Canine Imagery and the Widening of the Significance of Jesus’s Mission

Matthew 15:26-28 narrates the encounter between Jesus and an audacious Canaanite woman who beseeches him to heal her possessed daughter and spars with him playfully. She is simultaneously voicing a profoundly serious appeal for a broadened understanding of Jesus’s healing ministry so as to include Gentiles. The Matthean author depicts Jesus as initiating the banter in response to the desperate parent’s pleas, drawing on canine imagery in the quip: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (Matt 15:26). The Canaanite woman responds, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (Matt 15:27). Although to modern ears the dog imagery may seem derogatory, Matthew ascribes to the lips of Jesus the term kynariois (κυναρίοις), a diminutive term for dogs, suggestive of the house pets that panhandle around the dinner table.Footnote ³

The Matthean author’s reference to a table in Matthew 15:27 might all too easily evade historical–critical exegesis with regard to the nature of the furniture in question. Critiquing the historical accuracy of Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of The Last Supper, Rossella Lorenzi notes that in first-century Israel and Roman culture more generally at the time, “The food wasn’t eaten during a formal seated gathering at a rectangular table, as shown in many religious art paintings, but with Jesus and his apostles reclining on floor cushions, as the Romans did at that time.”Footnote ⁴ Arguably, the prospect of reclining at a low-set table suggests a dining arrangement that was closer to canine beggars than modern tables would permit, save for outright table-surfing on a dog’s part. To allow dogs near a table that was not far from what moderns might consider a picnic would be a virtual invitation for them to join in the meal. Such an arrangement might suggest that the Canaanite woman’s reference is not demeaning but envisages pets that are allowed close proximity to the table.

The Canaanite woman is portrayed as quick to play on Jesus’s dog imagery and assert the house dog’s right to fallen crumbs. The gospel depicts this persistent mother as teaching Jesus something of great importance regarding the scope of his mission and acting as a catalyst for the expansion of his ministry beyond religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries.

The narrative of Jesus’s encounter with the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 and that mother’s bold assertion that Jesus’s healing ministry could extend beyond conventionally assumed boundaries is followed by references to Jesus healing a multitude (Matt 15: 25-31) and then feeding the four thousand (Matt 15:31-39). The Gospel writer presents Jesus’s encounter with a descendent of the Israelites’ rivals for the land to emphasize the breadth of Jesus’s ministry of healing and feeding. There is a precedent in the Gospel to press further and challenge limitations to Jesus’s saving act as traditionally implied—although not dogmatically defined. There are further implications, discernible in our time, challenging traditionally implied species-based limitations to the significance of Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection.

Acknowledging Humanity’s Evolution from Other Animals

In his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pius XII affirms that there is no necessary contradiction between the scientific theory of evolution and the Catholic faith.Footnote ⁵ In his 1996 “Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences,” John Paul II suggests that evolution is more than a hypothesis, simultaneously recognizing the existence of several versions of the theory that are argued within the scientific community.Footnote ⁶

The full implications of these magisterial nods of approval may not, however, be adequately reflected in every instance in the church’s matrix of doctrines. Indeed, for people cognizant of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Christianity can appear to exhibit an anthropocentric exaggeration of the importance of humanity. In a vast universe rife with possibility for discovery, certain presentations of the narrative of the God-man and God’s unique relationship with humanity may be less than persuasive.

Atheist philosopher Richard Dawkins proposes a thought experiment that challenges the unique moral and spiritual status afforded to humans and denied to other animals by many Christians, including many of those who believe in biological evolution.Footnote ⁷ Dawkins proposes that the scientific theory of evolution suggests humans and chimps can each be traced back to a common ancestor via a line of intermediate primates, one line for humans and another line for chimps. Dawkins acknowledges that these intermediate primates, each representing a stage in the evolutionary process, are now extinct and that this is convenient for the speciesist mindset. He proposes a thought experiment in which he imagines that the intermediate species still exists and that a human stands hand in hand with his closest evolutionary ancestor in a line of intermediate primates that goes back to humanity’s common ancestor with the chimp. The common ancestor’s other hand grasps the hand of an intermediate primate, which begins another chain of intermediate primates that eventually ends with a chimpanzee. Dawkins notes that each creature would be regarded as being of the same species as its neighbor on either side as they stand hand in hand in the great line of intermediate primates. Indeed, he argues, males and females from each intermediate stage could mate with their male or female neighbors.

