On the Need for Eco-Salvation

By CreatureKind Fellow, Shea Watts

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it; – Psalm 24:1

… you save humans and animals alike, O Lord. – Psalm 36:6

In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh… – Acts 2:17 

that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself… – 2 Corinthians 5:19

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Does God, the Parent Hen who gathers their chicklings under their wings, care about the wellbeing or suffering of animals? What does Jesus, Lamb of God and Good Shepherd, have to offer for the billions of animals who suffer and are slaughtered for an unsustainable food production system? Does it pain God that colonizing humans are destroying the good creation, a world that God loves and reconciles? I want to explore these questions by considering the notion of salvation beyond the category of the human to the earth to include all life within it. By salvation, I mean the work of removing barriers for creaturely flourishing and freedom. 

The idea of extending our understanding and scope of salvation to other-than-human animals and the earth is not as large of a leap as it may first appear. In fact, sacred texts are rife with ancient examples that suggest we share more in common with our animal kin than we realize. While the earthling, haadam, is made in God’s image and likeness in Genesis, this does not establish humans at the pinnacle of God’s creation. Humans in these ancient creation stories are called not to practice power over the creation, but are commanded to tend to it, to offer care, and to use their means to preserve the wellbeing of other animals and the world. 

Consider the words of the psalmist, who considers God’s salvific plan to include the other-than-human. Listen to Peter’s reiteration of Joel’s prophetic vision that the Spirit will be poured out on “all flesh,” that is, all life. Ponder the idea proposed in Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth that God in Christ was reconciling the world (kosmos, i.e., the world). When we take into account the Scriptures’ expansive portrait of God’s salvation, we realize how limited we have made it when we deem only humans as worthy to be saved. And by doing so, we condemn other-than-human forms of life to death. The word “salvation” also signifies safety and the preservation of life. To perpetuate harm and even death, then, is theological malpractice. A critical lens into how our faith has shaped and shapes our relations to others reveals how what we think about God and ourselves affects how we act in the world.

Over the course of history, hubristic humans have ascended, assumed, and aspired to a sort of god-status over the creation. This is rooted in a deep misunderstanding of dominion as domination or total control over the creation, rather than the deep care and responsibility inherent in the creation stories. And there are scriptures that we can reference to make that argument as well. What I want to point out, however, is that our special arrogance compels us to commit acts that seem to be grandiose but are in truth not as generative as the Creator’s. To be sure, colonizing humans’ work largely has been marked by destruction, not creation: we have brought about death for countless species and pushed ecosystems to the brink of utter annihilation. For this reason, this geological age of evolution is called the Anthropocene, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant—and detrimental—influence on climate and the environment. Anthropocene is what happens when humans play god. If we are gods, certainly we are not good. As bell hooks writes, “When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.” Conversely, the opposite is also true: if we destroy the earth, we destroy ourselves. Does God not want to preserve and “save” the goodness of the creation? 

In order to combat our propensity to destroy, I believe we must first repent from our self-idolatry and reimagine our faith to include other-than-human animals and the earth itself. 

Ivone Gebara writes: “Patriarchal theology, and especially creation theology, legitimized both oppression and domination of nature and the existence of hierarchal relationships among all beings.” For Gebara, anthropocentrism leads to androcentrism. Her work shows how oppression is multifaceted and interconnected. For example, human supremacy, fueled by rationalism and individualism, interprets the world and what matters most based solely on our human experiences and beliefs. By virtue of this way of constructing the world, the human is placed at the center of relations and the top of the hierarchy of being. The closer that someone is to the human, the more likely we are to offer our care and compassion. It is why we care for our pets. But this cuts in both directions. It is also why we animalize others when they do not live up to our human standards, constructs, or norms. Racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, etc., are examples of how the category of the “human” wields power-over, power that undergirds our unjust and unsustainable practices as well as motivates unspeakable acts and atrocities we commit against one another. 

But this is not what God intends. Human-worship, or self-idolatry, therefore, is “sin,” which simply means “to miss the mark.” (The mark, here, is God’s intrinsic value, love, and concern that God has for all of creation). In the Christian tradition, responding to sin requires repentance. Repentance connotes a change, a turning-away from one way of being and acting and a move in the opposite direction. For many Christians, this act of repentance is a prerequisite for salvation. But understandings of salvation are often as problematic as are notions about the human’s place in creation. Who is included or excluded from God’s salvific plan, and what it means to be “saved,” are historical debates responsible for schisms, fractures, and new movements within the tradition. Ultimately, these are questions about what is at stake and by what means God is involved in the history of our world.

