ON
HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS
More
on the Doctrine of Creation in David Clough’s On Animals, Vol. 1
I
said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show
that they are but animals. For the fate
of human beings and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the
other. They all have the same breath,
and humans have no advantage over the animals . . .
~
Ecclesiastes 3:18-19
If it is true that the
purpose of all of creation is to be in relationship with God as Trinity, as I
discussed in All Creatures Of Our God And King, what does that mean for the place of humans in creation,
and what does it mean for the place of other animals? How are humans and other animals the same;
what sets them apart? What sets humans
and other animals apart from the rest of creation?
In Chapters 2 and 3 of
David Clough’s On Animals, he seeks
to put all these pieces together. As he
did in Chapter 1, Cough surveys a number of traditional answers to these
questions and considers how they stack up against what scripture has to tell
us. The fundamental point to keep in
mind, Clough reminds us, is that, “[i]n the face of many philosophical and
religious views that posited various forms of continuity between God and
creation, Christian theologians have insisted on the importance of a clear
boundary between the two” (p. 26).
Clough calls this a “radical and distinctively Christian insight” which
undermines all attempts to build a hierarchy of creatures: we are all, humans, other animals, angels,
stars, and rocks, created by and separate from God. We may seek to be with God, but we may not seek to be God. Thus, “we must
recognize that our basic relationship to creation is to recognize that we are
part of it” (p.27).
This brief
biblical survey makes clear the extent to which human beings and other animals
are thought of together in Christian scripture.
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 a common
table in Eden and beyond, together they experience 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 (p. 40).
Here is a wonderful explication
of what Richard Bauckham calls our “common creatureliness” with the animals and
our “horizontal” relationship with them as creatures with them before God,
rather than over them or between them and God, as has so often been asserted.[1] Moreover, Clough continues, animals, like
humans, are “addressed by God and called to live lives in response to God” (p.
41) and are often held up as examples for how humans should live (p. 42). These scriptural references, Clough argues,
belie our human attempts both to separate ourselves from other animals and to
treat animals simply as part of some larger concept of “nature,” failing to
recognize their individuality.
All of this, however, is
not to argue that there is no distinction
between humans and animals. Each type of
animal, including humans, has a unique place before God, notwithstanding our
commonalities. Clough takes up those
differences in Chapter 3, to which we now turn.
In considering the
distinctions among animals, and what might set humans part, Clough warns that
we must proceed with care, arguing that many traditional attempts to do this
have been driven more by philosophy and a desire to elevate humans than by
attention to the animals themselves. The influence of the idea of the Great
Chain of Being, whereby animals are understood to proceed in a hierarchy from
the simple to the complex and from those of little value to those of greater
value, has held too great a sway.
“Theologians,” urges Clough, “have particular reason to be skeptical of
such attempts to determine the value of creatures to their creator” (p.
45). The difficulty of assigning value
to living beings is a problem I have also addressed in my post On Image And Value.
Beginning
with Basil of Caesarea, Clough considers some of the theologians who have
marveled at the wonder of God’s many animal creatures and the fullness of
creation. He also looks at numerous ways
theologians and philosophers and scientists have attempted to catalog and group
different non-human animal species, pointing out where each system falls short. (In the course of this fascinating discussion
he also notes that the line between plant and animal isn’t quite as clear as we
might expect.) He concludes, “To embark
on such a list of possible ways of ordering creatures in a unilinear way is
already to appreciate the oddness of believing that any single principle for
ordering differing creatures could be thought of as definitive” (p. 62). There is no biblical foundation, he asserts,
“for a single and authoritative way of rendering the differences between
creatures” (p. 63). Instead, Adam’s
naming of the animals in Genesis 2 suggests attention to the animals’
particularity; the great creation psalms such as 104 and 148 celebrate the
diversity of God’s works but do not suggest any hierarchy, and the “awe-inspiring
final chapters of Job similarly emphasize the majestic breadth and complexity
of God’s creative endeavour but undermine the possibility of human
comprehension of creation in a tidy scheme” (p. 64). The only suggestion of hierarchy we can glean
from scripture is that human beings “stand above the rest of the created order”
(p.64).
