Christianity and the roots of anti-animal sentiment

Over at the blog Year of Plenty, Craig Goodwin reviews Laura Hobgood-Oster’s recent book The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals. It’s a generally positive review, but at the end Goodwin takes issue with some of Hobgood-Oster’s explanations for our troubled relationship with the animal world:

The references and historical background offered on these key doctrines of the Christian faith are too abbreviated and simplistic. For example I have an entire shelf of my library that is taken up by Karl Barth’s Dogmatics wherein Barth lays out thousands of pages of complex theological perspectives (the joke is that not even Barth read all of Barth.) To sum up Barth’s theology of the atonement in a few paragraphs and to suggest that this is a root cause of the problem is inadequate for the argument being put forth in the chapter.

Hobgood-Oster’s arguments in the concluding chapter regarding the influence of the Enlightenment on the disconnect are much more on target. The quote from Descartes regarding animals as unthinking “automata” is fascinating and informative.

I’d likely agree that Hobgood-Oster’s book, which is pitched toward a popular audience, probably doesn’t do full justice to the nuances of Barth’s doctrine of the atonement. (I don’t have the book in front of me, but I’m willing to agree this is the case.) On the other hand, it’s equally simplistic to blame our history of mistreating animals and neglecting their interests on the Enlightenment, which has in any event become much too convenient a whipping-boy in recent theology.

As Andrew Linzey and others have documented pretty exhaustively, the historical Christian tradition is pretty ambivalent about the status of animals. While there are lots of examples of saints showing compassion to animals and some examples of faith inspiring reform on animals’ behalf, official theology and church teaching have generally taken a much more negative view of non-human animals. Linzey has put a lot of effort into recovering the “animal-positive” aspects of the Christian tradition, but even he admits that this has been an uphill battle. The fact is that for most of its history Christianity has been overwhelmingly concerned with human beings and only tangentially, if at all, with non-humans. Fortunately, both the Christian and Enlightenment traditions have resources that can foster a greater concern for animals’ interests and the place in God’s creation.

Quote of the day

What makes “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” interesting, to the extent that something that’s so fundamentally idiotic and soul-deadening can also be “interesting,” is what you might call its aesthetic and ontological ambivalence.

From Andrew O’Hehir’s review at Salon.

Cities are for people, not cars

At least that’s the attitude some European cities are beginning to take, according to this report from the NYT. In order to create more environmentally friendly, less congested, and more livable cities, Europeans are “creating environments openly hostile to cars.”

Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.

The article notes the contrast with the U.S.:

“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”

U.S. cities are under less pressure to make cities car-free, partly because we haven’t signed the Kyoto Protocol, which was aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and we’re apparently not interested in meeting Clean Air Act requirements. In other words, the U.S. urban model is much less concerned with environmental and human health.

Usually this is explained as a simple difference of cultures, where freedom-loving Americans cling to their cars while those pantywaist socialist Europeans try to force everyone onto mass transit (or, God forbid, bicycles!). However, as the article notes, Europeans were on trajectory toward a more American-style model of car ownership and use, but this has been pretty successfully reversed by determined public policy.

It’s also worth pointing out that American “car culture” is not a simple result of individualism or the benevolent workings of the free market. The balance of forms of transportation has been tilted in favor of the auto by specific public policy choices like road construction, land use regulations, and building codes. These choices (not to mention our direct and indirect subsidization of the fossil fuel industry) all make it easier for Americans to choose driving. The European experiment shows that different choices can lead to a different quality of life in cities.

Ward and Lewis on post-mortem repentance and the possibility of universal redemption

…it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel to suppose that, though violence is prohibited in this age, it will be perfectly acceptable in the age to come. The German writer Friedrich Nietzsche called this resentissement, the desire for delayed revenge, the belief that we might have to suffer persecution now, but God will take revenge in the end. The true Christian perception is that the cross of Christ is God’s last word on violence. The divine love will never turn into divine hatred. It will go as far as possible to bring people to divine life, and it will always seek the welfare of every sentient being. And that is the last word.

–Keith Ward, Re-thinking Christianity, pp. 41-42

Interestingly, Ward doesn’t think this rules out the idea of hell, at least in a qualified sense. He says that God cannot force people to embrace the path of love against their will. “[I]t is possible for rational creatures to exclude themselves from love, and therefore from the divine life” (p. 42). As a result, people might find themselves, after death, in a hell of their own making where they experience the consequences of the choices they have made. Nevertheless, he believes that the divine love remains insistent in trying to draw people into repentance, and that such repentance is possible even in hell. “A God of unlimited love would go to any lengths to persuade them to return to the path of eternal life, and to help them on that path” (p. 42).