To be honest, I am not interested in pie-in-the-sky narratives of salvation. I do not seek to be saved from the fires of hell to a heaven with streets of gold. Life is what I know, but what lies beyond death is a mystery. I am more interested in the goings-on of the world in the here and now, for example, the wildfires of California and elsewhere that threaten our lives and the lives of our animal kin. I am more concerned with the plight of peoples, especially those affected by industrial farming and agriculture, the suffering of other-than-human animals, and the ongoing destruction of our world’s habitats and ecosystems. It is clear in the Lord’s Prayer that the thrust of God’s kin-dom is downward. How can God’s kin-dom exist “on earth” if there is no earth or life left on it? The scriptures do tell us the rocks will cry out. 

“But what about Jesus?” you ask. Good question. Episcopal priest and horse enthusiast Carter Heyward writes that we must “de-anthropocentrize” Jesus, that is “to show that humankind is not the center of God’s realm any more than the earth is the center of the universe… Christ is as much a pelican, an elephant, and a tree as she is our brother from Nazareth.” How should we treat animals when we realize that Christ is present in them? Heyward continues: 

It is rather, for eco-liberation theologians, that the earth and all creatures are embedded deeply in God and that God—in her christic paradigm—reveals herself through all creatures great and small. Christ is the pelican, the sparrow, the tree, and the water, just as Christ is the subjugated human.

The point is not to deny that God, in Christ, was present in Jesus. Rather, she suggests that God’s presence is not limited to Jesus. Expanding our understanding of God’s presence with and in all creatures, especially those who suffer, shakes loose the shackles of individualism that sever our lives from others. The Christian church in the West has largely missed and downplayed the collective nature of sin by focusing on the purportedly autonomous human individual. Of course, then, the collective nature of salvation also is too narrow. What God has to say, and whether my understanding of theology can address the exigencies and vicissitudes of these urgent crises, is my ultimate concern. Any talk of salvation that does not take into account these things falls well short of the wholeness, safety, and flourishing that God desires for all of creation. 

My work as a fellow with CreatureKind has taught me a valuable lesson, mainly, that any approach to the work of animal welfare and eco-theology should be done with humility. When we consider the harm we humans have inflicted upon the earth, it should bring us to a poignant reality: that we need to repent from our sinful ways and be converted to a new reality that sees all of God’s creation as worthy of salvation. This is what the kin-dom of God is like. The psalmist writes: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” Such beautiful, broad language invites us to consider that the breadth of God’s salvation is all-encompassing and more far-reaching than we may realize. 

Shea Watts (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate in Theology and Cultural Criticism at Chicago Theological Seminary. Shea, his spouse, and their three cats live in Charlotte, NC, where Shea works at Christ Episcopal Church as the Associate Director of Contemporary Worship and Liturgy. His project with CreatureKind reflects his belief that faith and food are inextricably entwined, and Christian practices should be informed and shaped by faith. He will be focusing on education at his local parish, raising awareness of the harms of factory farming in NC and constructing a theology of connectedness, creatureliness, and responsibility for the earth.

VIDEO: An Expert Explains...The Ethics of Farming Animals

Check out this video that the University of Chester produced of CreatureKind co-founder David Clough talking through the basic ethical issues of using animals for food!

Objections to a Christian Food Ethic Treating the Consumption of Animals

The following is an excerpt of a paper ("Consuming Animal Creatures: The Christian Ethics of Eating Animals") written and given by David Clough at the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics annual meeting and published in the journal Studies in Christian Ethics. Read the full article. 

by David Clough

David Clough

We are rightly sceptical about ethical arguments for radical positions, so before presenting arguments in favour of my position, let me consider three potentially fatal points that would quickly defeat the argument I am seeking to develop.

