Christian view of animals

[Guest guest]

Since it's been brought up, I thought I'd quote a few passages from the book "Dominion" by Matthew Scully. (I)f you want to get scriptural about it, that very same Bible always invoked for harsh dominion insistently calls mankind in just this spiritual direction, as in the post-Flood Second Covenant -- right after the creatures are delivered into our hands -- when we are told: "I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood.... And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations ... and it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud ... and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the

earth." I don't know how much preachin' and teachin' I have heard over the years about all of the covenanting between God and man. I do not recall ever once hearing that our fellow creatures were included, too. Yet there it is.... Echoing throughout the Old Testament is a call to rapprochement, at least in our hearts -- as when Hosea, pasuing in his rebuke of Israel, reminds us of the restoration to come: "And in that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground, and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely." Isaiah, hardly the maudlin type, prophesizes that once day "The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf with the young liion and the fatling together; and the little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.... They shall not hunt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of theLord, as the waters cover the sea." This book is not really so much an exposition of the Christian position on animal rights as it is a call to Christians to change their thinking on it, and the moral, spiritual, and Biblical reasons why. It really is a good read, and if you are ever going to argue for vegetarianism with a Christian, it has a lot of good knowledge. Beyond that, it is an often just plain touching call to care for animals, as Skully says for example: If in any given situation, we have it in our power either to leave the creature there in his dark pen or let him out into the sun and breeze and feed him and let him play and sleep and cavort with his fellows -- for me it's an easy call. Let him go. Let him enjoy his fleeting time on the earth, and stop bringing his kind into the world solely to suffer and die. It doesn't seem like much to us, the creatures' little lives of grazing and capering and raising their young and fleeing natural predators. Yet is is the life given to them, not by breeder but by Creator. It is all they have. It is their part in the story, a beautiful part beyond the understanding of man, and who is anyone to treat it lightly? Nothing to us -- but for them it is the world. peace, sharon

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