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.

Wal-Mart Isn't An Eschatology, Either

As the old folks say back home, I'm "outta heart" with Doug Wilson. First of all, I can't remember my username for his blog, and since he changed the furniture around on there, I can't figure out how to get it to send me a reminder. Second, he posted something on there that I desperately want to respond to, but, like I said, I can't remember my username.

In this post of his, he starts out talking about the Pretenders song in which Chrissy Hynde asks what happened to the Ohio she used to know, since now instead of rivers and trees, it's a shopping mall. Then he goes into how folks who get fixated on the good old days are experiencing a type of arrested development and refusing to move ahead with the general eschatological momentum. He sums all of this up by saying that "Nostalgia is not an eschatology".

Well, let me begin by confessing that I decide what I am going to think largely by checking Doug's blog to see what he thinks. I am a product of American public education. As a result, I am mostly untrained in the art of thinking for myself, and my ideas are largely derivative. Whatever, it's one of the things us average folks just accept at some point. Nevertheless, I'm going to go out on a dialectical limb and disagree with the guru on this one.

Now on one hand I can of course appreciate what he's saying. The past is filled with many heroic epochs infinitely more valuable the 1950's but nevertheless infintely less valuable than whatever it is we will experience when God's will is done on Earth as it is in Heaven. From this perspective, for me to lament the archetypally fecund first half of the 2oth century is a bit retrograde. If eschatological man is going to be infinitely greater than Charlemagne, it goes without saying that he will surpass Barney Fife.

But on the other hand, the sentimental thing we refer to as nostalgia is not the only thing folks experience when they meditate on, or value, or even long for, the past. C.S. Lewis touches on this in The Weight of Glory. Wordsworth was wrong to consider his childhood the actual source of the loftiness and transcendence he perceived in the world, but he was not wrong to mine his childhood for the intimations of glory that his childhood actually did contain. The past is as much God's work as the future is. The acorn exists for the sake of the oak, but an acorn is not contemptible because it is not an oak.

Speaking of Lewis, I think he might agree with me that what we call decadent nations are those which more nearly attained their own measure of glory in the past than they are doing at present. I am thinking of something like what Lewis calls Logres in That Hideous Strength: that true angel of the British Isles that has always existed along with that other development we call merely England. If anything like this is possible, then looking back is sometimes really a type of looking forward, a way of hoping that what is and always has been best and most glorious about a nation will finally prevail.

Lastly, there's the whole thing too where what we call progress really ain't. That's what I mean when I say that Wal-Mart isn't an eschatology, either. Nostalgia or no, I would have preferred the indigenous live oaks and cypresses around Orlando to all the plastic trees in Disneyworld.

Can Any Good Thing Come From Alabama?

I just had an interesting conversation with a fellow Christian. He was surprised to hear that I believe that God has some special plan for an ethnic, national Israel, and that it involves actual land. Among reformed types (I know some of them), it is customary to dismiss this idea as dispensational pre-millenialism of the Tim LaHaye/Hal Lindsay variety. Don't we post-millenialists (okay, amillenialists too) know that the promises of the Old Testament have been universalized to include all ethnic groups? Don't we know that the New Earth is going to include the whole planet, not just Israel? Don't we know that he is a Jew who is one inwardly and not outwardly (and, if we're honest about what we really think, that this really applies slightly more to gentile Christians than to real, ethnic, bloodline sons of Abraham)?

I recognize that this notion of God loving an actual place could throw a kink in a fellow's systematics. But when I read the Bible - the Psalter, the Prophets, Paul - I can't ignore God's passionate insistence on how much he loves that little strip of land over there on the eastern Mediterranean.

Is all that "curse those who curse you" and "bless those who bless you" business really just rhetorical?

How about when God says to Israel, "Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Is this just "symbolic"? Something that has to be interpreted "spiritually" by twenty-first century evangelicals (who are undoubtedly the most spiritually enlightened group of people ever to exist)? Is this something God was really adressing to the New Testament church but allowed the Jews to believe applied to them for a time? Because whatever you and I may say about it, the Jews were certainly convinced that these things applied to them. Otherwise, why was Jeremiah so hurt and confused that he blurted out, "Ah, Lord God, surely thou hast greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, Ye shall have peace; whereas the sword reaches unto the soul." Oh, Jeremiah, you silly thing - none of that ever really applied to Israel any way. God was talking about us, not you. So see? No reason to get all huffy.

