A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Schleiermacher on the historicity of the creation stories

    In the part in The Christian Faith on creation and preservation, Schleiermacher takes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) modern-seeming approach to the biblical creation stories. He argues that the doctrine of creation is intended to safeguard two points: (1) that everything that exists other than God is ultimately dependent on God and (2) that God was under no “external” constraints in creating, such as being limited by some pre-existent “stuff.”

    Consequently, Christians have no religious stake in any particular scientific or speculative account of the origins of the world. Schleiermacher notes that

    further elaboration of the doctrine of Creation in Dogmatics comes down to us from the times when material even for natural science was taken from the Scriptures and when the elements of all higher knowledge lay hidden in Theology. Hence the complete separation of these two involves our handing over this subject to natural science, which, carrying its researches backward into time, may lead us back to the forces and masses that formed the world, or even further still. (Christian Faith, 40.1)

    He concedes that the “Mosaic” account of creation was accepted as historical by the Reformers, but notes that the various Protestant confessions do not commit the church to that view. He also observes the allegorical interpretation of the “six days” was offered by the Jewish philosopher Philo and that “there always survived a somewhat obscure but healthy feeling that the old record must not be treated as historical in our sense of the word” (40.2).  Even if it was conceded, however, that the account in Genesis was historical, “it would only follow that in this way we had attained to a scientific insight we could not otherwise have acquired” (40.2). This would not be an article of faith in the proper sense, because it does not provide a greater elucidation of the feeling of absolute dependence.

    Schleiermacher takes this route in part because of his separation of philosophy and natural science from religion. Religion is rooted in the experience of absolute dependence, and everything related to dogmatic theology is an elaboration of that experience, as it occurs in the community of faith. But even if we don’t go all the way with Schleiermacher here, we can still agree that what faith says about the dependence of the world on God is a different kind of claim from the theories offered by science about the world’s origin and development.

  • Schleiermacher’s “natural heresies”

    For reasons that aren’t entirely clear even to me, I started reading Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith recently. And the weird thing is, I’m really enjoying it. Schleiermacher is (in)famous as the “father of modern theology” or sometimes “the father of liberal theology”: he tried to re-establish Christian faith on a basis that took into account Enlightenment critics but also went beyond the narrow and sterile rationalist constraints that some Enlightenment thinkers tried to place on religion. Religion, according to Schleiermacher, is not based in thought (philosophy) or action (ethics), but a kind of experience, which he famously described as a “feeling of absolute dependence.” As I read him, this isn’t a purely subjective experience, but a clue to or an apprehension of an objectively existing relationship between the world and God, albeit one that we only become aware of in relation to ourselves. This experience is both the “datum” of religion and something which it is the goal of the religious life to cultivate.

    This root religious experience, however, never comes to us “pure” so to speak. It always appears in a concrete form, which is conditioned by social, cultural, and historical factors, among other things. So, for Christians, the core religious experience is the experience of Jesus as our Redeemer. Everything in Christian theology flows from this. (This experience is always received within a “communion,” or church. Schleiermacher was no religious individualist.) According to Schleiermacher, Jesus possessed a perfect “God-consciousness”–which for him seems to mean something like an unwavering experience of this absolute dependence on the source of being. As Christians, we “catch” this God-consciousness from Jesus by being part of the church, and gradually we come to share in it more and more fully. (I’ve only just finished the–128 page!–introduction to The Christian Faith, so a lot of the details haven’t been worked out yet. But I think this is the general gist.)

    One interesting thing that falls out of this account of the “essence” of Christianity is that Schleiermacher is able to explain what he calls the four “natural heresies” that tend to arise throughout Christian history. If the core of Christian experience is that of Jesus as our Redeemer, then this implies that (1) we are in need of redemption, (2) we can be redeemed, (3) Jesus is sufficiently unlike us that he can be our Redeemer, and (4) Jesus is sufficiently like us that he can be our Redeemer. So, according to Schleiermacher, your four modal heresies are those that deny one of these four propositions:

    –“Pelagianism”–we don’t need redemption as such, though we may need someone who can show us how to be a little better.

    –“Manicheism”–creation is so corrupted/wicked that it is essentially irredeemable.

    –“Nazaritism” or “Ebionitism”–Jesus is just a human like us, so does not posses any special quality that can redeem us.

