Sin and Deification

While the deification view may at first glance appear to take sin and evil less seriously than the atonement view, it actually takes them more seriously. It views them not simply as individual failings for which human beings need forgiveness, but rather as all the forces - individual, systematic, institutional - that thwart the flourishing of God's creation. "Sin" is not mainly or only a personal problem, the solution for which is divine forgiveness. Rather, sin is living a lie, living contrary to the way the christic lens tells us is God's desire for all of us. "Evil", in this understanding, is to collective term for the ancient, intricate and pervasive networks of false living that have accumulated during human history.
Sallie McFague, Life Abundant, p. 185-186.

I think this understanding of sin and its relation to salvation has a lot of potential. McFague is here not actually dealing with sin in particular, and maybe it should be worked out a bit more. But I think a reading of the eastern fathers, for whom deification was the obvious way to understand salvation, would prove that McFague's interpretation is sound. They tend to use the tricky term "nature" to describe what is corrupted, but it would certainly be wrong to reduce this term to biology as we perhaps tend to do. History certainly place a great part in creating human nature.

Conventional Theology

In conventional theology Jesus Christ takes the sins of the entire world - past, present and future - upon himself. Through his sacrificial death he achieves forgiveness for all sins; through his resurrection we are assured of eternal life. Since Jesus Christ is "fully God and fully human", the second person of the trinity, according to the orthodox position he can accomplish redemption: as God he has the power to do so and as man he stands for and includes all human beings in his saving death and life-giving resurrection. ....
Personally, I have never been able to believe it.
Sallie McFague: Life Abundant, p. 157-158.

Almost had you going there, eh? According to McFague this is a theology that today, for North-American Middle-class Christians, is "not believeable and bad theology". It does not correspond to today's understanding of reality. This kind of theology, she says, puts the "offense of Christ in the wrong place", that is, it makes faith about a conflict with science rather than with a conflict with a sinful way of life.

It is bad theology only from our particular perspective of course. It is bad because in this kind of Christology "Jesus does it all". It does not engage us in creation, it does not motivate us to get involved in the "project in which we join God in Christ to help all creature's flourish".

Radically Dependent

We need, then, first of all to reconceive ourselves. We need to think differently about who we are. The eighteenth-century individual, isolated from other people except through contracts and from nature except as the resource base from which to amass wealth, is false according to the picture of reality current in our time. The postmodern picture sees us as part and parcel of the earth, not only as dependent on it and its processes but since we are high on the food chain, as radically dependent. ... We are simply not who the reigning economic model says we are, so says our current story. We may be greedy, but more basically, we are needy, terribly needy.
Sallie McFague: Life Abundant, p. 102.

This book as actually rather brilliant. So far, McFague has given an analysis of the current economic model and how it is unable to provide humans with true fulfilment, and how it is responsible for the sorry state of planet earth. Even if I am not sure about the use of that term postmodern (is there anything this word cannot mean??!?) I think she is very right in saying that those that advocate free-market capitalism today are living in yesterdays world. Too bad they still hold the power.

I really look forward to the theological chapters that make up the second half of this book.

Liberating Theology

Let us look at this rather unattractive suggestion more carefully. It is unattractive because it is not like other liberation theologies. Other liberation theologies arise from the cries of the oppressed; but we are not oppressed. This theology will not liberate North Americans from chains of oppression (except, of course, the chains of consumerism!); rather, it implies that we are the oppressors and must, if we are Christians, liberate others from our domination. That is, a liberation theology for us North American Christians should be based on a cruciform lifestyle, expressing and embodying a way of life that will be liberating to others.
Sallie McFague: Life Abundant, p. 34.

First, I have to note that see anything in this paragraph that does not apply to North Europeans as well as Americans. It is perhaps a matter of difference in scale, certainly not in attitude.

Second, I think that even if I agree in general notion that a contextual theology for the Western World should be primarily about liberating the others (bringing freedom to the Middle East, for example, should primarily be about giving them freedom from us), there are some problems with this notion as well. On the one hand I think consumerism is only one of the things we actually need to be liberated. We need to be liberated from our belief in that our leaders are basically morally good and want what's best for us. We need to be liberated from the notion that competition in any area of life produces the best results (it brings out the alternative that is best at competing, nothing else), among other things. So even if the end result is the same, a western liberation theology should also be about liberating us, not only the others.

But a more difficult problem is that notion that the purpose of a western liberation theology is to liberate others risk falling in line with the age-old western belief that it is our purpose to help (read: civilize, Christianize, democratize... colonize), the rest of the world. There is an inherent belief in the supremacy of the White man contained in it. Of course this is not what McFague is intending, but it is still worth noting that liberation must come from within, not from without.

(Yes I chose this book (thanks, Chris!), but I still will chose one more, probably Hart...)