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What do you say when your child loses a pet and asks you if her dog will go to heaven? Or, more likely today given the faddishness of vegetarianism, what do you say when your teenager asks you why you eat meat? Indeed, what should the church say to the growing animal-rights movement? Most of us have a beloved pet, but must we love all animals? Is that practical, or even possible? Does even God do that?
The animal-rights movement has been around at least since the early nineteenth century, although classical thinkers often wrote about animals, and some, like Pythagoras, advocated vegetarianism (a term that was not coined until the 1840s). The earliest animal advocates in England were Christians who were also worried about the treatment of children and the working conditions of the poor. In its modern guise, however, the animal-rights movement is often hostile to religion and single-minded in its focus on animals.
Most Christians rightfully distance themselves from a movement that blames Judaism and Christianity for negative Western attitudes about animals. When the animal-rights movement is not scapegoating Christianity for every abused animal, it is turning to bad theology for a supporting framework. Many writers about animals are committed to a pantheistic affirmation of the entire world that leaves no room for the uniqueness of human rationality and responsibility. Such pantheism views animals as manifestations of the divine. In the theology of animal rights, the Fall occurs when men take Genesis literally and set out to dominate nature. Paradise, according to this theology, is not a world where community is restored under a benevolent authority. Instead, paradise would be achieved when the government guarantees every individual's (including every animal's) right to be left alone by everyone else.
There is no doubt that bad theology often drives out good theology, but that should not keep us from asking about the biblical foundations for an answer to the animal-rights movement. Are animals here merely to serve as meat machines for our unhealthy diets? Do they share our origin and our destiny, and if so, how should we treat them now?
The Bible is radical in not treating animals as messengers of the gods. The Bible treats animals as others who are genuinely different from us and yet similar enough to merit kindness and to be included in God's plan for the world. The Bible certainly does not treat animals as equal to humans. Humans are God's representatives on earth, put here to mediate to animals God's original purposes and intentions. So what is God's plan for the animals?
Andrew Linzey's new anthology demonstrates how thinking about animals drives to the heart of Christian faith. When someone asks you if all good dogs go to heaven, you have to think very hard about what precisely you think heaven is. Every Christian should have a position on the value of animals, their value not just to us but, more important, to the God who created them.
Most Americans keep pets and are very interested in animals, but theologians have been slow to respond to this need. To some extent, then, the theology of animal rights is what the church gets when it keeps silent for too long about a major issue. Too often, when Christians do write about this topic, they end up speaking about nature in general and abstract terms, rather than addressing the more specific and difficult question of animals. It is too easy to say that we should respect the world as God's good creation without specifying what our obligations to animals are.
Putting animals on the agenda displaces humans from the center of theology and thus opens a space for the return of God to the pinnacle of religious concerns. This shift does not have to be antihuman, but it can help us to escape the humanism that has infected even the most orthodox theologies of the modern period. To say that God loves animals—and the rest of creation—is not to limit the special moral role we play in the world. To say that God loves only us is surely to reveal our limited imaginations and the self-interest that governs even the most theocentric theological models. Thus, putting animals on the agenda can, among other things, serve to save theology from the distortions of human pride.
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