Speech at the Launch of Animal Theologians by Dr Clair Linzey at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford

26 February 2024

Speech at the Launch of Animal Theologians by Dr Clair Linzey at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, on 26 February, 2024.

Thank you so much to all of you for coming, to Michael for that lovely introduction, and thank you especially to everyone at Wycliffe for the warm welcome to the Hall.

Many of you have said to me, Animal Theologians, mmm, am I finally going to get to hear what a dog thinks about God? You’ll be pleased to know that I am not going to offer my dog Max’s, I’m sure deeply profound, thoughts on the divine. Rather Animal Theologians gathers up some of the historic theological writings on animals from authors from different faith traditions, many of whom you know, some of whom you may not.

But first we must ask – what is animal theology? Animal theology may be described as a critical engagement with a theological tradition from the perspective that God cares about animals. The term was coined by my co-editor Andrew Linzey and is the subject of his watershed book Animal Theology. Although he had written other works beforehand, it was this book published in 1994 that launched animal theology as a sub-discipline within theology. The book challenged the traditional anthropocentricism of the Christian tradition and argued that Christianity had championed many negative ideas about animals that were theologically unsupportable. Now there are animal theologians in nearly every theological tradition, a great deal of whom Andrew has encouraged and supported. Since it was such a watershed moment in modern theological thinking of animals, Andrew is the last author considered in the volume Animal Theologians.

But ideas do not come out of nowhere. There are a large number of theologians who have thought and wrote about God and animals. Andrew’s work, and indeed my own, stands on the shoulders of these theological giants, and Animal Theologians is a tribute to them.

Theological study is at once characterised by forgetting and remembering. Indeed biblical exegesis is often about recovering lost meanings and lost interpretations. Like feminist theology before us, this is a work of theological remembering. Elizabeth Schüssler Firoenza, in her Searching the Scriptures, writes of how feminist theologians need both a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that seeks to investigate the tradition for women and a “hermeneutics of re-vision” that searches the tradition for lost voices on women.  If Andrew’s Animal Theology was a work of “suspicion” in this sense, then Animal Theologians is a work of “re-vision,” searching the traditions for different prophetic voices on animals.

The volume brings together theists, including Jewish, Unitarian, Christian, transcendentalist, Muslim, Hindu, Dissenting, deist, and Quaker voices, all offering unique theological perspectives. Some of the authors are well known, while others may be new to you. In each case the task has been to highlight the inner theological logic of their position. In some cases that is highlighting their moral thought, their historical context, or their pioneering ethical living. Now, as you might imagine, it was a hard task to bringing all the voices together – which is why the volume is 9 years in the making. A testament to how difficult it is to publish with Oxford University Press!

I’d like now to highlight just a few of the remembered voices on animals, as it is their work as pioneers that should be celebrated.

Perhaps the most important leading pioneer of Christian concern for animals was Humphry Primatt an Anglican Divine who wrote A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Animals in 1776. It would become a very important work as it was republished by Arthur Broome the founder of the first Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals, inspiring the modern SPCA movement that spread around the world in the nineteenth century.

Primatt powerfully writes, “We may pretend to what religion we please, but cruelty is atheism. We may make our boast of Christianity, but cruelty is infidelity. We may trust to our orthodoxy, but cruelty is the worst of heresies.” The focus on cruelty as un-Christian is an idea that captured Victorian thinking, and initiated the modern humane movements for animals, women, and children.

No author has been more concerned with the correct seeing and beholding of creation than John Ruskin. For him the eyes of the heart reveal spiritual truths especially when beholding creation. He writes,

“All Nature, with one voice—with one glory, —is set to teach you reverence for the life communicated to you from the Father of Spirits. The song of birds, and their plumage; the scent of flowers, their colour, their very existence, are in direct connection with the mystery of that communicated life: and all the strength, and all the arts of men, are measured by, and founded upon, their reverence for the passion, and their guardianship of the purity, of Love.”

In short for Ruskin, if one beholds them correctly there is the possibility of seeing divine beauty in other animals. Martin Buber goes so far as to perhaps suggest that one can encounter the transcendent in animals. His famous passage concerning meeting a horse, opens the possibility of transforming the I-It relationship into an I-Thou relationship with animals. He writes,

“When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparents’ estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapple-grey horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to explain it now, beginning from the still very fresh memory of my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other, which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it. When I stroked the mighty mane, sometimes marvelously smooth combed, at other times just as astonishingly wild, and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality  itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself; and yet it let me approach, confide itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me.”

Once we have condemned cruelty, beheld and encountered other creatures, how are we to approach the world with our newly found insights? One answer comes from the great theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who writes:

“We have got used to death, at least the death of other creatures and other people. And to get used to death is the beginning of freezing into lifelessness oneself. So the essential thing is to affirm life—the life of other creatures—the life of other people—our own lives … the people who truly affirm and love life take up the struggle against violence and injustice. They refuse to get used to it. They do not conform. They resist.”

So Animal Theologians is an invitation to behold, encounter, and resist violence and cruelty towards animals. It is an invitation to think about animals as if they mattered to God, as others have before us.

Thank you so much for coming this evening. I’d like to especially thank my co-editor, Andrew, and the wonderful contributors to the volume some of whom are here tonight. I’m happy to answer any questions, or you’re welcome to get straight to the wine and vegan canapes wonderfully produced by Louise and Richard. Thank you.