Sentience, Suffering, And Salvation: A Critique Of Key Concepts In Animal Theology

By Randall E. Otto

[Randall E. Otto is Affiliate Faculty in the Christian Ministries program for Southwestern College in Wichita, KS, a Mentor in Humanities for Thomas Edison State University in Trenton, NJ, and Visiting Professor in Critical Reasoning for Chamberlain School of Nursing, global campus. He has also served for nearly thirty years as a Presbyterian pastor.]

Abstract

An analysis of key concepts of sentience, pain, and suffering, and salvation as they pertain to animals demonstrates they are insufficiently conceptualized biblically, philosophically, or scientifically and thus unable to bear the weight required of them in animal theology. Animals and humans differ not merely in degree, but in kind, the rational being of humanity serving as the basis of the self-consciousness and uniqueness that enables humans to see pain has meaning, suffering has purpose, and humans are those for whom the Son of God became human in the incarnation to suffer and die for their salvation alone.

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“We must never allow the problem of animal suffering to become the centre of the problem of pain … because it is outside the range of our knowledge.”[1] So said C. S. Lewis in 1940, before the study of animal cognition in ethology had become a scientific discipline. Cognitive ethology has since suggested that ideas of thought, consciousness, language, and morality, once considered unique to humanity, are found in varying degrees through much of the non-human animal world, particularly in vertebrates. As a consequence of this explosion of study in animal cognition and in view of the Darwinian dictum that the differences between humans and animals are of degree and not of kind, the question of human interaction with the rest of the animal world has come to the fore.

The Christian appropriation of these concerns is stated by their leading proponent, Andrew Linzey, who, asserting that “mammals (at least) experience pain and suffering only to a greater or lesser extent than we do,”[2] maintains that “the obligations we have to sentient animals are the same sort of obligations that we have to human beings.”[3] These are also obligations of God himself, Linzey, Southgate, Webb, Clough, and others maintain in echoing Keith Ward’s contention that, “if it is necessary that each sentient being must have the possibility of achieving an overwhelming good, then it is clear that there must be some form of life after earthly death.… Immortality, for animals as well as humans, is a necessary condition for any acceptable theodicy.”[4] The concern here for the pain and suffering of animals as sentient beings, including their moral consideration and ultimate salvation, poses new questions for Christian theology regarding not just the uniqueness of humanity, but the nature of Christ’s incarnation and the purpose of the atonement. This analysis will examine the key elements involved in “repackaging Christianity as a religion promoting the rights of animals”:[5] sentiency, suffering, and salvation.

I. Sentience In Non-Human Creation

Linzey and other Christian animal rights advocates begin with a revision of Karl Barth’s doctrine of creation in which God’s covenant has significance for the whole of creation rather than merely for the species Homo sapiens. Animals are “fellow creatures” of value not just in relation to human beings, but to their Creator; more than mere things or commodities for human use, they are fellow Spirit-filled beings. “Animals have a God-given life (nephesh in Hebrew),” which for Linzey means “each individual animal is animated by the same Holy Spirit that gives life to all creatures, humans included. This bestows on sentient life especially capacities for living—capacities for feeling, capacities for seeing—unique and distinct potentialities, which must logically be valued by their Creator.”[6] Linzey here understands the days of creation in Gen 1 as indicating “closer circles of spiritual awareness which reach their climax in man made in God’s own image.”[7] Birds and fish created on the fifth day preceded land animals being classed with humans in keeping with the so-called Priestly writer’s purported interest in a developing capacity for spiritual response.

Beyond the curious anachronism suggesting the Priestly writer anticipated the Darwinian dictum of the difference between humans and animals being of degree and not kind, Linzey’s extensive use of the word “capacity” in animals is attended by little elaboration. It clearly does not involve rationality, for Thomas Aquinas and many others in the Christian tradition are roundly criticized for insistence on human intellectual uniqueness that subordinates animals and disparages their spiritual status. Aquinas, of course, adopted Aristotle’s nested hierarchy of soul functions, namely reproductive, locomotive, and intellectual, corresponding to the nutritive soul in vegetables, the sensitive soul in animals and humans, and the rational soul in humans alone. Rationality thereby becomes, Linzey laments, “the all-important factor in determining our immortal soulfulness, a faculty which Aquinas denied to the non-human.” He takes issue with Aquinas in two primary ways, ethological and biblical. “It is by no means clear that animals lack rationality altogether and certainly many higher mammals show goal-directed activity.” Additionally, he asks, “where in the Bible are we given the necessary information concerning these vital distinctions between different forms of life?”[8]

The second question pertaining to the biblical basis for differentiating humans from non-human animals on the basis of reason or intellect is quite easily addressed. False teachers are excoriated in 2 Pet 2:12 as being like “brute beasts, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like beasts they will perish” (cf. the parallel in Jude 10). The phrase aloga zōa appears to be used of animals in general as lacking reason, here as a figure for humans who have abandoned reason to descend to an instinctual level with the rest of the animal world (also found in 4 Macc. 14:14, 18; Wis 11:15; cf. also characterizations of human beings as “beasts,” thēria, in Titus 1:12, and probably 1 Cor 15:32). Moreover, before these references are cast aside as influenced by a purported Greek emphasis on the intellect, similar statements in the OT are to be noted, particularly in the poetic literature. A human with “no understanding” will perish like “unintelligent creatures” (ktēnesin tois anoētois, Ps 48:21 LXX). He is, like a beast, “stupid and ignorant” (Ps 73:22; cf. Prov 30:2; T. Zeb. 5:1) and counseled not to be “like a horse or mule without understanding” (Ps 32:9). Sometimes Israel is castigated for demonstrating less understanding than normally encountered in brutes (Isa 1:3).

