O neing

A N A LT E R N AT I V E O R T H O D O X Y

The Universal Christ

and Climate Change
By Sallie McFague

S
imone Weil (1909–19 43) says that human beings are natu-
rally “cannibalistic”: they eat instead of looking, they devour
rather than paying attention, they consume other people and
the planet in their search for self-fulfillment. Augustine of Hippo
(354–430) claimed something similar in his understanding of sin:
voracious, lustful desire to have it all for oneself. From the twenty-
first-century ecological perspective, sin is refusing to share, refusing to
live in such a way that others—other people and other life-forms—can
also live. For us in our time, sin is refusing to live justly and sustain-
ably with all others on our planet.
This is not a new understanding of sin; rather, it is built upon
the traditional view that, as Augustine puts it, sin is “being curved in
upon oneself”1 rather than being open to God. In our ecological age,
we now see that “being open to God” means being open to the other
creatures upon whom we depend and who depend upon us. We
cannot love God unless we love God’s world. We do not meet God
only in Jesus of Nazareth, because God is also incarnate in our world

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as the universal Christ. Christians have always known this because
an incarnate God is a world-loving God, but now it takes on new
meaning and depth as we realize the radical interrelationship and
interdependence of all forms of life.
To love God by loving God’s world has meant different things to
different people in different times. For us, I suggest, it is epitomized by
climate change. Climate change is not just another social and political
issue facing us; rather, it sums up the central crisis of the twenty-first
century. Put simply, climate change is the result of too many human
beings using too much energy and taking up too much space on the
planet. Through excessive energy use and its accompanying green-
house-gas emissions, we are changing the planet’s climate in ways that
will make it uninhabitable for ourselves and many other species. This
excessive use is from both population and lifestyle; that is, at close to
seven billion human beings, the planet cannot sustain the high-energy
lifestyle that about twenty percent of us now enjoy and most of the
rest of the world wants to enjoy. “Environmentalism” is not simply
about maintaining green spaces in cities or national parks; rather, it is
the more basic issue of energy use on a finite planet.
Thus, space and energy, the basic physical needs of all creatures—a
place to live and grow and the energy to sustain life, day by day, is
the issue. The universal or cosmic Christ is with us as we deal with
these mundane issues of space and energy. Just as an earlier generation
faced the Second World War as the quintessential issue of their day,
so climate change is ours. During that war, people all over the world
mobilized, sacrificing their comfort and often their very lives in order
to avoid what they believed was a threat of disastrous proportions.
We are faced with another such threat—one, perhaps, even more dan-
gerous in terms of the long-term health of the planet, for it involves the
very basis of physical existence—space and energy, habitation and food,
clean air and arable land, a viable climate for the flourishing of life. But
we do not face this threat alone—the universal Christ is with us.
In other words, the crisis facing us is one of geography, one of
space and place and habitability. It is not about time and history and
human meaning; rather, it is physical, earthly, worldly, fleshly—the
basics of existence. Christianity has often focused on time, history,
and human meaning; for example, salvation has been understood to
be eternal existence in another world for individual human beings.
But, an incarnational Christianity, a Christianity that believes in an

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 A universal Christ,
who loves and inhabits the world
. . . is radically mundane

incarnate God—a universal Christ, who loves and inhabits the world—
is radically mundane. In my paraphrase of the wonderful words of
Irenaeus (140–202): “The glory of God is every creature fully alive.”2
It is not possible to imagine “every creature fully alive” on planet
earth in the twenty-first century. If we continue living as we have
been living—and if more people join the high-energy lifestyle of us
privileged ones—we are headed for disaster. Climate change is telling
us, loud and clear, that the size of our population and its increasingly
excessive energy use is raising the temperature of the planet to the
point where disastrous effects will occur: excruciating heat, the melt-
ing of glaciers and the rise of the oceans, violent storms, the loss of
arable land and clean water, the decline of biodiversity, the intensifica-
tion of diseases, the increase of wars fought over food and water, etc.
This is a strange “crisis” to face: It does not have the immediacy
of a war or plague or tsunami. Rather, it has to do with how we live on
a daily basis—the food we eat, the transportation we use, the size of
the house in which we live, the consumer goods we buy, the luxuries
we allow ourselves, the amount of long-distance air travel we permit
ourselves, and so forth. We are not being called to take up arms and
fight an enemy; rather, the enemy is the very ordinary life we ourselves
are leading as well-off North Americans. Yet, for all its presumed
innocence, this way of life, multiplied by billions of people, is both
unjust to those who cannot attain this lifestyle and destructive of the
very planet that supports us all.