First, it seems unlikely that the vast majority of Christians today and in past generations could be in error in failing to recognise that their faith required abstention from most animal products. There is a strong and plausible argument from conservatism that should make us pause before accepting this judgement, and a parallel requirement on anyone advancing such a claim to provide an error theory explaining how things could have come to such a pass. My explanation for this is that the ways in which farmed animals are raised has changed radically and Christians, together with others, have been inattentive to these changes. I was shocked when I first came across the claim, not so long ago, that the first large-scale rearing of farmed animals exclusively for meat was in England in the late eighteenth century: up to that point meat was largely a by-product of keeping animals for other reasons, such as milk, eggs and wool. Meat was a cash-crop made possible by the Highland clearances in Scotland and the enclosures in England, displacing the largely arable agriculture of the poor, and, as Percy Bysshe Shelley noted in 1813, causing wastage of food productivity ‘absolutely incapable of calculation’.(1) The intensification of farmed animal production has developed over the past two hundred years since, but accelerated rapidly from the mid-twentieth century. Most farmed animals are now raised in ways that would be unrecognisable in comparison to conditions only a few decades ago. Broiler hens are a particularly extreme example: bred through intricate multi-generational programmes to reach slaughter weight at only 35 days old, their young legs unfit to support their unwieldy bodies, living the entirety of their lives in warehouses with artificial night and day, automated feeding and climate control, with human interaction restricted to a daily patrol to remove the dead, and finally stuffing them into crates for transport to slaughter. I still remember the experience of holding a straggly 16 day old hen in the midst of a huge broiler shed, surrounded by 26,000 of its fellows, with 23 similar sheds nearby, filled with the 600,000 birds that had been delivered together as day-old chicks two weeks previously. I had the strong sense that these animals were not being treated as animals, but as a crop, grown for harvest. The hen I held had only just lost its fluffy yellow chick feathers, yet was nearly halfway through its life. Pigs fare little better: most are also raised indoors in crowded conditions where farmers often resort to cutting off their tails to reduce the injuries from aggression and boredom that such intelligent and socially complex animals experience in such a monotonous environment.

Organic, free-range, family run chicken farm. Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

My point is that most of what now generates the need for radical changes in the Christian ethics of consuming animals is radical changes in farmed animal practice—changes which the farming industry has understandably not been active in publicising to consumers, and of which most consumers have therefore been unaware.

Therefore, the act of eating chicken today is different ethically from the act of our grandparents eating chicken, which they did much less frequently because before the invention of broiler hens chicken was a luxury compared with cheaper alternatives such as beef.(2) My position does not imply a retrospective judgement that our grandparents were wrong in eating farmed animals, but that the nature of the industry now is that we almost always are. It is also helpful to note that my position is also not a retrospective judgement in relation to what Jesus ate, which is commonly raised in discussions of Christian vegetarianism. Animals were not raised intensively in first-century Palestine, so my argument that intensively raised farmed animals should be off the table for Christians do not apply to Jesus’ dietary choices. In summary, I am arguing that the primary reason most Christians have not recognised the ethical problems associated with eating animal products is that farmed animal practice has changed comparatively recently and we have failed to attend to and appreciate the ethical implications of this change.

Rescued rooster. Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

A second potential way of defeating my argument that Christians should not consume products derived from farmed animals that have not been allowed to flourish as fellow creatures of God begins from New Testament teaching. ‘Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ (Mk 7:18-19). These scatological words of Jesus recorded by Mark and echoed by Matthew (Mt. 15:11, 16) seem to short-circuit any Christian food ethics, especially as Mark adds the parenthesis that in saying this Jesus declared all foods clean. Other New Testament passages echo this license to eat freely: Jesus allows his disciples to pluck heads of grain on the Sabbath and eat them (Mk 2:23- 24 and par.); Paul states that only those weak in conscience are concerned about eating meat offered to idols, and states that eating or not eating is irrelevant to our relationship to God (1 Cor. 8:4-8; cf. Rom. 14:2); and Peter receives a shocking vision in which he is told to kill and eat all kinds of animals, because God has made them all clean (Acts 10:9- 16). Clearly, the very particular context of early Christian communities negotiating their relationship with Jewish food practices is a crucial background here, and is inappropriate to determine Christian food ethics entirely within this context, but the texts do not encourage Christian attention to the ethics of eating. Given this early history, it is surprising that Christian monastic movements so often made stringent dietary demands of their members, and that traditions of fasting became so widespread, but the Reformation questioned this practice, with Luther reemphasising Paul’s position that neither eating nor fasting counts for anything,(3) and much more recently in 1966 Roman Catholic fasting requirements were relaxed.(4) All this seems an unpromising context for Christian attention to the ethics of what we eat.

What we consume, including what we take in through our mouths, has obvious and problematic impacts on other humans, on non-human animals, and on the wider environment.

Yet what we eat is of very clear and direct relevance for Christian ethics, as captured memorably in the title of Ron Sider’s 1978 book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.(5) What we consume, including what we take in through our mouths, has obvious and problematic impacts on other humans, on non-human animals, and on the wider environment. To take one example: we currently devote 78 per cent of all agricultural land to raising farmed animals, and feed more than one third of global cereal output to those animals.(6) Philosophers and theologians from Plato onwards have noted that raising animals for meat is an inefficient use of land, and it is abundantly clear that fewer people would go hungry and thirsty if the land were used to grow crops instead, where this is possible.(7) We may disagree about the ethical implications of this observation, but we cannot reasonably use the biblical passages cited above to deny its relevance for Christian ethics.