Few today would deny that animals have a range of cognitive abilities. The issue is not with animal cognition as such, but with the notion that it is on a continuum with that of humans, differing only in degree and not in kind. Barbour observes, “Some differences of degree are so great that they add up to differences of kind, but without sharp discontinuities.”[9] Matthew Boyle explains that the Aristotelian rational/non-rational distinction is “bound up with an attempt to characterize the form of a certain type of substance, one possessing powers of a certain distinctive kind.”[10] Crucial to his argument is the idea that rationality is not a particular power rational animals are equipped with, but rather their distinctive manner of having powers. To describe a human being is thus not to describe properties belonging to particular individuals, as is commonly done by Peter Singer and others in their use of the argument from marginal cases where defective humans who lack self-consciousness or some other characteristic thought to distinguish humans from animals have no better, if indeed less, claim to moral status than non-human animals.[11] Rather, to speak of a human being is to characterize the nature of the kind human being itself, so that the predicates “state not features that individuals must have if they are to belong to that kind, but rather attributes that directly characterize the nature of the substantial kind itself.”[12] “Rational” is thus not a characteristic of certain animal species, but is rather a way of transforming the nature of being an animal so as to constitute a new way of being a living thing. Ideas of agency and subjectivity, acting knowingly by conceptually weighing options, all involved in intentionality and reflective thought, are unique to rational creatures. Reason has to do with the whole organization of human powers, with the essence of what it means to be human, despite the possibility that members of the human species often fail to act rationally.

The claim that rational animals have a distinctive kind of animal mind thus implies that rational capacities for perception and desire cannot be explained as: the kinds of capacities for perception and desire to be found in nonrational animals, supplemented with a further, independent power to regulate these capacities in the light of reflective reasoning. Rather, an account of our sort of perceiving and desiring must itself refer to the role of these capacities in supporting a specifically rational form of life. If this is right, we are not merely animals who are in fact rational; we are essentially rational animals.[13]

In being essentially rational, humans are unique. “Whatever amount of conscious capacity we may concede to animals, there is no question that during the course of our evolution, our species crossed a great divide, a cognitive Rubicon that no other species on this planet has crossed.”[14]

The univocal use of terminology in much of the animal rights literature thus creates conceptual confusion. In his Animal Rights: A Christian Assessment (1976), Linzey had challenged the sufficiency of classical views of “personhood” and “rationality” for awarding moral rights on the basis of marginal cases. The inadequacy of that approach, however, has already been noted, based on the fundamental idea of a kind or nature that, as Parker observes, “indicates the ensemble of codes on the level of genes as well as traits on the level of the whole individual that make that individual a member of a species.”[15] An anencephalic baby may thus not resemble most humans in looks or mental capacities and may be able to do less than some chimpanzees, but the genome of that child demonstrates it is a human being. It is on this basis of being a certain kind and having a certain nature that the lack of a particular characteristic in a species would be discernable as exceptional. A blind eagle is nonetheless an eagle, and a human who is cognitively challenged is nonetheless a human being.

It was in his initial work that Linzey sought an account of sentient rights within a theological context, influenced by what has been called “The Great Sentence” of the animal rights movement, Jeremy Benthem’s 1789 assertion, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk?, but, Can they suffer?” Linzey viewed the sentiency criterion as one way to make sense of the value of created beings, the scriptural sense of human responsibility toward animals, and the fact that animals could be harmed in ways inanimate objects cannot. The use of sentiency, “understood as the capacity to experience pain and pleasure,” was “some way in which the theological sense of community with animals could be expressed,” “in which the spiritual capacities of animals could be recognized as giving them a status beyond that of cabbages and greenfly.”[16] While this seems an ideological commitment in search of a basis, the larger question is how to understand sentiency and its significance.

Sentience has already been defined as the capacity to experience pain and pleasure. How does such a response mechanism to stimuli translate into “spiritual capacities,” however? All living organisms must respond to changes in their environment, to stimuli that are detected, by way of impulses that elicit changes in position or behavior. This occurs in all branches of biology, from the cellular level on up. A plant is said to move toward the sun, though there is no intention involved, but rather the evolved response of phototropism driven by the hormone auxin. Plants use moisture gradients and acoustic cues to direct their roots toward a water source; they “sense water.” Some suggest that this means plants are “intelligent,” that they “listen,” that because they respond to a human anesthetic they may even feel pain. Plants do not have nerve cells or a brain, but they do have a system for sending electrical signals and even use neurotransmitters that the human brain uses to send signals. Are plants sentient? Most would say they are not, but some in the new discipline of plant neurobiology say plants “seem to possess the various elements that make intelligence possible—sensing, awareness, integration of information, long-term memory and adaptive learning,” while demurring from actually acknowledging plant intelligence. Others are so bold as to say plants feel pain and have a kind of consciousness.[17]

Perhaps this is why some, particularly those coming from a process perspective, say “all life is sentient.”[18] Their panpsychism proposes sentience throughout nature differing only in degree, not kind, between the mental and the material.

Barbour thus speaks of the “sentience of simple organisms” involving perception as the selective transmission of information found, for instance, in a one-celled paramecium, as well as an internal dimension of elementary awareness and feeling involving a central nervous system, and finally an elementary capacity for pain and pleasure, so that entities at all levels can be viewed as “experiencing subjects, with at least rudimentary sentience, memory, and purposiveness.”[19]

Linzey, however, does not advocate the process approach, believing its accent on immanence compromises God’s ability to offer redemption. His view of sentiency seems to be focused primarily on vertebrates, but what it entails is not altogether clear or consistent. In Christianity and the Rights of Animals, first published in 1987, he uses the parenthetic of “consciousness and the ability to feel pain” to qualify “sentiency.” What an experience of pain means to any particular entity will vary with the nature of its mental capabilities, its ability to understand what is occurring and what it means. This is where ideas of consciousness as self-awareness and rudiments of rationality are introduced to make sense of these experiences, since evidence of sentiency includes “fear, stress, anxiety, foreboding, anticipation, and terror.”[20] The extent to which such evidence is actually experienced by the entity or is an imposition of anthropocentric categories is a topic of vigorous debate, again dependent on the mental capabilities of the experiencing agent. Linzey seeks to insure the possibility of this mental capacity by speaking of sentiency elsewhere as “self-consciousness and the ability to experience pain.”[21] Consciousness, however, is very different from self-consciousness, as will be distinguished subsequently.

To critics who allege ambiguity in his sentiency criterion, Linzey in Creatures of the Same God points readers to his treatment of the topic in Christianity and the Rights of Animals.[22] There, in recognition of Albert Schweitzer’s affirmation of the sacredness of all life, he tries to show how it is not “subjective and arbitrary” to draw distinctions between the relative value of beings. He sees two ways in which to grasp the spiritual continuity between human and beast. The first is by the biblical application of “spirit” to the non-human and whether humans have something animals do not which survives death (Eccl 3:19–22). As both do have the “same breath” (Eccl 3:19), humanity has no advantage over the animal. Both go to the grave, but only of humans is it later said, “man goes to his eternal home” (12:5, beth ōlam; oikon aiōnos LXX), which Linzey does not address. Similarly, Ps 49:12, 20 says “man … is like the beasts that perish,” but this concerns a particular type of person who trusts in riches and has no understanding. The upright, contrariwise, God will redeem from the grave and take to himself (v. 15). From this it can reasonably be said that both animals and humans have a sensitive soul, using Aristotelian terms, but only humanity has a rational soul or spirit attuned to the divine, which survives beyond death.