    –“Docetism”–Jesus only appeared to be fully human, and so is too unlike us to provide the kind of redemption we need.

    Schleiermacher is careful to point out that these are idealized types, and may not be perfectly instantiated in history. But he thinks that identifying them can help further clarify what the essence of Christianity consists in. In any event, I found the discussion enlightening.

  • Getting Anselm right

    I’m reading Robert Sherman’s King, Priest, and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of the Atonement, and I may provide a more complete summary of the book later. But for now I just wanted to highlight Sherman’s spirited defense of St. Anselm’s theory of the Atonement against some of its sloppier critics.

    Longtime readers may know that this is a pet peeve of mine: people who use Anselm as the whipping boy for everything that’s wrong with Western understandings of Christ’s work on the cross. For instance, Anselm is routinely accused of holding to the crudest form of penal substitution when, in fact, he explicitly denies penal substitution!

    Sherman takes aim at those critics who say that Anselm’s God is modeled on a petty feudal lord who must extract his pound of flesh to assuage his wounded honor. He notes that this manages to get Anselm wrong in a couple of fundamental ways. First, he points out that it totally misunderstands Anselm’s conception of God’s “honor.” Honor in Anselm’s scheme refers to the beauty and order of creation: sin can’t “hurt” God, but it can mar God’s good creation, which disrupts the divine intentions for that creation. And this is not some esoteric interpretation of Anselm; he’s very clear about it, as Sherman points out:

    As far as God himself is concerned, nothing can be added to his honor or subtracted from it…. But when the particular creature, either by nature or reason, keeps the order that belongs to it and is, as it were, assigned to it, it is said to obey God and to honor him…. But when it does not will what it ought, it dishonors God, as far as it is concerned, since it does not readily submit itself to his direction, but disturbs the order and beauty of the universe, as far as lies in it, although of course it cannot injure or stain the power and dignity of God. (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo?, quoted by Sherman, p. 189)

    The “order and beauty” of the universe is “disturbed,” for instance, when God’s creatures are victimized and abused, or when the natural environment is despoiled. Human sin has real effects–but for Anselm these are not effects on God’s being per se.

    In fact, it literally makes no sense on Anselm’s understanding of God to suggest–as some critics do–that God’s pride is hurt by sin, and that he demands a blood-sacrifice to restore his honor. This is because, for Anselm, God is impassible–i.e., not subject to change–so nothing creatures can do can affect God’s blessedness. This doesn’t mean that sin isn’t serious–the disruption and defacement of creation threatens to undo God’s purposes. For this reason, God can’t simply “overlook” sin. (Sherman has an interesting discussion here of why simply appealing to the parable of the prodigal son isn’t sufficient to show that the Atonement doesn’t involve reparation for sin; since other creatures are affected by sin, more than simply forgiveness is needed.)

    For Anselm, Christ’s sacrifice is not done to appease God’s wounded pride, but to restore the damage done to creation by human sin. The beauty of Christ’s self-giving, even unto death on the cross, “blots out” the ugliness of sin. As Sherman points out, Anselm’s conception of justice is more aesthetic than strictly retributive (Christ’s sacrifice is “a gift exceeding every debt” as David Bentley Hart has put it). Moreover, Christ’s sacrifice is not just to “cover” human sin, but to restore humanity to its proper end. In Jesus a new humanity is created–one in which we can participate. This restorative function is a key part of how Anselm understands the Atonement.

    None of this is to suggest that Anselm is immune to criticism. But we should criticize what he actually said, not what we might imagine he said.

  • Tidbits from C.S. Lewis

    As my earlier post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into C.S. Lewis’s letters. Here are a few quotes that struck me:

    “I quite agree with what you say about buying books, and love the planning and scheming beforehand, and if they come by post, finding the neat little parcel waiting for you on the hall table and rushing upstairs to open it in the privacy of your own room… (to Arthur Greeves, Mar. 7, 1916)

    “I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life–is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity?” (to his father, Aug. 14, 1925)

    “What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now–except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’ — ‘sacrifice’ — ‘the blood of the Lamb’)–expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.” (to Arthur Greeves, Oct. 18, 1931)

    “I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia–even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work.” (to his brother, Apr. 8, 1932)

