The Lion, the Curse, & the Evangelical: Part 2
June 17, 2008
Dean Ohlman is a writer, producer, photojournalist and frequent contributor to Creation Care.
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine. Part 1 appeared yesterday.
Mentor to C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, made the conjecture that individual animal souls may even survive death and be reunited with their bodies in the last resurrection: For what good, for what divine purpose is the Maker of the sparrow present at its death, if He does not care what becomes of it? What is He there for, I repeat, if He have no care that it go well with His bird in its dying, that it be neither comfortless nor lost in the abyss. If His presence be no good to the [dying] sparrow, are you very sure what good it will be to you when your hour comes? Believe it is not by a little only that the heart of the universe is more tender, more loving, more just and fair than yours or mine. While many of us know that William Wilberforce was England’s great emancipator of slaves and a catalyst for emancipation in America, fewer realize that he was also one of the founders of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). That great heart broken by slavery was also broken by cruelty to animals.
Contemporary evangelical writer and pastor John Piper in a poem titled “Glorified” imagined the dawn of the messianic reign of Christ when all those who died in faith are reunited—and he also with his cherished dog:
And as I knelt beside the brook
To drink eternal life, I took
A glance across the golden grass,
And saw my dog, old Blackie, fast
As she could come. She leaped the stream—
Almost—and what a happy gleam
Was in her eye.
I knelt to drink,
And knew that I was on the brink
Of endless joy.
Are these men of faith insisting that one must believe in the immortality of individual animal souls? No. MacDonald confesses it as mere hope. But he also goes on to base that hope on the character of God: Multitudes evidently count it safest to hold to a dull scheme of things. . . . Those that hope little cannot grow much. To them the very glory of God must be a small thing, for their hope of it is so small as not to be worth rejoicing in. That He is a faithful creator means nothing to them for far the larger portion of the creatures He has made. Truly their notion of faithfulness is poor enough; how, then, can their faith be strong?
Evangelical Protestants often make of little account the stories about the honored Roman Catholic saint, Francis of Assisi, with his sympathy for and empathy with the animals. Many evangelicals may not realize, however, that the words of one of our most beloved hymns, “All Creatures of Our God and King,” were originally penned by Saint Francis. In this anthem, we sing of sun, moon, clouds, wind, flowers, fruit, joining with us in praise of the triune God. Further, it is this hymn that introduced to Christendom the much-maligned expression “mother Earth.” By that phrase Francis did not imply that the earth had a personality, but that it was the nurturing source of all life. For that reason he concluded, “Let all things their Creator bless, and worship Him in humbleness.”
The truth implied in that song and made clear in many biblical prophecies about the restoration of nature to a state at least as grand as the Garden of Eden is one that has been lacking in our churches and our Christian educational institutions. We understand that the Kingdom of God is, in part, with us now, but will one day be fully realized—at the return of Jesus Christ. We believe that the process of sanctification, becoming more like Christ, is taking place in us now. We stand as witnesses before the fallen world that the evangel, the good news, is true and that some consequences of the fall can begin to be reversed now. Francis Schaeffer believed that because of the redemptive act of Jesus on the cross and the work of sanctification we should be working toward a “substantial healing” of all the rifts created by the fall of man:
My division from God is healed by justification, but then there must be the “existential reality” of this, moment by moment; second, there is the psychological division of man from himself; third, there are the sociological divisions of man from other men; and last, there is the division of man from nature, and nature from nature. In all of these areas we should expect to see substantial healing. . . . On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then. It will not now be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling.
Part 3 will appear tomorrow . . .
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