Linzey wants to maintain that the creative function of the Holy Spirit equals being filled with the Spirit. Because animals have a God-given life, “this means … that each individual animal is animated by the same Holy Spirit that gives life to all creatures, humans included. This bestows on sentient life especially capacities for living—capacities for feeling, capacities for seeing—unique and distinct potentialities, which must logically be valued by their Creator.”[23] Because God made his everlasting covenant with all flesh after the flood and says he will pour out his Spirit on all flesh, Linzey thinks it valid to speak of them, at least of those of flesh and blood, as “Spirit-filled.” However, the Noahic covenant is clearly a recapitulation of the Adamic covenant, with the accompanying divine promise never again to destroy earthly life by means of a natural catastrophe. As such, it entails no specific redemptive promise. Further, not even all human beings, uniquely said to be created in the image of God in both covenants (Gen 1:26–27; 9:6) can be characterized as Spirit-filled, an idea generally reserved for prophetic utterance or special giftedness in the OT which is later expanded to include all human beings who call on the name of the Lord. Nowhere in the Bible is an animal spoken of as being “filled with the Spirit.”

Linzey supposes all created things, animate or not, have a relationship with God. “To be in a relationship with God is a good which doubtless all created things (perhaps even stones) possess, but to be a responding subject in relationship with God, with all that that entails, including spiritual perception and self-consciousness, is undoubtedly a greater (though not unmixed) good.”[24] How stones or other inanimate objects could “be in a relationship with God” would seem perplexing to all but a Jain, who views all things as having a kind of soul apart from belief in any god. While Linzey here seeks to move beyond sentiency to what he calls theos-rights as a “more rounded theological criterion,” theos-rights seem grounded in sentiency. Rights language, he says, “helps us to articulate more adequately God’s own interest in the lives of other sentient creatures.” “The Spirit is the source of their life and some creatures are endowed with God-given capacities for intelligence and sentiency,” so “because they are God’s creatures” humans owe them moral standing. While Linzey wants theos-rights to be grounded in God’s own right, not in something attributable to the creature, his continued focus on sentiency, here in conjunction with intelligence, carries little significance. “In practice, what theos-rights implies is that beings who have sentience are the ones who have rights.”[25] Although it seeks to deter emphasis on attributes of non-human animals, this criterion seems to maintain “sentiency and intelligence” as requisite. While an inclusive view of theos-rights would allow “the widest spiritual definition of spiritual life to include almost any being that is self-conscious, capable of self-determining movement, and possibly or even potentially open to the experience of pain,” the exclusive view to which Linzey holds “argues that rights can only properly and clearly be extended to those animals known to possess spiritually analogous lives to those of humans,” that is, mammals.[26] How Linzey can so confidently assert that mammals “possess spiritual analogous lives” to humans is altogether unclear, as there is no indisputable evidence whatsoever for spirituality in animals. Great apes and some other mammals appear to recognize change from life to lifelessness and occasionally demonstrate behavior comparable to human states of sadness, such as lingering near a corpse or carrying a dead infant about, yet “there is no indication that they are aware, let alone worry, that they too will die. Death-awareness is closely linked with self-awareness beyond the simple recognition of oneself in a mirror or exhibiting a distinctive personality.”[27] Tuttle thus thinks it doubtful that apes possess the capacity to envision future life events, let alone contemplate their deaths or what may occur thereafter. Language, culture, ideology, spirituality, and morality are uniquely human traits. Bonobos feel, think, and fear, but humans feel, think, fear, and believe. This is why Christian Smith distinguishes humans as “moral believing animals.” “We find traces of what we think of as religious consciousness and practices in the historical remains of the earliest human communities…. This confirms the suspicion … that religion is somehow very basic to, perhaps constitutive of, the life of human animals.”[28] Religion arose with human beings, as the archeological record indicates. “In a very specific sense religious belief is one of the earliest special propensities or dispositions that we are able to detect in the archeological record of modern humans. In this sense, then, there is a naturalness to religious imagination that challenges any viewpoint that would want to see religion or religious imagination as esoteric, or as an isolated faculty of the human mind that developed later.”[29]

If, as a review of two decades of scientific literature on the matter of animal sentience contended, “there is no universally accepted definition of sentience, and there are many different opinions as to where sentience exists in the animal kingdom,”[30] it would seem essential to its use as the basis for the theological and moral consideration of animals to stipulate precisely what it is. There was a widespread assumption of sentience noted in that literature review (99.38 percent), with an almost exclusive focus on vertebrates, along with an accompanying tendency to focus on negative states in animals such as fear, stress, pain, anxiety, and depression.[31] It would seem that theological advocates of animal rights align with these tendencies. Sentience cannot be simply equated with consciousness apart from analysis of what consciousness entails, not to mention further equation of sentience with self-consciousness, selfhood, intelligence, and other mental features not precisely delineated and demonstrated in the non-human animal world. Animal sentience must be limited to the ability of animals to feel and experience responses, which humans may then anthropocentrically characterize as joy, pleasure, suffering, and fear, apart from further indication of subjective states associated with higher consciousness. The extent to which sentience has significance would seem contingent of that entity’s ability to experience the stimulus as a subject.

