Blessed Are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint by Sallie McFague

Blessed Are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint

Sallie McFague

Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013. 225 pp. $24.00

Sallie McFague’s Blessed Are the Consumers provides readers with a wealth of new insights and new wine—theological creativity that transforms tradition—for new wineskins—contemporary Christians (laity and clergy, theologians, and people in the pew), and 21st-century churches and seminaries. McFague, Distinguished Theologian in Residence at Vancouver School of Theology, British Columbia, previously authored, among other books, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Augsburg Fortress, 1993), and A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Fortress, 2008).

In Blessed Are the Consumers, McFague picks up and deepens her thought on several themes elaborated in earlier work: the metaphor of Earth and all creation as God’s Body, the ongoing devastating impacts of global warming, the imperative of economic justice for all, and an exploration of what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century in a science-permeated, capitalism-corrupted, and ecologically endangered world, where traditional Christian theology is viewed increasingly by Christians and others as irrelevant. She focuses on two crises, ecological and economic, that threaten human communities’ socioeconomic well-being and the very survival of Earth and all of Earth’s living creatures. Creation and community are endangered and a new theological paradigm and the concrete action it promotes are needed. McFague suggests that kenotic theology provides this paradigm. Its biblical origin is Paul’s statement about kenosis, God’s self-emptying:

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. (Phil 2:4–8)

God, she states, “looked to the interests of others” and became visibly incarnate in Jesus. Elsewhere, Paul says that we see “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). Because of Christians’ faith in who Jesus is, Christian theology should begin with incarnation instead of creation in order to discern who God is and who we are. Jesus, who surrendered his will to God’s will in order to serve others, reveals both something about who God is—one who empties divine being the better to serve the world—and who we should be as “images of God” called to serve the world and each other.

McFague suggests that Christians reading the Good Samaritan story should see God, not us, as the Good Samaritan; we are the beaten and robbed man in the ditch. God will help us, just as the Samaritan helped the victim—as evidenced by God’s kenosis. God loves and is solicitous about the world and all in the world. God is incarnate in all creation, but not limited by creation. God is immanent in God’s Body, but is more than (but not “above”) this embodiment.

McFague provides biosketches of three Christians whom she especially regards as saints, because they identified with the outcasts and poor of their time: John Woolman, 18th-century Quaker, “prophet of economics based on universal love,” who lived simply and opposed slavery; Simone Weil, “philosopher of paying attention to the other,” whose identification with the malnourished populace during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II led to her death by starvation; and Dorothy Day, “practitioner of public personalism” and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement during the Great Depression. McFague declares that understanding theology and moral conduct is facilitated by knowing people in the tradition who have embodied compassion for others, more than by lists of principles and lofty moral exhortations. Her saints’ lives suggest the possibility that each of us, in our own way, can be converted to change our way of thinking and acting and care for and with the “least of these.” (Other lives of saints portray other-world-focused people whose lives are impossible to replicate in our own; usually, they are characterized by transcendence from Earth rather than engagement with and among Earth’s creatures.) McFague closes with suggestions about ways that people, much like her saints, might live a kenotic life personally, professionally, and publicly.

Blessed Are the Consumers makes an original contribution to theological and ecological thought. The book is repetitive in some places, but this may help readers unfamiliar with the ideas and concepts McFague explores as she advocates kenotic theology to promote Earth’s well-being and human thriving.