    “My own secret is–let rude ears be absent–that to tell you the truth, brother, I don’t like genius. I like enourmously some things that only genius can do: such as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy. But it is the results I like. What I don’t care twopence about is the sense (apparently dear to so many) of being in the hands of “a great man”–you know: his dazzling personality, his lightening energy, the strange force of his mind–and all that.” (to his brother, June 14, 1932)

    “The Tableland [in The Pilgrim’s Regress] represents all high and dry states of mind, of which High Anglicanism then seemed to me to be one–most of the representatives of it whom I had then met being v. harsh people who called themselves scholastics and appeared to be inspired more by hatred of their fathers’ religion than anything else. I wd modify that view now: but I’m still not what you’d call high. To me the real distinction is not between high and low but between religion with real supernaturalism & salvationism on one hand and all watered-down and modernist versions on the other.” (to Sister Penelope, C.S.M.V., Nov. 8, 1939)

    “Fascism and Communism, like all other evils, are potent because of the good they contain or imitate.” (to Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., Jan. 17, 1940)

    “The best Dickens always seems to be the one I have read last! But in a cool hour I put Bleak House top for its sheer prodigality of invention.” (to Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., Nov. 5, 1954)

    “One often wonders how different the content of our faith will look when we see it in the total context. Might it be as if one were living on an infinite earth? Further knowledge wd leave our map of, say, the Atlantic quite correct, but if it turned out to be the estuary of a great river–and the continent thro’ wh. that river flowed turned out to be itself an island–off the shores of a still greater continent–and so on! You see what I mean? Not one jot of Revelation will be proved false: but so many new truths might be added.” (to Dom Bede Griffiths, Feb. 8, 1956)

    “Birth control I won’t give a view on: I’m certainly not prepared to say that it is always wrong.” (to “Mrs. Ashton,” Mar. 13, 1956)

    “That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t.” (to Clyde Kilby, May 7, 1959)

    “No one ever influenced Tolkien–you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.” (to Charles Moorman, May 15, 1959)

    “We must have a talk–I wish you’d write an essay on it–about Punishment. The modern view, by excluding the retributive element and concentrating solely on deterrence and cure, is hideously immoral. It is vile tyranny to submit a man to compulsory “cure” or sacrifice him to the deterrence of others, unless he deserves it.” (to T.S. Eliot, May 25, 1962)

  • Praying with Marjorie Suchocki

    I’ve found that of all the process theologians I’ve read, Marjorie Suchocki is the best at applying process categories and concepts in a meaningful way that avoids much of the forbidding technical jargon. He short book In God’s Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer is a good example of this.

    Suchocki applies a “process-relational” understanding of God and God’s interaction of the world to some of the thornier problems of prayer, such as: How can prayer make a difference to what happens in the world? In doing so, she illuminates both the practice of prayer and the process understanding of God.

    In the first two chapters, Suchocki provides a succinct and elegant summary of her overall epistemological and metaphysical approach. In brief, God, in Suchocki’s process-based understanding, is continually providing the world with an impulse toward realizing its best available possibility for increasing well-being. In turn, in each moment, the world is offering back to God its realization of new possibilities–whether these are the ones God hopes for or whether we fall short in some way. God experiences this new actuality and responds to it in a new set of possibilities. And so on. This “dance” of mutual relation is how Suchocki understands God’s relation to the world. Unlike some traditional understandings of God, the process view sees God as working with and through the created order, rather than bringing things about by divine fiat.

    So imagine with me the dynamics of relationship between God and the world. Think of it as a dance, whereby in every moment of existence God touches the world with guidance toward its communal good in that time and place, and that just as the world receives energy from God it also returns its own energy to God. God gives to the world and receives from the world; the world receives from God and gives to God, ever in interdependent exchange. Imagine this dance to be initiated by the everlasting God acting out of divine freedom, and therefore out of everlasting faithfulness–for if God is free, then God is free to act in consistency with God’s own character. Thus every touch of God is a giftedness reflecting to some degree God’s own character. But only to some degree. For if this dancing God truly relates to the manyness of the world, then God relates to the particularities of the world. God relates not to some ideal world, but to the reality of this world. (p. 24)

    Prayer, then, is a special case of this more general relationship between God and the world. In prayer, we self-consciously make ourselves aware of God’s presence–listening for the voice of God in calling us to realize our possibilities for greater well-being, and offering our prayers to God, to be incorporated into God’s self and made part of future possibilities for the world. Prayer thus “makes a difference” both to us and God.