This distinction finds
its origin in Genesis 1:26-28, wherein God creates humans in the image of God
and gives them dominion over the animals. [2] Clough considers the various ways this
distinction has been conceived over the years, including those that suggest
there is something different in the way human are made (substantialist views),
those that suggest humans are to represent God on earth (functional), and those
that suggest humans are uniquely able to be in relationship with God
(relational). The functional view, he
notes, “finds striking and widespread support among recent commentators. . . .
With this shift away from substantialist interpretations of the imago Dei, the long theological
enterprise of seeking to identify a particular unique human characteristic with
the divine image has been brought to an end” (p. 66). Instead, the focus is on what role humans are to play in creation; that is how humans are to live.
In answering this
question, Clough argues, as Christians, we are to look to the New Testament and
to the ultimate image of God: Jesus Christ.
Therefore, he asserts, there is a growing consensus that it is a
theological mistake to ground our understanding of the imago Dei in the doctrine of creation. Instead, it properly belongs with the
doctrine of incarnation, which Cough takes up in Part Two of his book.
Nevertheless, before
ending his discussion of the proper place of humans in creation, Clough takes
up other means that theologians have used to set humans apart from other
animals, beyond the image Dei. Here again, the Great Chain of Being, with
its hierarchy of creatures has played an important role, with humans understood
as being at the top of the material creation, and below the angels, serving as
a kind of bridge between the material and the celestial realms. A related idea was that humans uniquely served
as a sort of microcosm of the universe, containing within themselves
all the elements of creation. “This was
implicit in Aristotle’s contention that human beings possessed a vegetative soul
like plants, a sensitive soul like other animals and, uniquely, a rational soul”
(p. 69). This rational soul, it was
thought, set humans apart from the animals and gave them something in common
with God. As my series Ask The Animals, Parts 1,2,3,and 4,
explain, and as Clough also makes clear, discussing the many recent discoveries
of animal intelligence, “both claims can now be seen as questionable” (p.
70).
Clough then addresses a
host of other proposals that set humans apart from other animals, put forward
by thinkers from Plato to Marx to Mark Twain.
“The astonishing range of these attempts to identify the key differences
between human and other animals is sufficient evidence that no such account can
succeed: instead, we must recognize that
human/animal difference is being used as a trope for discussion of the authors’
preferred features of human beings” (p. 72).
The difficulties lie not only in the fact that many of the attributes
supposedly possessed only by human beings are possessed by many animals, but
also in the fact that these catalogues would often leave out many vulnerable
human beings.
Clough concludes his
discussion with an answer to the objection that if we do not recognize some
significant difference between humans and other animals, then on what basis are
we to make a judgment whether to save an ant or an infant if both are in peril. Clough answers this problem this way: “Such egalitarianism seems to me to be ruled
out in a theological context by the occasions where Jesus affirms God’s care
for non-human creatures as a way of giving his human listeners confidence in
God’s providential care for them” (p. 75); thus, humans are worth many
sparrows.
While the ethical implications of this discussion are
reserved for Volume 2 of Clough’s work, in these two chapters, here he has affirmed the
value of both human and non-human animals, underscored their individuality, and
affirmed their places before God.
Therefore, while we may be confident in passing by an ant to save a
human baby, that is no license to disregard animals (even ants) when they are
in need and certainly no license to treat them cruelty or to see them only as
means to human ends:
As
far as the doctrine of creation goes – the focus of this part of the book – the
only theological supplement to the identification of human particularity in
this way is that we believe human beings have been called on by God to image
God among the other creatures. This
human difference relates primarily to ethics rather than doctrine, however, and
suggests that theologically the human/non-human difference is vocational. God has called human beings to be creatures
in a particular way and take responsibility for the lives of other creatures. Here then we have the authentic theological
construal of the difference between human beings and other creatures: we have been given our task to live as human
creatures and they have been called to be creatures in their many different
ways (p. 76).
In later posts, I will
consider Parts 2 and 3 of Cough’s book, but here, in Part 1, Clough has
provided a powerful response to the dismissive attitude toward animal welfare
that has so thoroughly permeated Christian thought. Here he sets us on the road to a better
understanding of what scripture has to tell us about what it means to be human as well as what it means to be a non-human animal before God.
[1]
Bauckham,
Richard. Living With Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology. Waco:
Baylor University Press, 2011. See Feb. 21, 2014 post, Common Creaturliness: Creation Care andAnimals, Part Four.
[2] Of course, numerous posts
in this blog address my own views on this topic.
1 comment:
Thanks Lois, good post.
Kathy Dunn
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