II. Suffering In Non-Human Creation

For animal theologians and animal rights activists alike, pain is the great cross-species leveler. But should it be? Already in 1940 C. S. Lewis observed with regard to animal suffering, “We must still distinguish sentience from consciousness.”[32] He went on to note that, while animals have a nervous system in which to experience sensations, there is no soul or self in them to distinguish itself from the sensation, to say, “I am in pain.” While Lewis acknowledged the possibility of “some degree” of soul or self in apes, elephants, and higher domestic animals giving rise to “rudimentary individuality,” “at least a great deal of what appears to be animal suffering need not be suffering in any real sense,” since humans may be “reading into the beast a self for which there is no real evidence.”[33] If Lewis could make such distinctions so long ago, one would expect greater attention paid to consideration of these concerns by present advocates of animal theology. In their review of the issue, however, Meric Srokosz and Simon Kolstoe maintain that recent theodicies for animal suffering, including the work of Southgate and Clough, fail to discuss the scientific evidence for animal suffering, but just “assume it exists.”[34] While there is no question that animals feel pain as a neurological response to stimuli, an evolutionary adaptation that can enable them to avoid a premature death, suffering is a more nuanced issue involving the self-awareness needed to experience pain as suffering. This further requires distinguishing between types of consciousness, something few animal rights advocates undertake. Srokosz and Kolstoe suggest distinguishing between two types of consciousness: sentience, also known as phenomenal consciousness, irreflexive consciousness, or primary consciousness; and self-consciousness, also known as reflexive consciousness, meta-cognition, or higher order thoughts.[35] Parker suggests four stages of consciousness: sentient consciousness, involving sensing and feeling; intelligent consciousness, involving thinking and insights into data; rational consciousness, involving reflecting and affirming or denying the adequacy or truth of insights into data; and responsible consciousness, involving deliberating and coming to judgments about what is valuable.[36] Donald, in a section of his book entitled “Defining the Domain,” states, “We must mind our definition of consciousness. It is not really a unitary phenomenon and allows more than one definition.”[37] He notes at least three definitions: consciousness as a state, that of concentration, readiness, dreams, which most mammals and many non-mammals have; consciousness as a place in the mind architecturally having to do with cognition, emotion, and action, self-regulation found in all higher mammals as well as species of birds enabling them to pursue a goal over the short term and behave as though possessing a unity of experience; finally, consciousness as representational, exclusive to humans because dependent on the human capacity for symbolic expression found in language. While it is not within the scope of this article to make a conclusion on the number of types of consciousness, it is clearly evident that there is no agreement on how to define or determine types of consciousness. However, that there are different types can hardly be doubted.

Thus, animal rights and animal theological use of “consciousness” apart from any real determination of its meaning and significance obfuscates the discussion. As Srokosz and Kolstoe assert, “Darwin’s view that the differences are ‘one of degree and not of kind’ has led to the danger of thinking that similarity implies equivalence.”[38] They allude to computer simulations of apparently complex corvid behavior, together with robo-pets that can mimic real animal behavior, demonstrating that apparently complex animal behavior does not require consciousness as found in humans. Such comparisons of animals to machines may revive the specter of Descartes, regularly pilloried in the literature for his analogy of animals to “automatons.” As John Cottingham has demonstrated, the human body is for Descartes a machine as much as the animal is, operating according to its own laws and self-moving, different only in respect to the soul. Descartes acknowledges “impulses of anger, fear, hunger and so on” in the sounds of dogs, horses, monkeys, and magpies, for instance, indicative of feelings. He did not therefore deny feelings to animals; he denied that they think. That a cat feels pain, for instance, does not mean it has the rational capacity (cogitatio) associated with the soul, to say “I am in pain,” a distinction Lewis also made.[39] Descartes is thus committed to the thesis that “animals do not have self-consciousness; but when as a result he consigns animals to the realm of res extensa, he simply does not seem to bother that terms like pain, anger, etc. which he uses of animals, clearly imply some kind of conscious (though perhaps not ‘self-conscious’) awareness.”[40] Interestingly, Malcolm Jeeves is hardly alone in lamenting mechanistic tendencies in contemporary neurobiology that “forget the primacy of the role of consciousness and the cognitive agent” and that view humans as “mere machines.”[41]

In a section on “Animals as Automata” dealing with an objection “that animals are not sentient (understood as the capacity to experience pain) and are therefore incapable of suffering,” Linzey chides Descartes as a “classic piece of a priori theological speculation stemming from the idea that only humans possess immaterial, rational souls.”[42] It has been shown, however, that Descartes does not deny feelings to animals and that in using the term automaton he simply means “self-moving.” He denies they have a self by which to understand or experience pain as suffering. This is an important distinction Linzey and fellow animal rights advocates do not observe. Pain and suffering differ.

Where Linzey does make such a distinction, it has little significance. “To accept that animals suffer is to acknowledge that they have a mental life: they experience fear, foreboding, anxiety, stress, discomfort, boredom and so on, and that all these reactions differ only in degree from those which are experienced by human beings.”[43] No one, not even Descartes, denies feelings or mental states to animals, but rather a self or soul capable of experiencing these feelings reflectively or correlating these mental states in symbolic fashion with a standard of truth. The feelings Linzey notes all would be categorized under Srokosz and Kolstoe’s category of sentience (i.e., phenomenal consciousness, irreflexive consciousness, or primary consciousness); Parker’s first two categories (potentially, depending on the animal) of sentient consciousness, involving sensing and feeling, and intelligent consciousness, involving thinking and insights into data; or Donald’s consciousness as a state, that of concentration, readiness, dreams, which most mammals and many non-mammals have, and consciousness as a place in the mind architecturally having to do with cognition, emotion, and action, self-regulation found in all higher mammals.

As Swinburne puts it, the difference between animals and humans is not the mental life, but a special kind of mental life having to do with a rational or intellectual soul.[44] Animals have a mental life of sensation, thought, desire, and in some cases purpose, having souls, albeit of a different capacity than those of humans. They have no spiritual capacity, as humans do. These wantons, as Swinburne calls them, do what they desire: “The wanton knows no conflict between his desires and his beliefs about the relative worth of actions. He has not made enough spiritual progress even to show weakness of will.”[45] It is, moreover, not possible for animals to make such progress. Animals are as intelligent as they need to be, and their intelligence is not different merely in degree, but in kind. Addressing the mental life of apes, with whom we have the closest genetic connection, Fisher summarizes the profound difference that remains:

While our genes are nearly identical, the structure of the human mind is radically different. The fact that no kind of extensive symbolic representation or linguistic mastery ever arises in other animals’ natural condition, is difficult at best to inculcate even for immature primates, and never reaches the level sufficient for moral reasoning or second-order intentionality, is indicative of the deep gulf between human and non-human intelligence. We are not just more intelligent—we are differently intelligent, in a manner that allows us to view ourselves, but also to manipulate the environment around us, in a qualitatively different way from other creatures.[46]

To say, then, that animals suffer can be viewed as a mental state, but could also involve a human tendency to view non-human behavior in anthropomorphic terms rather than speaking precisely about non-human animal experience.