    In a series of chapters, Suchocki applies this understanding of prayer to intercession, prayers for healing, confession, and other traditional topics. But she puts her unique spin on these by showing how her view of God affects how we understand them. For example, when we pray for someone else, God receives our prayers into the divine experience, and they become part of future possibilities presented to the world. Thus our prayers may have effects far beyond what we can imagine. This threads a line between quasi-magical views of prayer that simply expect God to do what we ask and reductionistic views that see the effects of prayer merely as psychological.

    Suchocki boldly says that God needs prayer because it is part of how God works with creatures to bring about the divine purposes, which she identifies with “communal well-being” for the entire creation. Suchocki doesn’t try to prove that God must do it this way–which is helpful if, like me, you find aspects of process theology appealing, but aren’t necessarily prepared to swallow the whole complicated conceptual apparatus. What she denies, though, that God works without us, which will put her at odds with at least some traditional understandings of prayer, as will her insistence that God is changed and affected by our prayer.

    One strength of the book is that it shows how process thought can make sense of our practices of prayer–we often do pray as though our prayers of petition, intercession, etc. make a difference to God and how things go in the world. On the assumption that God is utterly unchangeable, by contrast, these are harder to make sense of (though theologians have tried to do so in a variety of ways). So you could see In God’s Presence as a kind of argument for the superiority of the process-relational view on the grounds that it makes better sense of certain religious experiences. At the same time, it provides an impetus for praying–prayer really does make a difference and is an indispensable part of the church’s calling.

    Lest this makes it sound like this is a dry, academic tome, Suchocki writes very straightforwardly, avoiding most of the convoluted jargon associated with process theology. She also uses (gasp!) concrete examples–stories of prayer in her life and the life of others–to illustrate her points. While I don’t necessarily agree with the whole of the process perspective, this book changed my perspective on prayer–and more importantly, it made me want to put the book down and actually pray.

  • The Resurrection is not a bludgeon

    If Jesus cannot be accepted as the true revelation of God in his life and teaching, then his resurrection carries no weight. The moral challenge comes first. In his lifetime Jesus had constantly refused to perform supernatural conjuring tricks in order to impress. This still holds good. The resurrection is not there to bludgeon into submission those for whom the Gospel of the sovereignty of God exercised through the absolute and universal law of love is a closed book; for it is a vindication of this sovereignty, and of Jesus as its agent and manifestation. To everyone else it is meaningless and therefore incredible. Appearances to his enemies or to the pagans would thus convey nothing, or, worse still, the wrong thing. Only to those who have already caught the spirit of Jesus’ love will Easter bring true joy, for this joy is precisely that Love reigns at the heart of the universe.

    –John Austin Baker, The Foolishness of God, pp. 259-260

  • On Animals: Redemption

    Picking back up the thread of David Clough’s On Animals, let’s look at the third part, which deals with animal redemption. Clough’s argument throughout has been that it makes more sense to understand God’s great acts (creation, reconciliation, redemption) as including non-humans than as exclusively concerned with humans. This is no less true of redemption than of the other two doctrinal themes. He goes so far as to say that they are “different aspects of a single divine act of graciousness by God towards all that is.” The question then is: Will animals share in human deliverance from sin, suffering, and death, or are they destined to be cast aside as a kind of cosmic detritus?

    Clough cites John Wesley, who argued in his sermon “The Great Deliverance” that non-human animals needed–and would receive–redemption, just as humans would, and John Hildrop, who maintained that God brought each individual creature into existence for a reason, and thus God has reason to maintain them in existence. Clough writes that “[j]ust as we are accustomed to picturing human beings as being gathered up in Christ without regard to when they died, so we must become accustomed to think of other animals, too–ammonites and stegosaurs, dodos and Javan tigers–beign gathered up in the divine plan of redemption.” What God has created, God will redeem.