This sounds similar to the view of hell sketched by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce–people are in hell because they won’t choose to let go of their sins, their hatreds, the resentments. But they could. Purgatory and hell are not two separate realms (as in Dante); the difference is whether one chooses to leave. Lewis also imaginatively depicts God’s grace trying to draw people back. In his telling this takes the form of redeemed humans–usually people that the damned knew in the earthly life–entreating them to come “higher up and further in.”

Where I’m not sure Ward and Lewis would agree is whether there is, at some point, a moment of decision after which one’s eternal destiny is fixed. Both deny that such a moment occurs before death–in both Lewis and Ward post-mortem repentance is a possibility. But Lewis seems more inclined to think that there is a moment when one decides decisively for or against God. (His book is called The Great Divorce, after all.) Ward, on the other hand, seems more optimistic that the divine love will never give up on the unrepentant and that universal salvation is something to be hoped for.

Friday Metal: Scar Symmetry, “Seers of the Eschaton”

Bike commute update

It’s been about a month or so since I started commuting to work by bike, and my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. The Capital Bikeshare has worked out extremely well–I haven’t run into any problems with bikes being unavailable or there not being room to dock the bike at my destination station.

The most challenging aspect of the whole thing has probably been getting the logistics down. First, there’s the route. D.C. has a fair number of bike lanes, but also a fair number of busy streets with heavy traffic and drivers who are in a big hurry. But I’ve mapped a few routes that maximize bike lanes and/or stick to secondary streets. I think a misperception I had initially was the traffic would be extremely hairy, but the nature of dense city driving is that, by and large, cars simply aren’t able to drive that fast during the morning or evening commute. Of course, you still have to watchful and attentive.

Another aspect of the commute that has required some thought is the weather. D.C. has notoriously hot and muggy summers, and I don’t want to arrive at the office dripping with sweat if I can help it. So far, though, I’ve found that if I simply pack an extra shirt I can ride in normal street clothes (e.g., khakis and a polo shirt) and easily freshen up with a shirt change and some minor ablutions when I get to the office. My commute’s only about 2.5 miles and with the breeze created by the ride I stay cooler than I thought I would. Things may change if we get into stretches of upper-90s later in the summer, though.

The most rewarding part of the experience so far has been that it’s just flat-out fun. Cycling can give you a great sense of freedom and grace as you whiz through the streets, but at the same time it’s extremely peaceful, allowing you to be present to your surroundings with multiple senses in a way that driving makes impossible. Coasting through the tree-lined streets of Capitol Hill at 7 in the morning makes for a pretty enjoyable way to start the day. How many people can say that they actually find their commute relaxing?

White House: dropping bombs on Libya isn’t “hostilities”

The New York Times is reporting that President Obama has chosen to disregard, or at least overrule, the view of some of the top lawyers in his administration on the legality of the continuing war in Libya. The head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the General Counsel of the Defense Department have apparently both advised the president that the ongoing military action is not consistent with the War Powers Resolution. The act, which was passed in the wake of Vietnam, requires the president to seek congressional authorization for war 60 days after the onset of hostilities, except in cases where the United States is under attack. The war in Libya obviously doesn’t qualify, but other lawyers in the administration have argued that because the U.S. is now largely playing a supporting role in the NATO campaign, it doesn’t rise to the level of “hostilities.” The Times reporter, Charlie Savage, notes that it is “extraordinarily rare” for a president to override the conclusions of the OLC.

I’m not qualified to judge the legal arguments, although it seems significant that even the top DOD lawyer thinks that the War Powers Act applies to this case. In any event, though, the president’s decision certainly seems to violate the spirit of the act, which was passed precisely to put a check on presidential war-making. For once I’m inclined to agree with (gulp!) John Boehner:

The White House says there are no hostilities taking place. Yet we’ve got drone attacks under way. We’re spending $10 million a day. We’re part of an effort to drop bombs on Qaddafi’s compounds. It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test, in my view, that we’re not in the midst of hostilities.

Of course, Congress is hardly blameless here as it has largely ceded its constitutional authority and responsibility for declaring war to the executive branch over the last several decades.

Sad news

Philosophy professor Todd Bates, who blogged under the name Anglican Scotist, died suddenly this week from a brain aneurysm. R.I.P.

Friday Metal: Argus, “Wolves of Dusk”

Killer traditionalist heavy metal from my home state of Pennsylvania!

It’s books all the way down

A short addendum on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time: One thing that always makes me happy is when a good book leads me to really want to read other books by citing them. In this case, Hill’s book made me want to track down copies of John A.T. Robinson’s (yes, that John A.T. Robinson) In the End, God and E.P. Sanders’ Jesus and Judaism.