On Animals: Volume I: Systematic Theology

by David L. Clough

This volume is a project in systematic theology: a rigorous engagement with the Christian tradition in relation to animals under the doctrinal headings of creation, reconciliation and redemption and in dialogue with the Bible and theological voices central to the tradition. The book shows that such engagement with the tradition with the question of the animal in mind produces surprising answers that challenge modern anthropocentric assumptions. For the most part, therefore, the novelty of the project lies in the questions raised, rather than the proposal of innovative answers to it. The transformation in our thinking about animals for which the book argues results in the main from looking squarely for the first time at the sum of what we are already committed to believing about other animals and their place in God's creation.

Genres: Theology, Animals

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

David Clough is Professor of Theology and Applied Sciences at the University of Aberdeen. He has published on Karl Barth's ethics, Christian pacifism and the place of animals in Christian theology and ethics. He is a Methodist Local Preacher and the co-founder of CreatureKind, which works to engage churches and other Christian institutions with farmed animal welfare as a faith issue.

Reviews

[Philip Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first volume in a two-volume set written by the English theologian David Clough. The first volume is an attempt to work out the theological territory concerning animals. To that end the book is sub-divided into three parts, with each part involving discussion on a distinct theological category. Part 1 is concerned with understanding animals through the doctrine of creation. Part 2 is concerned with animals understood through divine reconciliation with the creation: animals viewed through the Incarnation and atoning death of Jesus Christ. Part 3 is concerned with the theological territory surrounding redemption of the creation and animals.

This volume is intended to lay the theological foundations in preparation for the second volume which will examine animals through the lens of theologically-informed ethics.

I will be critically reviewing David Clough's book in more detail on my blog http://animalsmattertogod.wordpress.com/

[Trey Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you’ve circled passages, underlined sentences, and scribbled marginalia on almost every page of a book, you know you’ve read a damn good book. I was sad to finish it, though I’ve got enough subsequent questions and connections to continue reflecting for a long time, and this work’s second volume, On Animals: Theological Ethics, is now out for me to dive into.

I’ve always loved “nature” in general and animals in particular, and have been vegetarian-ish for a significant part of my life, but beyond holding a somewhat vague conviction that it’s the vocation of human animals to care for other-than-human animals, I’d never done any really deep theological reflection on animals in themselves/ourselves, what we might (not) have ontologically in common, and what other-than-human animals’ lives mean in, consist of in, and receive from the life and promise of God.

Until now. What a beautiful, illuminating, and incisive read. Clough’s book is a meditation on the above and so much more – all mediated through a reconstruction and faithful expansion of the Christocentric project of the pivotal 20th century theologian Karl Barth.

Instead of seeing other-than-human animals as a derivative category or an optional-but-unnecessary realm for theology, Clough makes a strong, biblically-rooted case that believing the love/work of God in Christ creates animals, reconciles animals, and finally redeems/restores animals is not a niche alternative view but rather an crucial facet of Orthodoxy. In Christ – the firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1.15), the Word made flesh (not human, at least according to John 1.14), the reconciler of all things (Colossians 1.19), and the restorer/gatherer-up of all things (Ephesians 1.10 and Acts 3.21) – other-than-human animals are not disposable, not utilitarian “automata” created primarily to serve humans. Rather, they are creatures with inherent dignity, beauty, and self-directed purpose: they are important to God in themselves and saved by God for God's self.

One of my favorite sentences in the book, from a section when Clough is reflecting on (1) the danger of theologies that arrogantly submit that really, when it comes right down to it, God created the universe for humans; and (2) what God’s promised redemption of all things in Christ might actually look like in the future, or now, or outside of time and history, or somehow all of the above:

“[Let’s not] underestimat[e] the kind of transformation human beings will need to participate in redeemed creaturely life: if the new creation will be so transformed that human beings can live happily in peace with one another, the change necessary to allow dinosaurs and bacteria bodily resurrection [too] seems of little consequence. It seems to me that a diplodocus or pterodactyl might have just as much to gain from a life set free from bondage to decay as I do.”

People who love animals or want to love animals more, read this book. People who love theology, read this book. People who want to understand what the general point of Jesus is, anyway, read this book.

Highly, highly recommend.

[Joshua Duffy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Regarding 'Animal Theology' Clough has set an impressive foundation for a generation to build upon. He covers three main areas in regards to animals: creation, reconciliation, and redemption. Impressively researched and solidly challenging, this is a book which anyone writing on the subject on animal theology will undoubtedly reference.

[Jim Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read anything quite like this in a while.

Or ever, I suppose.

But what I mean by "in a while" is that it's been a long time since I've read the kind of philosophy or theology textbooks intended for "scholarly" study. I was once, long ago, a Philosophy/Theology student, and read this stuff a lot.

I usually didn't love it.

I often complained that academic writing had no life to it, was so dry and so stylized and full of jargon that it was incomprehensible to anyone outside of a college classroom, which made it more or less worthless to the work of changing the world for the better.

I won't say that about this, exactly. This has value.

But it's dry theology classroom writing and it suffers from many of the things that plague other theology texts written for theology students.

That said, it's unique, to my knowledge, in its efforts to bring animals and human treatment of animals into the dryer, stuffier parts of the theology world.

This is only a Part I, dealing specifically with animals in Systematic Theology. If you're not familiar with Systematic Theology, that's okay. It's basically a genre in which people talk about God but and somehow manage to make it boring.

I am really looking forward to reading Part II, where Cough will get into the implications of Part I as pertains to Christian ethics. That will show whether or not the work he put in here has a pay off, if preparing the ground lets him build something worth building.