Humans inevitably ask about the cause and significance of pain as suffering. Lewis speaks of pain as “God’s megaphone” that “may lead to final and unrepentant rebellion,” but may also be “the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.”[47] None of this holds true for animal suffering, since “beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue” and “therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it,” something Lewis finds “appalling.”[48] What, then, is its reason in animals?

Linzey wants to maintain that all of creation is fallen, but how? As Southgate says, “The scientific record of the Earth’s long history before the advent of human beings calls into profound question any account that regards human sin as the cause of struggle and suffering in the nonhuman creation. Predation, violence, parasitism, suffering, and extinction were integral parts of the natural order long before Homo sapiens.”[49] Linzey’s notion that violence between creatures is not what God intended is hard to understand in an evolutionary perspective, as is his insistence on the primacy of Gen 1:29–30, “that creation—a wholly vegetarian, nonviolent creation—that God describes as ‘very good.’”[50] How “animals, who have no free will, live in a state of fallenness subject to the evil of predation is no easy matter,” he admits. “Believing in cosmic disorder, let alone a source of cosmic evil, present in the world before the arrival of dinosaurs and human beings,” he says, while problematic, “is theologically essential if we are to believe that predation is not willed by the Creator.”[51] Thus, even the classical view of a fall into sin is not here the basis of this purported cosmic disorder. So how did this disorder arise? And how are animals implicated if they are “not moral agents with free will, and are not therefore capable of sin”?[52] What does this say, moreover, about the “spiritual capacities” he elsewhere asserts of animals?

For Linzey, Clough, and others, it is the incarnation of God in Christ that helps to make sense of the suffering of animals. Whereas Southgate and certain process theologians speak of God as suffering with creatures in the hope of eschatological redemption of the victims of evolution, Linzey simply says, “If it is true that God is the Creator and sustainer of the whole world of life, then it is inconceivable that God is not also a co-sufferer in the world of non-human creatures as well.”[53] Hence, God may need deliverance from the suffering found in creation as much as creation itself.

III. Salvation And Non-Human Creation

In animal theology, the incarnation serves to identify God with all creatures, not just humans. Linzey identifies five christological connections involved in the incarnation of God for all creatures. The first has to do with Christ as Logos, through whom all things come to be. Christ as Logos is “the decisive fact of being for all creatures.”[54] What frustrates this use of Logos for the dissolution of distinctions between creatures is the very meaning of the word, which has to do with language, reason, truth, and revelation of law, all unique to humans. In particular, there may be the influence of wisdom by way of the Torah on the Johannine prologue,[55] again a concept that has no relation to animals with no linguistic abilities or higher order conceptual abilities. This is not to say, of course, that non-linguistic and non-rational creatures, animate or inanimate, need to have such capabilities to benefit from divine creation and providence; it is rather to say that the revelatory delineation of such is of no meaning or significance to them, apparently because they are not objects of salvation.

Another connection Linzey draws is that the incarnation is not just the assumption of humanity, but the assumption of fleshliness or creatureliness. “The Yes of God the Creator extends to all living, especially fleshly, beings: the ousia assumed in the incarnation is not only specifically human, it is also creaturely.”[56] It is a red herring, however, when Linzey and Clough, for instance, use the male understanding of the incarnation by advocates of male church leadership as an instance of an “overly particularist” understanding of the incarnation, for it remains that, male leadership or egalitarian, such an understanding is species specific, men and women both being human! In Christ sociological distinctions are done away with (Gal 3:28; Eph 2:11–13), but not species distinctions. Therein lies the real crux: ousia is a particular nature that the Son took on in the incarnation. He took the “likeness of sinful flesh” (homoiōmati sarkos hamartias, Rom 8:3), which must be human since, Linzey admits, animals are not moral and cannot sin. God became human in Christ to be a sin offering in fulfillment of the OT sacrificial system “in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature (sarx), but according to the Spirit” (Rom 8:4). Clearly, there are moral obligations involved in sin as lawlessness (1 John 3:2) irrelevant to non-humans, but which pertain specifically to humans, to whom the moral law uniquely applies and for whom redemption is provided, since “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). “All” here is not “all creatures,” but “all human beings,” those of moral culpability. The Adam/Christ parallelism in Rom 5 is unambiguous: “the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men (pantas anthrōpous), so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men (pantas anthrōpous)” (v. 18). There is here no indication of a “fallen world” beyond that of sinful humanity or any provision of salvation beyond the covenantal fulfillment found in the federal head of humanity’s elect, Jesus Christ. The Pauline assertion, “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22), refers to spiritual life based on federal headship of the human race, of being “in Adam” or being “in Christ.”[57]

Clough, however, maintains, “The fundamental New Testament assertion concerning the incarnation … is not that God became a member of the species Homo sapiens, but that God took on flesh, the stuff of living creatures.” From this he concludes that none of the specifics of his having been “human, male, Jewish, Palestinian, first-century” “seem to have been first in the mind of the New Testament authors who chose the term ‘flesh’ to characterize the event.”[58] This is, however, undoubtedly because it was everywhere assumed the messiah, who must come of the line of David, must be a Jewish male human being in order to satisfy the requirements of being the king of Israel. The genealogies in Matt 1 and Luke 3 make clear the focus on all of these elements. “The gospel of God which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures” concerns “his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh” (gegomenou ek spermatos Dauid kata sarka, Rom 1:2–3). Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly indicated than in the book of Hebrews, which accents the superiority of Christ over angels (1:5–2:18), Moses (3:1–4:13), and the Aaronic priesthood (4:14–7:28); that his superiority over animals is not addressed is surely because it is a non-issue. As a human being, that superiority would be assumed. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity,” “for surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants,” which is why “he had to be made (ōpheilen) like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest” (Heb 2:14–17). The word opheilō denotes obligation, necessity imposed either by law, duty, reason, or the nature of a matter. Against Gnostic ideas, let alone inane suggestions that the Son could have been incarnate as an ant or some other creature, Marcus Dods contends it was the nature of the case that imposed the obligation: “He must be a real man, and not merely have the appearance of one. He must enter into the necessary human experiences, look at things from the human point of view, take His place in the crowd amidst the ordinary elements of life,” particularly as hina “introduces one purpose which this thorough incarnation was to serve,” that of sympathizing with the people for whom he would offer himself.[59]

