ANIMAL THEOLOGY BY DAVID CLOUGH

for me the starting point for thinking about animals and Christian theology is to remember that Christians believe in a God who is the creator not just of some things but of all things the God of all creatures so that means that Christians need a vision a theological vision of God and the world that is big enough to encompass that realization of God as the creator of all things and that has big implications for the way we do Christian theology we need a theology that's capable of engaging with black holes and stars and distant galaxies but we also need a theology that's capable of dealing with the other living things that we found around us on our planet including animals so theology is often been preoccupied with God's relationship with the human and for understandable reasons we're human we're primarily concerned for a lot of the time with how we and the beings most like us are living and going about their lives but we are heir to biblical scriptures and Christian theological traditions that recognize that we find our human being alongside their being of other creatures including animal creatures our scriptures are full of the place of animal creatures before God so very opening narratives in creation in Genesis we find God creating all kinds of creatures declaring them good in their own right without respect to their utility to any other kinds of creatures and affirming their place within this good order of creation elsewhere in the Old Testament we find the great Psalms of creation like Psalm 104 affirming the ordering of God of these myriad kinds of creatures each given their own place to flourish before God and in other parts of the psalms glorifying God in their floor celebrating their being before God living out their creaturely existence in response to the gift of creation grace to them so that means that Christians need to be attending very carefully to what it means to be in relationship with the God who is the god of these creatures and what that means for how we live alongside them and again that thinking about that kind of responsibility to other animals is also present in the scriptures that we find them find ourselves reading so there are some basic ethical questions about practice in relation to other animals that the Scriptures are concerned about Genesis 1 deals with the question of what we're to eat for example and declares that while human beings are given dominion over other creatures and uniquely made in God's image by the end of Genesis 1 the diet specified for these creatures who are to image God is a vegan one or all animals humans and other animals are to be eating plants according to this originating vision of what it looks like when God's will is fully done when we move forward and look at Genesis 9 when things have shifted so after the flood the earth has been filled with violence God has Noah rescue both his family and representative animal species on the ark when they come out of the ark God declares that the there's going to be a plan B in relation to creation the food rules have changed so humans are given explicit permission to eat animals for the first time in Genesis 9 but that's under strictly limited conditions their animals are not to be eaten with their blood and voluminous texts of law later in the Old Testament specify that in two different kinds of clean and unclean animals and also particular ways of slaughtering them in particular times and places by the ticket people according to particular rituals so this question of eating animals is really significant in relation to Old Testament narratives and also turns out to be controversial within the New Testament too and so our scriptures are concerned with what it means for us to live well alongside these other creatures there are other examples of that too in the Old Testament so we find regulations about how domesticated animals are to be treated there for example they're to be given consideration under Sabbath legislation you shouldn't be making your draft animals work any more than you should be working or any of your family or your servants should be working on the Sabbath so animals are entitled to that kind of consideration there are various regulations about treating animals well not muzzling the ox when it's treading the grain and even responsibilities to wild animals so when there's a Sabbath for the land one of the things that happens when you leave the land fallow in the seventh year is that wild animals have the opportunity to find food from the land and so there's a real sense of a human vocation within this wider world creaturely animal world both in relation to domesticated animals and wild animals too Israel is also looking further ahead so when the prophets think about what needs remedy in relation to the distance between the way Israelis living as a community and the calling they're calling by God to live as a holy people one of the things they're interested in and how is how animals are treated so in Isaiah we read that God is dissatisfied with animal sacrifice and is concerned that when the Israelites are making animal sacrifices it's almost it's as bad as killing it's as bad as murder for example so again this question about eating and practice is really significant in the Old Testament and then we read these amay visions of Isaiah for what's going to happen when God's will is fully done in the future when the Messiah comes there'll be this new creation where there will be no killing no creature preying on another creature no violence between humans and other animals the wolf will lie down with the lamb and the lion and the kid and so on and so on and so while Israel is living within this current era in which there is Creek intra creaturely violence it looks like somehow that falls short of God's full and complete will for how creatures should live alongside one another and perhaps referencing back to this originating vision in Genesis 1 and 2 where there isn't predation and prey and where Adam and later Eve are living in peaceful relations with other creatures in Genesis 2 because human beings have no economic interest they're not eating animals they don't need clothing from animals they're living alongside animals in Genesis 2 and this grace filled existence so we attack the amazing scriptural visions of what it would look like for humans and other animals to live together and alongside one another and if we think back to Genesis 9 there's another element of that coexistence which is to do with government and so when God establishes the rainbow and promises never to flood the world again what we find is that the covenant that God makes with Noah is not just with Noah not just with his family but with every living creature Genesis 9 emphasizes again and again this covenant of God's faithfulness is between God humans and all the other living