As the growing literature in this area confirms, twenty-first-century Christian ethics cannot therefore afford to leave food ethics beyond its range of concerns.(8) There is nothing wrong in eating an apple as such, but if food is scarce and eating it would be to take more than our share, then the decision to take and eat it is obviously an ethical one. Similarly, if the apple has been produced under conditions that fail to provide adequately for agricultural workers, or using pesticides that poison sources of water, or do other unwarranted damage to other animals or the environment, this wider context makes the decision to purchase and consume it relevant to ethics. In a Christian context what we eat is an ethical question because of the implications of our consumption for fellow creatures of God. This is the basis for a Christian ethics of food.

On dairy and veal farms, babies like this one are taken from their mothers within hours of birth and placed alone into small crates. Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

In this article, I want to focus on a particular part of this issue: the ethics of consuming animal products. Here we encounter a third possible defeater to the argument I announced. You may agree that Christian food ethics should properly take account of the implications of our consumption for our human neighbours, but deny that we should be concerned about the impacts on other animals. There are good theological foundations for such a lack of concern for animals. In Augustine’s discussion of the Decalogue prohibition of murder in The City of God, he notes that some people have said that the prohibition of killing should be extended to beasts and cattle, but that this would lead to a reductio ad absurdam because if it is unlawful to kill animals, why not plants as well? To avoid involving ‘ourselves in the foul error of the Manichees’, Augustine draws on the Greek idea of the soul as threefold: plants have a nutritive soul, animals have a sensitive soul in addition, but humans uniquely have a rational soul. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ does not refer to plants because they are not sensitive, and does not refer to animals because they have no society with us in reason, he argues, and because God has ordained that their deaths and lives may justly serve our use.(9) When Aquinas considers whether it is permissible to kill any living thing in the Summa theologica, he cites Augustine’s argument about animals being irrational, and adds Aristotle’s view in the Politics that plants were created for the sake of animals and animals for the sake of human beings.(10) Aquinas draws on Aristotle to argue that, just as some human races are ‘intended by nature for slavery’ so that it is just to go to war to enslave them, so we can see animals as naturally enslaved for the use of others.(11) Elsewhere in the Summa, Aquinas argues that animals are excluded from consideration in relation to both justice and charity.(12)

Christians have biblical and theological grounds for recognising animal creatures as different from plants, and these differences have implications for how we treat them

Let us agree to agree with Augustine and Aquinas that the Decalogue does not prohibit killing animals, and agree to disagree absolutely with Aristotle and Aquinas in their view that there are humans who are naturally ordered to be slaves to others. What should we make of the argumentation between these two points? First, while Augustine is right that killing animals is not prohibited here, he is wrong that we have no way of recognising the difference between killing animals and plants. As we shall see below, Christians have biblical and theological grounds for recognising animal creatures as different from plants, and these differences have implications for how we treat them. Our rejection of Aquinas’s analogy from races naturally destined to be slaves ought to lead us to question the analogous Aristotelian logic that plants were created for animals and animals for humans. Genesis 1, notably, provides no basis for such a claim: the creatures of each day are declared good in themselves without reference to their utility to any other creatures.(13) Genesis 1 gives humans dominion over other animals, but its specification of plants as food both for animals and humans suggests that this dominion does not include the taking of their lives, and the peaceable coexistence of humans with the animals in Genesis 2 strengthens the case for a dominion that does not involve killing. After the fateful events of Genesis 3, and after the flood God causes in eventual response, God gives permission for the first time for humans to eat other animals provided they do not consume their lifeblood (Gen. 9.3-4), but we might well follow Luther and many other theologians in interpreting this as a departure from the ideal of Genesis 1, especially in the light of prophetic visions of an end to animal sacrifice and the Messianic reign bringing peace between humans and animals, and Paul’s anticipation of the whole creation freed from its groaning bondage.(14) We should also question Augustine’s use of the criterion of reason to identify creatures we may and may not kill: there are human beings not capable of reason whom we rightly wish to protect, and we need to recognise that the abundant examples of animal reasoning offered in contemporary animal studies—such as the politicking of chimpanzees, the abstract logic of parrots, the innovative tool-fashioning of crows, and the ability of dolphins to parse grammar, to take a few of myriad possible examples—mean the Greek idea of a binary divide between humans and other animals on the basis of rationality is unsustainable.(15) The early fourteenth-century English commentary on the Ten Commandments, Dives and Pauper, seems preferable to Augustine and Aquinas’s discussions at this point. It notes that Genesis 9 must mean animals are excluded from the Decalogue prohibition on killing, but interprets not consuming animals with their blood as prohibiting cruelty, ‘For God that made all has care of all, and he shall take vengeance on all that misuse his creatures’.(16) Karl Barth, influenced by Albert Schweitzer’s vision of reverence for all life, recognised the serious ethical attention Christians need to give to fellow animal creatures, stating that animals belong to God, not to human beings, and that therefore any human treatment of other animals must be ‘careful, considerate, friendly and above all understanding’.(17) While Barth considers that this could include killing other animals for food, he judges that such killing could only be obedience to God where it is done under the pressure of necessity. Otherwise, Barth comments strikingly, such killing is nothing less than murder.(18) Augustine, Aquinas, the author of Dives and Pauper, and Barth are right to recognise that Genesis 9 is a strong argument against the idea that vegetarianism is a universal requirement for Christians, but their positions do not indicate that animals are of no moral account, and we are clearly not necessarily guilty of the ‘foul error of the Manichees’ in considering that Christians might have faith-based reasons to be concerned about their treatment of animals.

