A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming

A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming. By Sallie McFague. Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2008. 198 pp. $20.00 (paper). Global warming is arguably the most pressing concern of our time. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by human use of fossil fuel is heating up the planet to the extent that the complexity and beauty of life as we know it is now seriouslv threatened. Global warming also presents us with serious concerns of social and economic justice, People living in the poorer Southern hemisphere are disproportionately affected by the heating up of the planet for which rich countries in the north are mainly to blame. Yet while ecological dieologians have addressed the ills of environmental degradation, Uiey llave been remarkably slow to write a comprehensive theological response to climate change. For this reason, Sallie McFague s new book is a welcome resource for lay people as well as those working in churches, seminaries, and college education. McFague, who is the Distinguished Theologian in Residence at Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia and the Carpenter Professor of Theology Emeritus at Vanderbilt Divinity School, has written extensively about the relationship between Christian faith and the environment. Central to her many publications is the sense that theology matters, that the way we, as Christians, envision God, the world, and ourselves shapes the way we feel permitted and/or obligated to act. Thus in her important 1993 book The Body of God: An Ecological Theology, McFague argued that viewing the world as Gods body would make us treat the rest of the world with reverence. In A Neiv Climate for Theology, she insists that in order to inspire changes to our high-consumption, fossil fuel-driven lifestyles we need to start seeing ourselves as inextricably part of the natural or planetary community. A New Climate for Theology has four parts. Part 1 takes up the challenge of laying out the basic scientific understanding of climate change (chap. 1 ) and of explaining why it is a concern for Christianity (chap. 2). McFague s sketch of the main scientific findings on global wanning is rather cursory and, hence, will most likely disappoint readers interested in a more in-depdi treatment of climate change or in the connection between global warming and social and economic justice. Nor does McFague address readers who are not yet convinced chinate change is real and caused by humans. She simply assumes (erroneously?) that most people by now have awakened to the threat of climate change. Yet McFague's brief summary of die science of global warming does make a strong moral case for why we should care about it, a case which is further elaborated from a Christian theological point of view in chapter 2. Part 2 of the book unfolds McFague's central dieological project of rediinking who we are in the scheme of things. Chapter 3 argues in favor of a paradigm shift from an mdividualistic to an ecological antiiropology. Drawing mainly on die natural sciences, McFague urges her readers to start seeing themselves as interconnected with and radically dependent on the rest of nature, while at the same time being increasingly responsi I)Ie for the others in creation (p. …

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