creatures and so again we have a biblical vision that sees human beings alongside other animals now you might think that by the time we get to the New Testament and think about what Christians believe about the person of Jesus Christ and God and the Incarnation and automa and redemption that things look very different that maybe maybe we have the sense that animals sort of fall out of fall out of their zone of reference at that point but again I think we are apt to overlook some really foundational important text that also recall us to seeing humans and other animals as alongside one another again we could start with what we could go back to a creation narrative in the prologue to John's Gospel so nervous another biblical framing of what creation means and it's really clear that Jesus Christ who is the word is intimately involved with the creation of all things without him nothing was made that was made and then the fundamental description of the Incarnation in John's Gospel is not that that word became human but that the word became flesh and that term flesh Sark's in the Greek besar in the Hebrew is a really interesting term because it's that that fleshy stuff is stuff that human beings have in common with other kinds of animal creatures and so that makes the prologue to John's Gospel really scandalous in its affirmation that this the this eternal God takes on this messy body bloody bodily stuff that's common to humans and other animals and so then we need to be open to thinking about the Incarnation not just as the word became human as the first Christian Creed's sort of quickly switched to but thinking of Incarnation as God's taking on of creatureliness God entering into the creaturely space and engaging with that creaturely world a little later in John's Gospel John talks about the God's motive in the Incarnation and that famous first John 3:16 says that for God so loved not human beings but the world the cosmos in Greek so it's God's love for the whole of this creaturely reality that motivates the incarnation according to the early chapters of John and again it's not just John in the early at some of the earliest christologies that we have thinking about what it means to talk about Jesus Christ as the Son of God on the work of Christ at the beginning of Colossians and Ephesians in the epistles we find a vision of what God is doing in Christ as a reconciling work which is making peace through the Christ's blood on the cross between all things Tapp anta in Greek all things in heaven and earth in Colossians that Tapp anta is repeated six or seven times within a few verses so we have the sense that the some of the first people who were trying to think about the significance of what God has done in Christ weren't prepared to think of it as some kind of mono species transaction between God and Homo sapiens instead they had a sense of this Christ event as something that changed everything it was a invent of cosmic significance God acting to radically transform the situation of creatures in the reconciling work of Christ and at the end of Mark's Gospel when Jesus is talking about the mission of the disciples interestingly he describes that mission as taking the gospel to the whole of creation so again staring us in the face all over biblical text of this sense that we've got some kind of responsibility for taking animals seriously in relation to doctrine of creation in relation to thinking about God's work in Christ and then also in relation to thinking about Redemption so as a lay Methodist I was really struck to come across John Wesley's sermon the general deliverance she was which he preached in the late 18th century Wesley was preaching on Romans 8 the passage in what Paul is talking about the groaning of creation and the way in which creation will be liberated from its bondage to enjoy the freedom of the children of God and Wesley says Wesley is very concerned about where animals belong in this passage and his sermon the general deliverance is about animals in the context of romans 8 and he says look nothing could be more Express he says away with vulgar prejudice and that the plain word of God take place animals will be liberated from their vomit bondage animals will be part of this Redemption that God is bringing says John Wesley in the late 18th century and for Wesley that was not just some belief about a sort of future heavenly reality it had implications for Christian practice here and now so in that sermon he talks about the cruelty towards animals that he sees on the streets and he says that if Christians really believe in Romans 8 and believe in a God who is bringing Redemption to all creatures that should transform our practice in the present and it's not just Wesley of course and not just romans 8 that would give us reason to think about a vision of redemption that would be inclusive in that way John Wesley was well versed in patristic sources who had visions of creation in which the whole of creation was sort of gathered up figures like Irenaeus for example and there were long long Christian theological traditions that don't see redemption again as a sort of mono species act on behalf of God but as God's gathering up of crucially life in order to create you know not just teleport a select group of human souls to some spiritual heavenly reality but to instantiate a new creation and how could it be otherwise if we take seriously some of the texts in Revelation where we have a vision of a land lamb standing as if slain in the center of a context of worship whether these hybrid creatures drawn from Ezekiel's vision part human part animal and then Sarah surrounded by the saints but then surrounded by every kind of creature in heaven and earth these the the the the more than human Ness of these visions of redemption and non-negotiable it seems to me in relation to the biblical inheritance of these visions of redemption that we're heir to but then if we're going to follow Wesley we need to think seriously about what the implications are of this Christian theological vision for creaturely animal life for the way we treat animals now so just as Wesley saw animals mistreated in the streets we need to recognize that in the early 21st century in many contexts we are treating fellow animal creatures in ways that seem really problematic if we take seriously their relationship with God in under these major doctrinal headings of creation reconciliation and redemption and so it seems to me that once we realized the centrality of a Christian concern for animals based in fundamental faith commitments that Christians have got reason to attend very carefully to what we're doing to other animals in the different ways that we are making use of them for our own purposes at the moment

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Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020