Soulful Savages
Today I’d like to work through something that comes up a lot when I try to talk to my church friends about the concept of ethical vegetarianism. I usually hear something about how Jesus fed fish to the masses and God killed an animal to clothe Adam and Eve in leather. I guess the implication is that if you read these passages this way it’s somehow justification for the idea that God doesn’t care about animals, he kills them so we can … etc. the logic of which I disagreed with in the Slippery Fish post. So, onto the miracles …
Jesus turned water into wine. That was a miracle – he isn’t bound by the usual laws of time and matter.
Jesus multiplied bread to feed thousands. That was a miracle – he isn’t bound by the usual laws of time and matter.
Jesus multiplied fish to feed thousands. That was a miracle – he isn’t bound by the usual laws of time and matter.
So how then do the feeding/multiplication miracles have anything to do with whether or not we have a moral obligation to not cause suffering to sentient beings when we have the ability to do otherwise? Did Jesus have to go through the usual processes to make wine? Not that we know of. Poof, it’s wine. Did Jesus have to go through the usual processes to feed fish to thousands … no, poof there’s enough for everybody. Even taking a literal reading of this miracle story, I don’t see how this supports a rejection of the argument for ethical vegetarianism today. At its most literal … Jesus multiplied dead fish … he personally didn’t do any killing in this story. At another level it’s about him actually being concerned with (literally) hungry people. If we’re concerned about feeding hungry people in the world we should know that given a limited amount of agricultural land we can feed more people with plants than we can with flesh. At another level it’s a spiritual metaphor which isn’t about literal food but spiritual nourishment. (Which brings up another point that I’ll talk about in a separate post … that when you mix the imagery of physical and spiritual nourishment … you still get more support for a less violent trajectory through Jesus. Wow that’s pretty bad wording, huh.)
The other example of this kind of thinking comes up with Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the garden. Even if you take this to mean literal skins, as in animal skins, like leather … how is it that the Creator God who just got finished speaking the universe into existence is somehow not given credit for being able to “clothe them in skins” without going through the usual processes of killing an animal? He created the entire universe with a word but he can’t create an outfit without slaughtering an animal? If anything this looks to me like a commentary on our natures outside of our intended relationship with God. In my opinion the writer is describing God giving us over to our lesser natures, describing us becoming like animals. You don’t even have to read it as implying we weren’t corporeal before that. The point to me is that when we exist outside of what God wants for us we are clothed in our animal nature.
The point though isn’t about how I interpret this passage. The point is that the passage itself doesn’t go any further than it does and is therefore open to interpretation. The passage simply does not say that God killed the first animal. Proponents of penal substitution interpret it this way because it fits with the idea that “something has to die” and God was the one who started / institutionalized animal killing for us. I think much theological discourse has been approached from a position of assuming the right and/or necessity of killing animals and that has lead to concepts like penal substitution. Once you get out of that paradigm, out from under the idea that killing animals is a necessity, then scripture looks very different, start to finish.