An even more disconcerting interpretation is that God really did feel that way about Israel back then, but now that the Old Testament is "obsolete" he's just kind of moved on, just kind of forgotten all those declarations of love he made to Israel once upon a time.

No, guys. This is one of those times where rigorous sytematics has to be tempered (as logical and philosophical constructs must ever be) by the overall ethos of scripture. Simply put, we must not allow our love for systematization to render us up a God who writes love poetry that he doesn't really mean. That would be the foolishness of Aaron: I ran these verses through the machine, and out came this god.

Do a little thought experiment with me. First, try to forget for a minute that the Old Testament has been made perfectly persipicuous to us. Set aside for a moment the knowledge that contemporary American evangelicals have exhaustively plummed the depths of the Hebrew scriptures and have analyzed away all of their mysterious, eastern, pre-democratic and pre-industrial elements.

Next, try reading the Old Testament as if it were a parchment just delivered to you in the desert by a fiery seraphim after you've eaten nothing but grasshoppers for a month (instead of a textbook with explanatory notes sold to you by a nerdy librarian and that you've done twenty semester hours on in an upper-middle class seminary run by a bunch of white folks). Read it as if it were the thundering oracles of a jealous oriental diety who was known to the surrounding pagans (and feared by them) as a mountain dweller.

Lastly, check out Romans 11. Romans is of course where the bulk of the ammo comes from for the other side of this argument. But isn't it just like God to throw down something in the middle of someone's airtight, proof-texted case just in order to, you know, mess it up? Paul doesn't appear to be taking the everybody-is-spiritually-a-Jew angle in Romans 11, folks (or, as it is otherwise known, the doctrine of Isreal-really-means-the-Church). No, he is very consciously, deliberately, and overtly contrasting Jews and Gentiles in this passage.

Now then, it must be obvious that I am not a master guru scholar of the scriptures. I am not a trained theologian in any sense. I do not know the languages, and I have not taken the classes (although I have the highest regard and deference for anyone who does and has). But I can read English passably well; and insofar as our English translations are reliable vessels of God's Word, I've read it a good bit. And the God that I read about in there loves rivers, and mountains, and valleys - not only that, but he loves particular mountains, rivers, and valleys. The Bible says so, over and over and over. It's not just in there to sound pretty, either. It's true. It's a real part of God's character.

What about you? Is there some place, some locality, some region, some culture, some town, some family home, some neighborhood, some acre of backwoods, some creek, some beach, some stretch of backroad that you love? That you miss? That you draw a great degree of your personal identity from? That you weep for, because it's been sold to strangers, or turned into a development, or flooded by a lake for fat cats on ski-doos, or neglected and allowed to dilapidate? I bet there is. Even if you don't think so right now - maybe you were a military kid, or maybe you just don't get all mushy and sentimental like other folks (or could it be that you cynically regard what is most human about you as sentimentality and mush?) - even so, I bet if you meditate on it honestly for an hour, you will realize there is some place like that for you.

Where does it come from, this mysterious attachment to place? Is it just a freak of human nature with no significance? Is it just something poets and songwriters go on and on about to justify their careers or maladjustment (or both)? Pffffffffft. Come on. You love some place because God loves some place. In fact, the fact that you love someplace is Him loving that place through you. Loving a place is an indicator of human-ness. People with no attachment to place are deficiently human. And that's just another way of saying that their imago Dei is messed up. We are bearers of God's likeness, and everything that is essentially human is his image in us. To love a place is a fundamental element of being a person. Read The Lord of the Rings again if you don't believe me. Or Faulkner. Or Dostoevsky. Or the Old Testament.

Anyway, just so all of you know, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, the eschaton, the millenium, whenever all of that gets straightened out, I plan on receiving the state of Alabama as my especial province. My duty will be to restore her to her Edenic beauty. I love Alabama. It's my home, even though I haven't lived there in some years. It's where I first dwelled among mountains and rivers and fireflies and sycamores. It's where I first heard fiddles and banjos and sawmill blades buzzing on green lumber. It's where as a child I was called in to wash up for dinner.

Chesterton once said something about loving a place - something about an insane asylum, or a slum - something to the effect that even that place would have been beautiful if someone had just loved it. That's precisely why Israel is going to be like the Garden of the Lord someday - because God loves it.