Linzey also finds a strong basis for the election of all living creatures in the Noahic covenant. He sees a redemptive significance that is not there, however. It is, rather, a recapitulation of the original creation intention that is here primary in the promise never to destroy the earth by natural catastrophe. “Genesis 9:1–8 makes clear that Noah and his family were to be God’s means of covenant continuity, enabling a new human beginning within the same promise structure and intention as Genesis 1:26–28 and Genesis 2:4–17.”[60] God recommences with Noah what he had begun in Adam. While the ark has often served as a symbol of the church (cf., e.g., 1 Pet 3:18–21) and it might serve animal theology’s aims to draw on the animals in the ark as thus symbolizing animals in the church, this imagery gets no attention in Linzey’s work. What is also of interest is the initiative that Noah himself takes in sacrificing “some of the clean animals and clean birds” to offer a burnt offering to the Lord (Gen 8:20–21). Greenberger recalls the rabbinic tradition that sees in this offering what is “central to Noah’s essence and legacy” and the clear “connection between Noah’s offering and God’s critical decision” never again to destroy his creation.[61] Obviously, the burnt sacrifice of some of the clean animals and birds would seem to violate core tenets of animal theology; notwithstanding, Scripture describes it as a “pleasing aroma” to the Lord, moving God to a decisive determination with regard to the future of the earth.

Both Linzey and Clough make much of ideas of the “cosmic Christ” who is “the reconciler of all things.” The idea of such “cosmic reconciliation” has been a topic of wide-ranging debate in the history of interpretation, and no clear understanding has emerged. That there is some “fallenness” to the universe is far from evident, however, and Linzey makes no exegetical effort to support it or any hoped-for universal salvation.[62] Peake observes, “In its full sense reconciliation can only be of beings endowed with moral and spiritual nature.”[63] Inanimate and non-human creation would not thus be involved. Ralph Martin suggests “a more defined objective” in saying Paul’s intent is “on rebutting any idea that part of the universe is outside the scope of Christ’s reconciling work; and especially he stresses that there is no alien power or hostile spirit-force which can work havoc against the Church.”[64] Christ’s victory on the cross has overcome all evil agents (Col 1:16), placing them under their rightful head.

Linzey’s final christological assertion has to do with Christ serving as humanity’s moral exemplar, particularly his taking the side of the poor and oppressed. Linzey asks how such self-sacrifice and humility cannot extend to human interaction with animals, and indeed it can and does among many who nonetheless cannot embrace Linzey’s entire program of animal liberation.[65] For Linzey, owning, hunting, fishing, shooting, riding, wearing, eating, caging, trapping, exhibiting, virtually anything but letting animals roam in the wilderness, is oppressive.

None of this, however, can be said of Jesus or any other biblical figure. At Jesus’ birth, an angel of the Lord calls shepherds to come and see the newborn king, not to give up their keeping of these animals for food, clothing, and sacrifice. Indeed, Jesus aligned himself with them as the good shepherd (John 10) who lays down his life for his sheep, as well as the gate keeping them safe from thieves and preying animals. That leaders of his church are called pastors or shepherds (poimēn) demonstrates their role in caring for God’s flock (1 Pet 5:2–4).

In keeping with the stipulations of the law, Joseph and Mary offered an animal sacrifice at Jesus’ presentation in the temple (Luke 2:22–24), just as they would have for all other required Jewish festivals. Jesus joined his parents for Passover (Luke 2:41–43) and would have observed this festival of animal sacrifice till his death, the night before which he had his disciples prepare it in anticipation of his offering of himself as “our Passover lamb” who “has been sacrificed” (1 Cor 5:7; 1 Pet 1:19). That he is regularly called the Lamb of God has in view his fulfillment of the Passover sacrifice.

Jesus ignores opportunities to criticize Jacob for having owned flocks and herds (John 4:12) and does not criticize Simon, Andrew, James, and John when he sees them fishing and calls them to follow him. Indeed, at his word, they are all astonished at the great haul of fish they catch (Luke 5:6), reprised after the resurrection (John 21:5–6) when Jesus shares a meal of fish and bread with the disciples. Jesus multiplied the fish and loaves in the feeding of the four and five thousand, for which he offers thanks to God before distributing them (John 6:11 and parallels; Matt 15:36 and parallels). As previously noted of shepherding as pastoral care, also not to be missed is the disciples’ call to become fishers of men, that is, other human beings (halieis anthrōpōn, Matt 4:19), since humans are the focus of salvation.

Jesus was said to have made “all meats [bromata] clean” in Mark 7:19 by his emphasis on what comes out of the heart, not what a person eats. As there were only “clean” and “unclean” animals, this clearly involves eating meat, which Jesus approves. Why else would Jesus tell parables involving killing a fatted calf as part of a celebration (Luke 15:29–30) or ride a donkey into Jerusalem if he were opposed to their domestic use?

From the time of ancient Israel the most important role animals played was for daily diet.[66] Herding was prevalent from the patriarchal period with nomadic herds reaching 150,000–200,000 animals. Lions, wolves, bears, and foxes were among the greatest predators, with dogs used to guard the herd. Animals posing the greatest danger to herds were hunted for pelts, and deer, gazelle, and birds were hunted for food.

Animal sacrifice began at least as early as Abel (Gen 4:3–4) and Noah, when the special sanctity of blood is denoted (Gen 9:4). Sacrifice was part of the cultic system of many peoples (e.g., 1 Sam 6:4 of the Philistines; 2 Kgs 3:27 of Moabite human sacrifice; 2 Kgs 10:24 of Samarian Baal worship), and the patriarchs were no exception. The Levitical system (Lev 1–17) makes clear the details of the divinely commanded system of making atonement, with the bull, ram, or male bird offered in the burnt offering and a ram or lamb for the guilt offering. Any animal without defect could be offered for the fellowship offering. Linzey denies God could have commanded this system, since “the sacrifice of animals is always murder” and “God is no murderer.”[67] He contends, “There is no hint in the Gospels of Jesus’ support for the practice of sacrifice itself,”[68] despite his attending Passover and eating the Passover meal. That this sacrificial system continued even after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection on up to the destruction of the second temple in AD 70 is well recognized, as part of daily worship. “Day after day, masses of victims were slaughtered there and burnt, and in spite of thousands of priests, when one of the great festivals came round the multitude of sacrifices was so great that they could hardly cope with them.”[69] Jeremias repeatedly observes how the “unusually rich meat diet of the priests” made them susceptible to sickness.[70] Finally, contrary to Linzey’s assertion that Jesus’ “cleansing of the temple” was a moral protest against sacrifice,[71] the more consistent and accepted view is that Jesus was enacting prophecy in symbolically declaring its end in his replacement of it as the “new temple,” presaging also the temple’s imminent destruction.[72]

