faulker05

MINORITY REPORT –PART ONE: ANIMALS AND THE SAINTS “The saints are exceedingly loving and gentle to mankind, and even to brute beasts ... Surely we ought to show them [animals] great kindness and gentleness for many reasons, but, above all, because they are of the same origin as ourselves.”                                                                           ~ St. John Chrysostom              The Christian tradition, on the whole, has not been kind to animals.   As we have seen , the dominant voice in the history of the tradition has held that animals were crea...

IMAGE OF GOD: WE CANNOT BE HUMAN WITHOUT THE ANIMALS “God’s resolve to create in the divine image is coupled with a commissioning to have dominion. . . . It is as representative (image) of God that we are given capacity for power in the world.”                                ~ Bruce Birch In last Friday’s post, I took a very brief look at some of the traditional understandings of what it means to be created in the image of God and how that has led to the perspective that humans, separated from the rest of creation with the gifts of reason and will, are privileged in creation.   We saw that these traditional understandings of our creation were heavily influenced by philosophical ideas from different times and places and that those philosophical views about what it meant to human were grafted onto theological interpretations of our crea...

PRAYING FOR PETS “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”                                                                ~ Matthew 18:3             In church this morning, I listened to a delightful presentation on the children’s worship service.   The speaker talked about some of the things that are different between that worship and worship in “the big church,” including the fact that in the children’s worship, “we probably pray for pets more often.”   This observation made me consider why we don’t pray for pets in “the big church.”   It’s a question that...

WHY HAS THE CHURCH TRADITIONALLY TAKEN A DIFFERENT VIEW? [I]rrational animals . . . are dissociated from us by their want of reason, and therefore by the just appointment of the Creator subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our uses . . . .                                                ~ St. Augustine, The City of God, Book 1             If it is true, as I argued in earlier posts, that our creation in the image of God imposes on us an obligation to care for our fellow creatures, that Scripture tells us that how we relate to animals is reflective of our character, and that Scripture’s teachings on the right use of power extend to animals as well as humans, why has the Church traditionally taken the vi...