W
h at, t hen, woul d be a personal, professional, and
public ethic for twenty-first-century people and espe-
cially for well-off, religious people? One of the distin-
guishing characteristics of many, perhaps most, religions is some
form of self-emptying. Often it takes the form of ego-lessness, the
attempt to open the self so that God can enter, or desire is diminished.

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 Whether in Buddhism, with the self’s release from desire by non-
attachment, or the Christian admonition that to find one’s life one
must lose it, religions are often countercultural in their various ethics
of self-denial in order that genuine fulfillment might occur. While, in
some religious traditions, such self-denial moves into asceticism and
life-denial, this is not usually the underlying assumption.
For example, in the Christian tradition, kenosis or self-emptying
is seen as constitutive of God’s being in creation, the incarnation, and
the cross. In creation, God limits the divine self, pulling in, so to speak,
to allow space for others to exist. God, who is the one in whom we
live and move and have our being, does not take all the space, but
gives space and life to others. In the incarnation, as Paul writes in
Philippians 2:7, God “emptied the divine self, taking the form of a
slave,” and in the cross God gives of the divine self without limit, to
side with the poor and the oppressed. Likewise, one understanding
of Christian discipleship is a “cruciform” life, imitating the self-giving
of Christ for others.
In some notable saints of the Christian tradition, this form of dis-
cipleship is clearly illustrated. Simone Weil, acutely conscious of her
starving French compatriots during the Second World War, spoke of
“de-creation,” a radical form of self-emptying that involved both body
and soul. John Woolman (1720–1772) had a dream in which he heard
the words “John Woolman is dead”3 in order that he might live a life of
total self-limitation as a protest against the excesses of his society made
possible by slavery. Dorothy Day (1897–1980), identifying totally with
the abject poverty of people in the ghettoes of New York City during
the Great Depression, lived an ethic of joyful sharing, a form of the
abundant life totally contrary to our consumer understanding.
The kenotic paradigm in these folks is not for the sake of asceticism
or self-flagellation. It is not a negative statement about the earth and

Could it be that the universal, cosmic Christ

can lead Christians to respond to
climate change by living in a
self-emptying
way?
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life; rather, it is the recognition that life’s flourishing on earth demands
certain limitations and sacrifices at physical and emotional levels. The
ego that demands everything for itself—honor, power, money—is the
same cannibalistic self that devours all the food and land. As St. Fran-
cis (1181/1182–1226) well knew, “possessionlessness” is a matter of
the spirit and the body: one cannot, he insisted, hold on to one’s sense
of superiority while giving away all one’s clothes to the poor. While
the self-emptying pattern might have been seen in other times as a
peculiarly religious way of being in the world, I think we can now see
how it might be the germ of a personal, professional, and public ethic
for the twenty-first century.
Two things characterize our time: first, an awareness of our radical
interdependence on all other lifeforms as well as on the vital climatic
system of our planet and, second, an increasing appreciation of the
planet’s finitude and vulnerability. These realities of our time mean
that the whole vocabulary and sensibility of self-limitation, ego-less-
ness, sharing, giving space to others, and limiting our energy use, no
longer sound like a special language for the saints, but, rather, an ethic
for all of us.
The religions may be the greatest “realists,” with their intuitive
appreciation for self-emptying and self-limitation as ways, not only
to personal fulfillment, but also to sane planetary practice. Could it be
that the religions can take the lead in exploring and illustrating how an
ethic of space, energy, and kenosis might function in light of the twenty-
first-century crisis of climate change? Could it be that the universal,
cosmic Christ can lead Christians to respond to climate change by
living in a self-emptying way, conscious that radical sharing, limitation,
and sacrifice are necessary in our time of limited space and energy?
Could we live and move and have our being in the universal
Christ, participating in the insight and power of God incarnate in
the world as we deal with these mundane issues of the basics of exis-
tence—space and energy—so we can live in radical interdependence
with all other creatures? We are not alone as we face this challenge—the
universal Christ is in, with, and for the world as we struggle to deal
with climate change.

For the complete edition of Oneing, click here.

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 “The Universal Christ and Climate Change,” by Sallie McFague,
first published in Oneing, “The Universal Christ,” Volume 8,
Number 1, Spring 2019. Copyright © 2019 by CAC. All rights
reserved worldwide.

NOTE S

1 Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book XIV.

2 
I renaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, Book 4, Chapter 20.
3 
The Journal of John Woolman (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), 264.

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