Early in my blogging career (on Verbum Ipsum, my Blogspot predecessor to ATR) I, perhaps with delusions of grandeur, wrote a five-part series called “The Atonement and the Problem of Evil” (the series is archived here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V). My reason for writing it was a hunch that the problem of evil is best addressed not just by trying to answer the question “Why is there so much evil in the world?” but also by talking about what God is doing about the evil in the world. Theodicy should not be separated from soteriology, in other words.

I think it holds up fairly well, but in retrospect I see that I neglected an important topic, the problem of animal suffering. Many thinkers including C.S. Lewis and one of my old teachers, philosopher (and atheist) William Rowe see the problem of animal suffering as one of the most difficult problems for any theodicy. This is because none of the standard responses to human suffering seem available for dealing with non-human suffering. Animals can’t be morally improved by suffering, nor can they be said to deserve their suffering as punishment for sin. It can’t even be chalked up to a necessary consequence of free will, since we don’t think animals have free will, at least not in sense used by traditional “free will” theodicies. In short, much animal suffering seems to be severe, gratuitous, and without redeeming features of any sort. The question, then is whether we have reason to believe that God is a) concerned about animal suffering and b) is going to do something about it.

I think we do have reasons to believe that God is concerned about animal suffering and will do something about it based on the kind of God that we believe he has revealed himself as. All Christians agree that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus reveal the character of God. This character is one of self-giving love that enters into solidarity with us by sharing our human condition. And this love is exemplified on the Cross as nowhere else: Jesus “loved his own to the end” (Jn. 13.1). But does this have any relevance for animal suffering? In his Animal Theology Andrew Linzey suggests that the Cross shows us not only God’s solidarity with human suffering, but God’s solidarity with the suffering of all sentient creatures. “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” (p. 50).

If God has entered into solidarity and made a new covenant not only with all human beings, but with “all flesh,” then it might not be too much of a stretch to think that God will raise all flesh, all sentient creatures, to newness of life. If Jesus is the firstfruits of a new creation, why shouldn’t we follow the Bible in anticipating that this will include more than human beings? This seems a more promising approach to theodicy than one that tries to write off animal suffering as necessary to the greater good of the whole. If “not even a sparrow falls” without our Heavenly Father’s knowledge, can we consign billions of sentient creatures to exclusion from his Kingdom?

Obviously any kind of post-mortem existence for animals raises some difficult questions since we don’t really know what kind of “selves” animals have, especially the lower ones. Then again, there are some difficult questions about post-mortem human existence and I don’t know that we can draw a bright line between human beings and other animls such that only the former are capable of surviving death. Whatever else we know it seems virtually certain that animals have some degree of “subjectivity” which could, in principle, be resurrected or re-embodied in some way.

If Christians are right that God created the world and called it good and that he entered into that creation in a unique and miraculous way, then I think we can reasonably suppose that God has purposes for his creation that extend beyond his purposes for human beings. Clearly we occupy a pivotal position in those purposes if Christian teaching is to be believed, but we don’t exhaust them. Did God create the natural world and billions of living creatures merely to discard them? Just as we believe that our bodies will, in some way that we can’t really imagine, be raised, I think we can hopefully affirm that our animal kin will be raised to share, in a way appropriate to their natures, in the life of the Blessed Trinity.