation is the direction of creation' 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.

McFague defended her approach as simply being about a refocusing, a 'turn of the eyes of theologians away from heaven and towards the earth'. Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1975) Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1987) Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Searching for a New Framework). Minneapolis: Fortress Press (2000) A New Climate for Theology: God, the World and Global Warming. Minneapolis: Fortress Press (2008 Blessed are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint. Minneapolis: Fortress Press (2013) A New Climate for Christology: Kenosis, Climate Change, and Befriending Nature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press (2021)