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

My judgement, then, is that there are no convincing fundamental objections to a Christian ethics of food, nor to thinking Christianly about the ethics of eating animals in particular. I will return to some more specific objections to my argument below, but in the next section I proceed with my positive argument for the position that Christians have strong faith-based reasons to avoid consuming animal products derived from animals that have not been allowed to flourish as fellow creatures of God.

You can read the full article by following this link. 

Footnotes:

1. Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006), p. 403; Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet quoted by Stuart, pp. 405–406.

2. A. Godley and B. Williams, Democratizing Luxury and the Contentious ‘Invention of the Technological Chicken’in Britain, Business History Review (Reading: Centre for Institutional Performance, University of Reading, 2009), p. 1.

3. See, for example, Luther’s commentary on Gal. 6:15 in Lectures on Galations (Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, eds Helmut T. Lehmann, and Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1958), vol. 27, p. 138).

4. In Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Constitution Paenitemini he allowed local bishops to replace Friday fasts from meat with other forms of penance. Pope Paul VI, Paenitemini: On Fast and Abstinence (Rome: Vatican, 1966), ch. III.

5. Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997 [1978]).

6. David Clough, On Animals: Vol. II. Theological Ethics (London: T & T Clark/Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2017), ch. 2.

7. Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, p. 402, citing Plato’s Republic, 373d; Clough, On Animals II, ch. 2.

8. See, for example, Stephen H. Webb, Good Eating, The Christian Practice of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001); Rachel Muers and David Grumett (eds), Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology (London: T   & T Clark, 2008); L. Shannon Jung, Food for Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004); Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

9. Saint Augustine, The City of God, ed. R. V. G. Tasker, trans. John Healey (London: Dent & Sons, 1945), I.19.

10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Blackfriars, 1963), II-II, 64.1, citing Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), I.8, 1256b.

11. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, 64.1.

12. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.2, qu. 102, a. 6; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2.2, qu. 25, a. 3. It is important to note that there are other much more positive dimensions of Aquinas’s thought for engaging theologically with animals. For discussion of these, see Judith A. Barad, Aquinas on the Nature and Treatment of Animals (San Francisco, CA and London: International Scholars, 1995) and John Berkman, ‘Towards a Thomistic Theology of Animality’, in Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough (eds), Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Other Animals (London: SCM, 2009).

13. Gen. 1:4a, 10b, 12b, 18b, 21b, 25b.

14.  Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 1–5, Luther’s Works, vol. I, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1958), p. 36; Isa. 1:11; 66:3; 11:6-9; 65:25-26; Rom. 8.19-22.

15. David Clough, On Animals: Vol. I. Systematic Theology (London: T & T Clark/Continuum, 2012), pp. 30, 69–70.

16. Priscilla Heath Barnum (ed.), Dives and Pauper (Oxford: Early English Text Society/Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 35 (my rendition in modern English).

17.  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III/4, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. A. T. MacKay et al. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1961), p. 352.

18.  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4., pp. 354–55. As noted above, I am not arguing in this article for Christian vegetarianism or veganism, but Barth’s argument here seems to be the most promising starting point for such an argument, given that for most humans today, killing animals is not necessary to gain adequate nutrition.