Dawkins envisages these chains of primates hand in hand to repudiate speciesism. His thought experiment might also be regarded, however, as instructive in the matter of the emergence of creatures with rational souls, eligible for heaven. At some point in that line, would one primate lack a rational soul and be ineligible for heaven while its neighbor possessed the metaphysical qualifications for admission? Put differently, did creatures without rational souls, themselves lacking a capacity for heaven, parent creatures who were thus endowed? Further questions arise: Does the elevation of modern humanity rest on a faulty premise—that evolution has already reached its pinnacle and ceased with the advent of homo sapiens? And, in some distant future, would humans who are more evolved than we are wonder whether their twenty-first century ancestors were capable of being saved? Why, it might be asked, would God create the vast array of sentient creatures that have ever lived only for a tiny fraction, that is, humans, to be eligible to engage in an eternal loving relationship with God?

The Christian tradition has already engaged the question of limitations placed upon humans’ eligibility for salvation. Some thinkers and traditions contend that it would make little sense to believe that a loving God would exclude from the possibility of salvation those humans who were not baptized with water in the name of the Trinity or saved by virtue of God’s covenants with the Jewish people. Such an exclusivist prospect would suggest that the vast majority of human persons ever created by God must have gone the way of perdition. Strands of the Christian tradition have, over the centuries, responded to such a preposterously pessimistic prospect using the concepts of baptism of desire, the fundamental option, and anonymous Christianity.Footnote ⁸ Envisaging Dawkins’s line of intermediary primates, the question widens as to why the God who wills that all people be saved (see 1 Tim 2:4) would exclude sentient, intelligent creatures from salvation according to some essentially arbitrary point along that line.

Do Animals Need to Be “Saved”?

Nonhuman animals have, like humans, been subjected to both the hardships of a fallen world and the adversity that is an inherent part of evolution and other natural processes. It is from both fallenness and incompleteness that nonhuman animals need to be saved. Salvation in this sense is distinct from the redemption of humans who are subject to the slings and arrows of a fallen world and, by their free-willed choices, perpetuate them. Humans, because of the Fall and original sin, tend to commit personal or moral sin. Nonhuman animals, it might be argued, do not have sufficient reasoning ability to exercise free will and make moral choices. The nonhuman animals need to be saved from a fallen world but not redeemed from personal sins. As Nicola Hoggard Creegan observes:

The model of salvation being advanced in this article is that of an eternal loving relationship with God, that by virtue of being eternal survives death. Because it is characterized as “loving,” it entails consciousness on the part of the creature, who is consciously returning God’s love. Salvation from this perspective entails the posthumous survival of the creature’s consciousness and individual identity. It is not merely an unconscious incorporation into all that is, akin to nirvana, whereby Buddhists imagine that consciousness is extinguished to allow for a peace approximating nothingness. Rather, the ultimate end of sentience is a loving relationship with God, not death and oblivion.

Suffering and Death as Inherent in God’s Good Creation

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin notes the obvious incompatibility between an evolutionary process that includes suffering and death on a mass scale and a historicized interpretation of the mythic motifs of original immortality and original justice. Teilhard de Chardin recognizes that the suffering and death of sentient creatures existed in creation prior to the emergence of humanity.Footnote ¹⁰ Animals have, by Teilhard de Chardin’s account, contended with suffering and death ever since there were animals. Teilhard views such adversity as the inevitable byproduct of an incompletely evolved world.Footnote ¹¹ To that extent, animals have always been subject to natural evil in a world in which the forces of nature are not micromanaged by God and have always needed salvation.

Finitude itself may not be evil, and a creature’s death may be, as N. T. Wright poetically suggests, the equivalent of a tree shedding its leaves in the autumn—and no more tragic.Footnote ¹² In a related train of thought, Karl Rahner and Teilhard de Chardin have both advanced views of death as a transition to a state of transcendence and a new phase in the creature’s relationship with God.Footnote ¹³ This view of death as an inherent dimension of God’s good creation is in opposition to a Pauline view of death as the “wages of sin,” that is, a product of the Fall and not an inherent feature of God’s good creation. That said, it should be noted that the Pauline trope of the wages of sin could be interpreted as referring to a fallen, corrupted view of death that lacks trust in God or to “spiritual” rather than biological death. Nonetheless, the view of death as an evil conquered by the resurrection of Christ is well embedded in the Christian tradition.