Although Linzey admits the “difficulty and ambiguity” of gospel accounts of Jesus’ eating fish and sending demons into the Gadarene swine, he and others draw heavily on inferences of a peaceable kingdom purportedly inaugurated in his temptation experiences. In Mark 1:13, it is suggested “he was with the wild beasts” as a new Adam restoring paradisal conditions with the animal world.[73] Heil has demonstrated, however, that Jesus is rather to be viewed here as the antitype of Israel amidst a new exodus:

That Jesus is with wild animals in Mark 1:13 does not mean that he is the new Adam who restores a paradisal coexistence with the wild animals. Rather, Jesus’ being with wild animals is part of his being tested by Satan and thus being trained in the wilderness as God’s Son, just as Israel as God’s son was tested and trained in the wilderness during the exodus event.[74]

All of this leaves Linzey to look for help in apocryphal material, which he acknowledges may “be entirely legendary,” though “some may comprise genuine historical reminiscence.”[75] This seems a slim basis on which to overturn the history of Christian thought on the relationship of humans to the animal world.

Salvation in animal theology involves some idea of a peaceable kingdom (Isa 11:1–10) in which there is a reconciliation with nature, animals live peaceably with humans apart from captivity, and vegetarianism is normative. “A creation free of predation and parasitism” “is required if we are to believe in a holy, loving God, Creator and Redeemer, who does, in the end, make all things new.”[76]

Given that an entire history of theology has seen no contradiction between the holy, loving God of Scripture and predation, the onus would seem to be on animal theology to explain how a specialized or obligate carnivore could successfully survive on an herbivorous diet, particularly given that most are unable to extract necessary nutritional requirements from carbohydrates.

While Linzey does note “pain and suffering and death are evils overcome in the passion and resurrection of Christ,”[77] he gives the central NT themes of the death and resurrection of Christ little attention. The cross does not appear to have atoning significance, as it is not propitiatory or substitutionary; rather, it is the consummation of the suffering of God in the incarnation, in the Yes of God by which he is said to have assumed creatureliness, “the free offering to God the Father in the cause of love for fellow creatures.”[78] “In his incarnation, passion and death, Christ takes to himself all suffering and disorder wherever it is present and thus saves all creation from itself. By taking flesh, all flesh is assumed and thus redeemed.”[79] The incarnation is viewed as salvific and the cross and resurrection, though the major focus of the NT, recede in significance.

Clough, expanding on Barth’s idiosyncratic doctrine of the election of all humans in Jesus Christ, says, “all creatures, human and non-human, are elect through Christ’s taking on of creatureliness.”[80] Clough is more interested in the atonement, particularly in view of his notion that non-human animals may be said to be sinful. This he bases on admittedly ambiguous readings of the pre-flood situation in Gen 6, the snake in Eden acting against God’s purposes, God telling Noah he will demand a reckoning for human life from humans and other animals, and, most extensively, the curious cases of animal trials in the Middle Ages. None of this biblical material provides any solid basis for assumptions of moral accountability in animals, which have no spiritual or intellectual capability to understand or respond to a divine mandate. Clough’s appeal to the animal trials evinces the question begging to which this effort is prone.

Secular animal trials began in the thirteenth century in northern and eastern France and then spread throughout the Low Countries, to Germany and Italy, through the eighteenth century, with ecclesiastical trials commencing in the fifteenth century. Pigs were most commonly brought to trial, along with “homicidal” oxen, cows, horses, and dogs. Esther Cohen says secular and clerical hierarchy thought “the practice was juridically meaningless and invalid, for all crime presupposes intent, and beasts possessing neither knowledge of good and evil nor malicious intentions could not be held responsible for their actions.”[81] Nonetheless, deference to folk belief in animal willpower and superstitious human-beast composites like mermaids, women serpents, and werewolves allowed these trials to proceed. Whether they borrowed from ideas of exorcism found in early Christianity or, as Leeson thinks, were used by the Catholic Church to assert its power to supernaturally punish tithe evaders,[82] they drew on popular superstition to assert and maintain Church hegemony. Such analyses do not permit animal trials to buttress any theologically sound idea that animals have moral responsibility or that God has provided for their redemption in Christ.

Clough’s “audacious hope” is “one in which predation is no longer a possibility for human or non-human creatures,”[83] an existence in which wild animals remain wild, though how they would survive without eating meat is not explained.

In stark contrast is Southgate’s vision of a kingdom of continued predation. Southgate feels the tension of the Isa 11 passage, which envisions animals in a new creation and relationship with others that nonetheless allows them to continue to be themselves. “What could the life of a predator look like in the absence of the second law of thermodynamics, and the imperative of ingesting ordered energy to ward off the ever-present slide into decay?”[84] Viewing not death, but incompleteness, as the problem, he draws on a poem by James Dickey entitled “The Heaven of Animals,” in which animals who have “no souls” nonetheless find themselves in heaven where they continue to “hunt, as they have done, But with claws and teeth grown perfect,” “and those who are hunted Know this as their life, Their reward: to walk.” “Under the tree, They fall, they are torn, They rise, they walk again.” For Southgate, “this is heaven, then, that preserves the characteristics of species, but without pain or death or destruction.”[85] How to make sense of such a heaven, perhaps as involving some experience of the prey that delights in the beauty of the predator, or whether there is some resurrection life of the non-human creatures, Southgate cannot say. Here again ideological commitment to a particular vision seems to assert itself over viable biblical, theological, and biological support.

IV. Conclusion

Stephen Budiansky wrote back in 1998, “The premise of animal ‘rights’ is that sentience is sentience, that an animal by virtue above all of its capacity to feel pain deserves equal consideration. But sentience is not sentience, and pain isn’t even pain.”[86] By this he means to repudiate the univocal use of language and imprecise use of concepts central to the ideological commitment of the animal rights movement, not to mention the “gross anthropomorphism” that attributes human thoughts, intentions, and capabilities to animals that seems unique to humans and the interpretative overreach found in numerous studies of animal cognition.

