All Dogs (Don't Necessarily) Go To Heaven

Do animals go to heaven?

This question keeps coming up. I have discussed it at least three times within the last month, once with my own children after my mother had to have her dog put to sleep. Is that just coincidence? Without going all into that can of worms, I’ll just say I doubt it.

First I must make two preliminary remarks.

One, I am firing this off, so expect it to ramble and to not be anything like airtight.

Two, following N.T. Wright and others, I do not believe that the emphasis in the New Testament is on “going to heaven” so much as it is on taking part of the resurrection, a.k.a., inheriting the Kingdom of God, a.k.a., inheriting the earth. I do not deny that the spirits of the righteous who have departed “go to heaven”, but I believe that this is provisional until the time in which heaven and earth are joined and both the heavens and the earth are made new. So the real question for me in this is Will animals take part in the resurrection? This seems to me a much more scriptural and incarnational way of putting the question.

A seventh grader at the school where I teach recently answered the above question in the affirmative. One of his central reasons was as follows. “Animals have never sinned and never opposed God.” This is an enormously complex issue that must be treated with many fine distinctions that I do not have the ability to make. However, I will say that, generally speaking, I believe this is a true statement. Man is responsible for the Fall. Man is the culprit, and insofar as Creation is fallen, it is fallen as a result of man’s failure as federal head and steward over Creation. That is to say, I don’t believe that God holds Creation responsible for its own fallen-ness in the same way that he holds man responsible for his.

However, there may be gradations of responsibility in this. The closer a creature approaches to rational thought, the more responsibility it may bear for its own fallen-ness. In other words, the more its actions are conscious and volitional rather than just instinctual, it may begin to contribute more to its own fallen-ness; its fallen-ness may become less and less passive, and more and more active, the closer it approaches human consciousness. (I know I'm butchering basic philosophical terminology here, but I admit to being just a regular old guy, so please be gracious.)

George MacDonald or C.S. Lewis (or maybe both) said something to the effect that humans bestow a measure of personhood on the animals that they love. I have no scripture to back this up (although perhaps some could be found), but in my experience with animals, this rings true. At any rate, I am ready at this point to make a rough and provisional distinction between three types of animals.

First, there are wild animals that just sort of do what they do. They hunt. They eat. They defecate. They sleep. They breed. Now this activity may not be ideal. For example, before the Fall, animals probably would not have eaten one another, and I don’t think that God is ecstatically pleased with this arrangement, or that he looks on it with indifference or unqualified approval. However, I do not think that he looks on it with anger, either. I don’t believe that he blames predators for being predatory. I do not believe that he considers this kind of activity to be sin (at least not sin with a high hand), although I think that it does have its origins in man’s sin and is a less than ideal situation. I think God is content to let it be so for now, but that when everything is eschatologically “fixed”, there will be no more of this business. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and so on.

Second, there are what we might refer to (for lack of a better term) as feral animals, e.g., alley cats and wild dogs and crocodiles who live in sewers (is that an urban legend?) and hyenas and vultures and so on. Maybe I ought to have just called them scavengers. Anyway, it may be that such animals, some of them living in proximity to humans and absorbing some of their ethos, actually begin to approach something like real moral evil. I’m not sure about that, but it could be, at least in some situations. If an animal becomes bloodthirsty, if an animal eats human flesh and becomes voracious for it, if a woman “approacheth an animal to lie down thereto” – these and similar situations may change the status of the animal in terms of God’s judgment. It appears from the Old Testament laws that animals involved in lewd activities with humans, or animals that killed humans, were at least to be treated as guilty, for they were to be executed (sometimes along with the humans who perpetrated such acts with them). I think God has placed an instinctual knowledge within animals (or at least within certain kinds of animals, perhaps what we would call the higher animals) of the kinds of activities they are not to engage in with respect to humans, and if the animal transgresses these limits, we can say, at least in some sense, that the animal is being presumptuous, i.e., sinful.

Incidentally, I believe this situation was widespread before the flood. Genesis 6: 5-12 includes this: “And the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them…Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.” Man is clearly bearing the brunt of the responsibility for all of this violence and corruption, but the animals are implicated too. Again, I think that man initiated all of this bad behavior, that they recruited animals to go along with their sin, but that the animals then developed a taste for it and began to take part in it presumptuously and volitionally, at least to some extent.

Lastly, there are domestic animals (and, I suppose, the gentler varieties of wild animals, e.g., manatees, dolphins, doe-doe birds, etc.) that find their greatest happiness in obedience to a human master, or at least in some measure of comfortable proximity to humans. Among these are the animals that I believe, in ideal contexts, can most closely approach actual personhood. The humans who are responsible for them can, I believe, develop, cultivate, bequeath, a measure of personhood – and thus perhaps immortality – on them. These are animals that men form lasting, deep, and fraternal relationships with. I would be frankly be surprised if these animals were not present in the new earth, either as a reward for their own fidelity, or as an additional joy for the resurrected humans who once loved them, or both.

I admit to having no proof texts for any of these notions, although I believe there is some indirect scriptural warrant for some of it, especially if one will allow me to speculate a good deal beyond the express content of scripture.

God exercises dominion over creation in two ways that are specifically spelled out for us in Genesis chapter 1. First, he creates all things ex nihilo by speaking. Second, he names – delimits, constrains, defines, bestows being and character on – the things which he has created. Man is of course created in God’s image and shares God’s dominion over creation, and the way that he expressly (according to Genesis 1) exercises his dominion over the animals is by naming them.

There appears to me to be something analogous between God’s relationship with Man (the pinnacle of Creation whom God formed with his hands, named, and then breathed life into) and man’s relationship with the animals. Perhaps this is where man’s creativity is most like God’s in respect to its power. Man cannot create anything ex nihilo, and much less can he create life in this way. Man has the power to form a statue from rock, but he cannot breathe life into it. However, in his dominion over the animals – which is the part of Creation that the scripture actually dwells on in regard to its special subjection to man – perhaps man has the privilege of bequeathing a measure of life to them. God imparted his life to man when he breathed life into him. Perhaps man has the privilege and power to bequeath some measure of this life into the animals as well. Perhaps this would have been a part of subduing Creation: man discovering, then developing, the various and sundry hidden powers of intellect and rationality latent within the rest of Creation. And perhaps it is even now a part of what Creation groans for as it endures the present subjection to futility and awaits the glorious liberty of the sons of God. I don’t swear it is so, but I believe it is so. And I also believe that any animal that has been the recipient of such life from a man will be present with us in the new heavens and new earth.