The good stuff in here?

First off, there are tons and tons and tons of footnotes and a nice long bibliography, just like every book of this sort should have, and some of the titles he mentions or quotes from have me very curious. For instance, I now really want to read "Theology on the Menu" by Grumett and Muers, as well as a book called "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals" by E.P. Evans. Clough summarizes a mind-blowing story from that latter book, detailing how a community 1545 and again in 1587 took weevils to court for ruining their grapes. The defense included some animal-rights (wrong term, but close enough) language and argumentation that was not only ahead of its time, but probably ahead of our time. Really cool stuff, and the story was fun to read.

Clough explores the murderous habits of a chimp named Passion and her daughter Pom, as told by Jane Goodall, and makes a convincing theological argument that this illustrates that animals can be "sinful" and thus also in need of redemption. Again, it's a great story, though a sad one.

The goal of the book is admirable. Clough is dealing with topics often neglected or even mocked by average Christians and by ivory towered theologians, and he does so honestly, passionately, and with intellectual rigor. I like that. I like anything that is going to push people to take the reality of human-caused animal suffering more seriously.

Do I love his quick dealings with the classic "problem of evil?" Not really. But to be fair, I've never read a theologian who has ever dealt satisfactorily with the problem of evil (which is why I'm not a Christian; the problem of evil is a deal breaker). He plays "time games" to get around it, a habit I've always been annoyed with, the use of abstract language that pretends to say something but doesn't and sort of brushes the problem away. But that theological issue isn't his focus here, so maybe in a book where that was more in his sights he'd provide something better.

Do I love his reading of the Old Testament through a New Testament lens? Not really. Maybe I'm making too much of it and that's not his intention as much as it seems to be. And of course it's not just Clough. Reading the OT as if it's meaning can only be made clear through the revelations of the NT is a pretty standard move. But it sucks. It sort of disregards the people who wrote, lived, breathed the OT. According to this line of thought, the people for whom the OT was most alive (those who wrote it, were governed by it, who lived through it) couldn't understand it nearly as well as people reading it thousands of years later. God's word was apparently aimed more at the modern reader than the people he led through the desert. I find that obnoxious. But again, standard.

And there's a certain amount of mental gymnastics going on here, trying to make moral and rational sense of things that, if you step back, maybe just don't make moral and rational sense. I get that as a non-believer it's easier for me to say that. As a believer, of course one wants it all to work out. But from the outside, it's like watching someone who takes the original Star Wars trilogy very seriously trying to justify why Luke couldn't do this or that with the force, or why Vader was able to catch the Emperor off guard, or why storm troopers who are clones of some great warrior are such terrible shots, or whatever, and getting themselves worked into knots when it doesn't make sense. You want to say "hey, some of this doesn't make sense, it's just people writing stories" but I guess sometimes that's not what a person wants to hear.

Anyone, I'm glad I read this, and I even learned two new words: "anthropomonism" and "apokatastasis." I'll try to use both often.

And it made me like John Wesley more.

And maybe even Karl Barth.

So there's that.

[Daniel Crouch · Rating 4 out of 5]

While his work here does not explicitly bring up the issue of violence against animals (a topic presumably dealt with in the next volume), Clough directs toward a theological understanding of animals—through the categories of creation, reconciliation, and redemption—that has clear implications for how we treat animals. This connection between the eschatology vision and our ethics today is described by Moltmann and adopted by Clough.

A resemblance to “How Can We Love Our Enemies When We Kill Our Friends,” by Lysen and Martens, I want to bring out, is twofold: (1) they both direct our attention not toward violence toward our enemies or non-violence as a form of cooperation but the violence we (often inadvertently) enact against our friends—or at least those we did not intend to in the case of animals; and (2) they both bring industrialized violence to the fore of the conversation. The latter is, in my not-yet-professional opinion, the most important issue facing the West in modern times, our indirect participation in evil. Even as the timid defender of capitalism that I am, it is undeniable that our daily lives have us tied up in markets we would otherwise condemn. This returns us to the clash between the Neo-Augustinians and Neo-Anabaptists, categories again introduced in the Lysen and Martens article, for their our ethical arguments that might alleviate our guilt in such participation—and simultaneously accept Clough’s theology without the moral implications—but these are arguments that need to be had.

[Suzanne McDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book on a theme that is close to my heart. I have some quibbles (e.g. I think Clough's expansion of the image of God and election don't cut it scripturally, and are not actually necessary for the theological outcomes he rightly seeks- although if you're a Barthian on election, note that his is a superb extension of Barth's trajectory), but this is a richly thought-provoking book, the focus of which has been so neglected and is so much needed. I'm grateful for this volume, and eager to read what I expect will be an equally good - and profoundly challenging - sequel on ethics.

[Marcus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Way too wordy to get anything out of. It felt very hard to read. I'm too down on it to write further about it - but could have been about 50% shorter!

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some interesting points, but many rebuttals left unanswered. I regret buying this book, as I could not bring myself to finish it.

[Beth Quick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must-read for Christians who are interested in animal ethics. As I pursue studies in animal ethics, this work is really serving as a foundation for my thinking about animals.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but essential reading for those wishing to think about animals from a Christian perspective. Clough successfully de-anthropomorphises the doctrines of creation, reconciliation and redemptions by arguing that non-human animals 1) have intrinsic value apart from human purposes; 2) are capable of sin and need reconciliation with their creator; and 3) will receive redemption and participate in the new heaven and new earth.

While he occasionally blurs the distinction too far--in my opinion--between humans and non-human animals, this was a fantastic work that will provoke the minds of all who engage with it. Highly recommended.