Those same foundational problems are everywhere evident in recent work in animal theology. This article has endeavored to demonstrate how the key concepts of sentience, pain, and suffering as they pertain to animals are insufficiently conceptualized biblically, philosophically, or scientifically and thus unable to bear the weight required of them as foundational to this theology. Animals and humans do not differ merely in degree, but in kind, with the rational being of humanity serving as the basis of the self-consciousness and uniqueness that enables human beings to recognize themselves as those whose pain has meaning, for whom suffering can have a purpose, and for whom the Son of God became a human being in the incarnation of necessity in order to suffer and die for those to whom he served as a covenantal head and as the sacrificial Lamb to take away their sins. Appreciable as some of the aims of animal theology may be in terms of a more loving stewardship for God’s creation, these cannot come at the cost of fundamental tenets of Christian faith such as are found in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Notes

1. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 115.
2. Andew Linzey, Creatures of the Same God: Explorations in Animal Theology (New York: Lantern, 2009), xi.
3. Andrew Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1987), xiii–xiv.
4. Keith Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 201–2; cited in Linzey, Animal Theology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 100; Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 78; Stephen H. Webb, On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 175; David L. Clough, On Animals, vol. 1 of Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), 147.
5. James V. Parker, Animal Minds, Animal Souls, Animal Rights (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010), vi.
6. Linzey, Creatures of the Same God, xii.
7. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 80.
8. Ibid., 36.
9. Ian Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (New York: Harper & Row, 1997), 254.
10. Matthew Boyle, “Essentially Rational Animals,” in Rethinking Epistemology, ed. Günther Abel and James Conant (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 2:398.
11. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 64–67.
12. Boyle, “Essentially Rational Animals,” 2:405.
13. Ibid., 2:424.
14. Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001), 149.
15. Parker, Animal Minds, Animal Souls, Animal Rights, 10.
16. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 80–81.
17. Anil Ananthaswamy, “Roots of Consciousness,” New Scientist 224, no. 2998 (Dec. 6, 2014): 34–37.
18. Charles Birch, Living with the Animals: The Community of God’s Creatures (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1997), 40.
19. Barbour, Religion and Science, 235–37.
20. Linzey, Creatures of the Same God, 15.
21. Linzey, Animal Theology, 20.
22. Cf. Linzey, Creatures of the Same God, note on p. 56, with Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 77–86.
23. Linzey, Creatures of the Same God, xii.
24. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 81.
25. Jonathan M. Cahill, “Grounded in Love: A Theistic Account of Animal Rights,” Journal of Animal Ethics 6 (2016): 74.
26. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 83–84.
27. Russell H. Tuttle, Apes and Human Evolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 592.
28. Christian Smith, Moral Believing Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106.
29. J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 204.
30. Helen S. Proctor, Gemma Carder, and Amelia R. Cornish, “Searching for Animal Sentience: A Systematic Review of the Scientific Literature,” Animals 3 (2013): 884.
31. Ibid., 890.
32. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 117.
33. Ibid., 119.
34. Meric Srokosz and Simon Kolstoe, “Animal Suffering, the Hard Problem of Consciousness and a Reflection on Why We Should Treat Animals Well,” Science & Christian Belief 28 (2016): 4.
35. Ibid., 5.
36. Parker, Animal Minds, 28.
37. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 117.
38. Srokosz and Kolstoe, “Animal Suffering,” 7.
39. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 118.
40. Cottingham, “‘A Brute to the Brutes?’ Descartes’ Treatment of Animals,” Philosophy 53 (1978): 558.
41. Malcolm Jeeves, “What Distinguishes Us from Nonhuman Animals?,” in What About the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology, ed. Joel Green (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 23.
42. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 62.
43. Ibid., 110.
44. Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 183.
45. Ibid., 215.
46. Christopher L. Fisher, “Animals, Humans and X-Men: Human Uniqueness and the Meaning of Personhood,” Theology and Science 3 (2005): 300.
47. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 85.
48. Ibid., 115.
49. Southgate, Groaning of Creation, 28.
50. Linzey, Creatures of the Same God, 49.
51. Ibid., 54.
52. Ibid., 52.
53. Linzey, Animal Theology, 50.
54. Ibid., 68–69.
55. Gerhard Kittel, “legō, logos,” TDNT 4:93, 133.
56. Linzey, Animal Theology, 69.
57. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 199–203.
58. Clough, On Animals, 85–86.
59. Marcus Dods, “The Epistle to the Hebrews,” in The Expositor’s Greek Testament, ed. W. Robertson Nicoll, 5 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961), 4:269.
60. William J. Dumbrell, Covenant and Creation: An Old Testament Covenant Theology (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2013), 17.
61. Chaya Greenberger, “Noah’s Survival and Enduring Legacy,” Jewish Bible Quarterly 45 (2017): 30.
62. Against a cosmic fall, see, for example, Bethany N. Sollereder, God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy Without a Fall (New York: Routledge, 2019), ch. 2; and C. John Collins, Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2003), 147–60.
63. A. S. Peake, “The Epistle to the Colossians,” in Expositor’s Greek Testament, 3:509.
64. Ralph P. Martin, Colossians and Philemon, NCB (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), 60.
65. Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002).
66. Oded Borowski, Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient Israel (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998), 231.
67. Linzey, Animal Theology, 121.
68. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 42.
69. Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135), rev. and ed. Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, and Matthew Black (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1979), 2:308.
70. Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 26, 106, 170.
71. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 42.
72. Cf. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 413–28.
73. Richard Bauckham, “Jesus and the Wild Animals (Mark 1:13): A Christological Image for an Ecological Age,” in Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology, ed. Joel B. Green and Max Turner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 3–21.
74. John P. Heil, “Jesus with the Wild Animals in Mark 1:13, ” CBQ 68 (2006): 77.
75. Linzey, Creatures of the Same God, 71.
76. Ibid., 53.
77. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 82.
78. Linzey, Animal Theology, 110.
79. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 60.
80. Clough, On Animals, 99.
81. Esther Cohen, “Law, Folklore and Animal Lore,” Past and Present 110 (1986): 20.
82. Peter T. Leeson, “Vermin Trials,” Journal of Law and Economics 56 (2013): 811–36.
83. Clough, On Animals, 160.
84. Southgate, Groaning of Creation, 88.
85. Ibid., 89.
86. Budiansky, If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: Free Press, 1998), 193.