    An alternative argument for animal redemption draws on considerations of theodicy–the suffering of animals should be compensated for by life after death. While he strongly affirms the reality of animal suffering, Clought rejects this line of argument on the grounds that theodicies generally tend to justify suffering–by seeing it as a necessary part of some overarching plan or system. This portrays God as having to compensate animals for an injustice experienced at his hand. Rather, Clough says, “God must be understood to be the redeemer of all creatures, human and other-than-human, because God has determined to be gracious and faithful to them in this sphere, as well as in their creation and reconciliation, not because they would otherwise have a legitimate cause of complaint.”

    Animal redemption is part and parcel of a vision of cosmic redemption that has deep roots in the Christian tradition. Key New Testament texts here are those that speak of “all things being gathered up in Christ” and God being “all in all.” Origen took these and ran with them in his doctrine of universal restoration. In fact, Clough suggests, the same sorts of considerations that point many in the direction of universal salvation tell equally well in favor of animal redemption.

    In the final chapter, Clough goes on to consider “the shape of redeemed living.” While he is postponing discussion of ethical issues to the second volume of his work, he offers some general thoughts on what redeemed relationships between human and non-human animals would look like. He draws on the eschatological vision of “peace between creatures” offered in key Christian texts. These include the early chapters of Genesis, Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom, and the portrait of the New Jerusalem in Revelation, as well as the church’s stories of saints who “made peace” with wild animals. These suggest that God’s redemptive purpose is that “all creaturely enmity will be overcome in the new creation, and predator and prey will be reconciled to one another.”

    This gives rise to a number of puzzles to which we can offer only speculative answers, such as: Will individual animals be redeemed, or only species? How can predators be reconciled with their prey without losing their essential nature? What does redemption look like for domesticated animals who have had their natures altered by human intervention? Are all animals ultimately to be “tamed,” or is their room for wilderness in the new creation? Clough offers some tentative answers to these questions with which I’m largely in sympathy, but he also cautions against dogmatic certainty when it comes to specifics.

    But the trajectory, he thinks, is clear: the destiny of creation is to live in peace, even if it now “groans as in the pains of childbirth.” And this has practical implications. Whatever the details of our eschatology,

    a vision of what the reconciliation and redemption of all things by God in Christ through the Spirit might mean for relationships between humans and other animals will cause Christians to be motivated to act in whatever ways they can to witness to redeemed patterns of creaturely relations.

    I think the point here is that creaturely solidarity is, or should be, much more deeply woven into theology–and the Christian life more broadly–than has usually been the case. Animals are as deeply involved in God’s acts of creation, reconciliation, and redemption as we are. This has implications for ethics–and maybe also for community life and politics. For example, what would church life look like if we took seriously the view that we are part of a “mixed community” that includes many different kinds of animals? How should we anticipate the creaturely peace that is to characterize the new creation, even while recognizing that we still live in a fallen world? These are the kinds of questions I’d like to see Clough take up in his second volume.

    Previous posts:

    Reading David Clough’s On Animals

    On Animals: Creation

    On Animals: Reconciliation

  • On Animals: reconciliation

    In the second part of On Animals (see previous post here), David Clough turns to Christology. While the topic of creation might strike us as the obvious place where the question of animals would arise, it’s less apparent, at first blush, how they fit in to the great themes of Incarnation and Atonement–grouped together by Clough under the heading of “reconciliation.”

    But this impression quickly disappears, as Clough engages in some of the most original and engaging thinking so far in the book. Clough offers three main arguments for why the Incarnation is relevant to animals. First, since we don’t restrict the significance of the Incarnation to males or Jews (Jesus was, after all, a Jewish man), why should the species boundary be the point at which its effects stop? As John’s gospel says, the Word became flesh, not simply human.

    Second, Clough offers an extension of Karl Barth’s doctrine of election in Christ to include all creation. This at first seems like an unpromising approach–Barth after all is know for his rigorously human-centric account of God’s reconciling work. However, Clough argues that it’s a natural extension of Barth’s radical, Christocentric doctrine of election. “In Barthian terms, if we understand God to be radially ‘for’ creation, nothing less than the election of all creation can give it an adequate place in his theology” (3355).

    Finally, Clough points to the passages in the New Testament–particularly the Pauline epistles–that speak of “all things” being created in Christ, or held together in him, or reconciled in him. It’s very clear that the NT sees the Incarnation as having cosmic–not merely human–significance. “Not merely the being of one species of creature, but the being of every kind of creature is transformed by the event of incarnation” (3480). This move allows Clough to come back to the discussion of the imago dei from part 1: Christ is the true image of God, and we only image God as we are conformed to him. However, as the fleshly incarnation of the Word, Christ makes it possible for all living creatures to “image” aspects of the divine.