In keeping with a view of death as the work of evil, John Haught strongly rejects any place for death in the good creation.Footnote ¹⁴ Acknowledging the apparently necessary role of death in the biosphere, Haught argues that it would be materialist thinking to legitimize death on such pragmatic grounds. In Haught’s view, Christian theology must assert God’s victory over death, a position shared by Celia Deane-Drummond.Footnote ¹⁵ These authors regard it as a moral imperative for Christians to resist and condemn death.

In response to Haught and Deane-Drummond, Elizabeth Johnson contends that suffering and death are integral components of the good creation when they arise from natural processes as opposed to suffering and death wreaked by unwarranted human exploitation of the environment.Footnote ¹⁶ Johnson’s view hence extrapolates human destructiveness from the adversity inherent in food chains and natural competition, ascribing to human destructiveness a fallen character that she does not ascribe to the brutality that results from natural, that is, inhuman forces. It is the destruction wreaked by unwarranted human exploitation that Johnson would regard as the appropriate target of human resistance and condemnation. Concurring with Johnson, I think animals need salvation from a world that is both fallen and incomplete.

Personhood and Eligibility for Heaven

If heaven as envisaged in the Christian tradition might be defined in terms of an eternal loving relationship with the persons of the triune Godhead, the communion of saints, and the angels, it might be argued that the tradition suggests that it is only persons who are eligible candidates for such a state of being. Christian thought has classified angels as persons—though with exceptions—thought of as pure spirit, that is, incorporeal beings. The only other creatures envisaged by the tradition as possessing personhood and its associated eligibility for heaven have been humans.

Christian tradition also applies the language of personhood to the triune Godhead, again showing that personhood is not, from a Christian perspective, exclusively synonymous with humanity. The trinitarian formula, like any endeavor to express the mystery of God, is analogical in the sense described by Aquinas in his Doctrine of Analogy.Footnote ¹⁷ That is to say, the language of personhood includes elements of both applicability and inapplicability with regard to God. Its inapplicability might be evidenced by Aquinas’s refusal to consider God as a being so much as being itself, that is, Ipsum Esse Subsistens, and hence not a person, three people, or forty-seven people in a conventional sense.Footnote ¹⁸ Nonetheless, in terms of theological anthropology, the attribution of personhood is intimately bound up with perceived eligibility for heaven. Hence, the question as to how personhood is defined becomes crucial to soteriology.

From a Christian perspective, personhood is not defined from a cognitivist point of view, that is, dependent upon the possession of cognitive abilities.Footnote ¹⁹ Such an approach would exclude fertilized ova, that is, zygotes, which perish shortly after conception; the unborn at later stages of development; and children and adults who are gravely incapacitated because of illness or injury. The Catholic tradition does not envisage that such beings are excluded from salvation and affords them personhood—at least for soteriological purposes. Conversely, nonhuman primates and dolphins, it might be argued, demonstrate significant cognitive ability beyond that of many impaired humans, and the emergence of artificial intelligence calls into question any definition of personhood based purely on cognitive abilities.

Another approach to personhood that falls foul of a Catholic perspective is the social approach, which views personhood as dependent upon recognition by other persons. That suggests that one is a person only if other persons recognize them as such.Footnote ²⁰ This position seems mired in relativism and prone to racist, ableist, sexist, and other flawed perspectives and sinful ideologies.

At first glance, the genetic approach to personhood may seem to sit comfortably with a Christian perspective because it equates personhood with the possession of human DNA. The doctrine of angels, however, puts the lie to this approach insofar as Christian tradition has broadly considered these disembodied spirits as persons. Notably, Teilhard de Chardin regards humanity as the point in evolution at which the universe becomes capable of thought, introducing what he calls the “noosphere,” that is, the world of thoughts and ideas. His position would seem to contradict a traditional belief in angels as disembodied intelligences capable of thought and choice.Footnote ²¹ A reconciliation of the doctrine of angels with Teilhard de Chardin’s position on the emergence of the noosphere would seem to require a dualistic distinction between the visible and invisible realms of creation, a bifurcation rather at odds with the holistic thrust of Teilhard de Chardin’s vision.Footnote ²²

A gradualist approach to personhood rejects a zero-sum perspective by recognizing degrees of personhood whereby, for example, an embryo has a lesser degree of personhood than a teenager. The gradualist approach parts ways with a Christian view of personhood if it is used to suggest that a human in their declining years incrementally loses their personhood. This would mean that a person in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease is less a person than is a healthy human. Perhaps, however, the gradualist approach could be applied at the evolutionary level to account for the gradual emergence of personhood in sentient creatures without equating the personhood of a mouse to that of a human.

