During the Lenten season we focus especially on confession and repentance, including repentance for evil done in our name. In her book Life Abundant the ecological theologian Sallie McFague discusses who we imagine is responsible for evil, if God’s reality is good.1
She writes, “One often hears in the aftermath of [natural disasters], ‘Why did God let this happen?’…The interesting point about these events, however, is that they are increasingly human-generated … not entirely natural, and certainly not from God.”
She argues that, “If one understands that belief in God is parallel to saying that reality is good, then God could never be actively involved in the death of people in a tornado or from starvation.” But she notes that we humans are increasingly implicated in these global tragedies: the evidence linking our behavior with climate change, deadly weather crises, and the loss of species is growing stronger, while “global starvation is a matter of unjust distribution…We can see the finger of blame pointing at ourselves.”
McFague concludes, “‘God’ is the belief that hope and not despair, life, not death, laughter, not tears, are deep in the nature of things…not the dominant part…We realize then that if we are to say that reality is good…we must help reality to be good…God in the world is both an illumination of hope and a call to heal the pain of the suffering world. The affirmation that reality is good means that God is with us and that we must therefore be with God. Divine incarnation combined with our response of prophetic action on the side of the oppressed is the way that we can say ‘Yes, reality is good.’”
1. Sallie McFague. Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril. Fortress Press, 2001, pp. 153-156.