    Turning to the Atonement, Clough challenges our belief that animals don’t need reconciliation because they are incapable of sin. He points out that animals do seem to be capable of what we might recognize as “sinful” behavior–using the example of a group of infanticidal and cannibalistic chimpanzees observed by Jane Goodall. This was behavior that was clearly “abnormal” and regarded as such by the other chimps. While we might draw back from attributing moral responsibility to these animals, Clough points out that the line between humans with “free will” and animals without it is much fuzzier than we like to think. We all act from a mixture of causes (both biological and environmental) and conscious motives, and humans probably have less freedom than we think. The difference between us and chimps is more a matter of degree than of kind. Clough also recounts some of the long, strange history of humans putting animals on trial for various crimes (including a fascinating account of an excommunication trial of a swarm of locusts!). The notion that animals are incapable of acting sinfully or viciously is more recent than we might think.

    Recognizing that this is somewhat speculative ground on which to stand, Clough offers another reason for thinking that animals are in need of reconciliation. This is the fact that the animal kingdom is characterized by predation and its attendant bloodshed and suffering. The long history of nature “red in tooth in claw” seems to be at odds with the vision of the “peaceable kingdom” offered in the Bible. Clough rejects a literalist reading of Genesis that would attribute predation and animal suffering to human sin, but he also rejects “evolutionary” theodicies (such as that offered by Christopher Southgate) which portray predation as a necessary part of creation. Instead, Clough prefers what he calls a “trans-temporal” and Christological account of the Fall. The depths of creation’s estrangement from God is only revealed in the light of Christ. It’s not something that happened at some point in time as the result of a single, fateful decision; instead, it is the fact of creaturely estrangement from God throughout history–a fact that is illuminated by the equally trans-temporal effects of the death and resurrection of Christ.

    I have to confess that I find Clough’s account of the Fall opaque. I have a hard time distinguishing the idea of a creation that is estranged from God at every moment throughout history from one in which predation, suffering, and death are necessary elements of the evolutionary process. At the very least, I’d like to see it spelled out in more detail.

    Clough then turns from the need for reconciliation to the means of reconciliation, pointing out that “Christ’s death is not merely like an animal sacrifice–it is an animal sacrifice” (4341). Simply put, the death of Jesus is the death of a human animal. “In Christ, a human animal was sacrificed not for humans but for the sake of all creatures” This creates a certain symmetry between the fact of the sacrifice and the scope of its saving power. This provocative suggestion is not really explored in depth, and I would’ve liked to see a bit more on Clough’s understanding of how this sacrifice makes a differences for (human and non-human) animals. But this minor quibble aside, Clough offers strong reasons for thinking that God’s act of reconciliation, as much as God’s act of creation, encompasses all creatures.

  • On Animals: creation

    As mentioned in my previous post, David Clough’s On Animals is divided into three parts, each focusing on a central Christian doctrinal topic: creation, reconciliation, and redemption.

    Chapters 1-3, making up the section on creation, collectively make the case that (non-human) animals have an independent value and role in God’s creation. Chapter 1 argues that human beings are not the point of creation. “It is not difficult to find Christian theologians stating that human beings are God’s sole or primary purpose in creation. It is harder, however, to find good theological argument in defense of this proposition” (685).* This view, Clough suggests, owes more to Stoicism or Platonism than the Bible, and rests on non-biblical distinctions between “rational” and “non-rational” or “immaterial” and “material” beings.

    By contrast, the Bible is surprisingly reticent about exalting humanity, although we obviously occupy a special place in creation, and affirms the goodness of all created beings. Clough draws heavily on key passages like Psalm 104 and God’s speech to Job to highlight the biblical assertion that non-human animals have their own worth and role to play, quite independent of any benefit to us. Non-human creation is not merely the “scenery” for the human drama; rather, “all creaturely life, and each creature, has a part in God’s purposes” (869).

    In chapter 2, Clough discusses what makes the animal form of life (including both human and non-human) distinctive. Because God is creator of all, there is a “basic creaturely solidarity” between all things, and the Bible frequently portrays humans and animals sharing a common life:

    Together they are given life by their creator as fleshly creatures made of dust and inspired by the breath of life, together they are given common table in Eden and beyond, together they experience the fragility of mortal life, together they are the objects of God’s providential care, together they are given consideration under the law of Israel and its Rabbinic interpreters, together they are subject to God’s judgment and blessing, together they are called to praise their maker and together they gather around God’s throne in the new creation. (1558)

    Animals are distinctive in that they are vulnerable–they depend on the existence of other living organisms to survive, but at the same time they have a capacity for independent action and responsibility (response-ability) before and to God. “It is clear… that it is not only human animals that are addressed by God and called to live in response to God.” (1588)

    Having established the distinctiveness of animals as a theological category, in chapter 3, Clough considers the oft-touted distinction between human and non-animals. A long tradition of both religious and secular thought maintains that humans are superior to animals, and thus worthy of moral consideration that animals aren’t. Usually this entails identifying some trait uniquely possessed by humans, such as reason or free will. But both scientific and theological considerations call into question such an absolute distinction. Post-Darwinian biology has made familiar the idea that boundaries between species are far more fluid than we once thought, and comparative studies of animal behavior and cognition have shown that the differences between humans and animals relative to such things as rationality, emotion, sociability, and even a sense of morality are matters of degree rather than of kind.

    This doesn’t mean that there are no significant differences between humans and non-human animals, but “we need to speak of human uniqueness with considerably more care and sophistication than has commonly been the case” (1949). What Clough emphasizes is that there is a wonderful diversity of animal life, which can’t be ranked along some unilinear “scale of perfection” or “great chain of being” with humans at the top. Traditional rankings usually place creatures higher or lower on the scale to the extent that they resemble humans, but “the project of constructing one particular hierarchy as authoritative is ill-conceived” (2254). Clough quotes Thomas Aquinas to good effect, who wrote that “because [God’s] goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another” (2027). Clough notes that there is “something theologically striking about the sheer abundance of differentiation between creatures” (2055) and that “the Jewish and Christian creation narrative does not allow for some creatures being more distant from God than others” (2201).

    Following many recent commentators, Clough suggests that the idea that humans were created in the “image of God” is best understood in “functionalist” rather than “substantialist” terms. That is to say, it refers to a task we are given to do (to represent God as caretakers of God’s creation), not to something we are or have (rationality, free will, etc.). He further notes that a fully Christian understanding of the image of God must make reference to Jesus Christ, who alone is the true “image of the invisible God.” This raises the question of how, or to what extent, the Incarnation and Atonement can be considered inclusive of non-human animal life, which is the topic of the second part of the book.
    ———————————————–
    *Parenthetical references refer to “location numbers” in the Kindle e-book edition. If someone knows of a different way of citing passages in an e-book, I’d be interested to hear it.

  • Reading David Clough’s On Animals

    Over the weekend, I started reading the British theologian David Clough‘s On Animals: Systematic Theology (Volume 1). Clough, who co-edited this excellent collection on animals and theology, writes that he had originally intended to write a book about animals and Christian ethics, but found that the doctrinal foundations for such a project were so underdeveloped that he needed to write an entire volume on doctrine before getting to the ethical implications! (Volume 2, as I understand it, will cover the ethical upshot of the doctrinal points developed in this volume.)

    The book is organized around the themes of creation, reconciliation, and redemption. Clough argues that, when properly understood, traditional formulations of these doctrines have implications for the place of animals that are far different than usually assumed. For example, the first two chapters on creation (which is as far as I’ve gotten) make the case that creation is not for the sake of human beings. Many theologians have maintained just this, but that’s largely, Clough contends, because they uncritically adopted positions from extra-biblical sources such as Stoicism, Platonism, or gnosticism (in the case of several of the church fathers) or had absorbed secular zeal for mastery over the natural world (as happened among some early-modern theologians). A better reading of the Bible and Christian faith, Clough says, is that creation is for the sake of God’s fellowship with all creatures and that (non-human) animals have their own place and vocation before God that is not merely to serve humanity.

    I plan to blog more about Clough’s book as I make my way through it. (And note that the hardcover is listed at $120, while the Kindle version is a mere $15.)