Whereas the Christian tradition has tended to view personhood as an admission criterion for communion with God in heaven, Ian McFarland reverses this logic to argue that it is a being’s potential for heaven that establishes its personhood in the first place. McFarland proposes that “the basis of our ‘personhood’ is not any quality that we possess (whether in equal or in different measure) but simply the fact that God in Christ addresses us as persons—speaking to us in time the same Word spoken eternally within the Trinity.”Footnote ²³ Personhood might thus be understood as Christ’s invitation for us to participate in the community of the triune Godhead, that is, an invitation to theosis.Footnote ²⁴ In this sense, the possibility of salvation is integral to personhood.

The question arises of how McFarland’s designation of personhood as an invitation to theosis would apply to eternally damned beings, human or otherwise, should any exist. Damned beings could still be classified as persons if it is their own freely chosen, ongoing hostility to God that defines their state of damnation and not God’s withdrawal of the invitation to theosis. For what it is worth, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in its elaboration upon the petition in the Lord’s Prayer for deliverance from evil, insists that Satan exists as a person.Footnote ²⁵ In any case, McFarland suggests that personhood is defined by an ongoing and potentially salvific relationship with the persons of the triune Godhead and paves the way for a relational approach to defining personhood and envisaging eligibility for heaven. Both, that is to say, might be detected in terms of a creature’s capacity for relationship and for love.

McFarland’s insight rings true that personhood is better defined in terms of an invitation to communion with the persons of the triune Godhead than in terms of any cognitive attribute, genetic identity, or social recognition. There is a circular character to his position, however, that becomes especially obvious in relation to the question of which creatures might be eligible for the celestial state. Essentially, McFarland contends that the creatures that are eligible are the ones that God invites. God is not in this sense accountable to some external criterion that sets the parameters as to who can be saved.

An additional approach to the definition of personhood may leave us indebted to a somewhat unlikely source in the person of one Peter Singer, an avowed atheist with a disdain for speciesism. Singer’s arguments for animal rights are rooted largely in a recognition of the sentience of nonhuman creatures, that is, their capacity to feel pleasure and pain.Footnote ²⁶ An argument from sentience might be crafted to propose that the experience of pleasure ultimately points to the joy of the beatific vision. Granted, pleasure in itself falls short of joy. Pleasure can be fleeting and dependent upon external stimuli, whereas joy includes a degree of stoicism, not being at the mercy of external stimuli. It might be argued, however, that pleasure is a primitive form of happiness that is not joy but exists on a continuum with it. To engage with that which brings us joy entails some degree of pleasure—even pleasure of a rather lofty variety.

A Theodicist Argument for Conscious Nonhuman Animals in Heaven

A theodicist argument for nonhuman animals’ access to the heavenly state essentially regards heaven as just compensation for animal suffering and death in the earthly realm, whether due to its fallenness or incompleteness. From his atheistic perspective, Singer regards sentience as a criterion for personhood. A theistic perspective might build upon Singer’s position to argue that it is persons, that is, sentient beings, who are invited by the triune Godhead to theosis.Footnote ²⁷ Holmes Rolston refers to suffering as “the shadow side of sentience.”Footnote ²⁸ Sentience, with its intimate connection to pain, establishes both eligibility and need for salvation in the sense of being liberated from the adverse effects of a world both fallen and unfinished to experience a loving relationship with God free from suffering and death. As Denis Edwards argues, the brutal competition for survival as entailed by evolution cannot, if there exists any divine justice in a meaningful sense, have the “last word.”Footnote ²⁹ No creature can find its ultimate end in an unfinished world.

John Wesley, writing in the early nineteenth century, recognized the monstrosity of the plight of nonhuman animals and responded by engaging in animal theodicy when he detected “a plausible objection against the justice of God, in suffering numberless creatures that had never sinned to be so severely punished … But the objection vanishes away, if we consider, that something better remains after death for these creatures also; that these likewise shall one day be delivered from this bondage of corruption, and shall then receive an ample amends for all their present sufferings.”Footnote ³⁰ Wesley’s argument might also be voiced with regard to the human victims of suffering. He thinks of the afterlife as compensation for suffering endured this side of the grave. Jürgen Moltmann, cognizant of evolution in the biosphere in a way that Wesley in his historical setting could not have been, sounds a similarly theodicean note while more explicitly invoking the prospect of a conscious afterlife for animals:

Moltmann insists that divine justice requires not only the cessation of conscious suffering but also the implied conscious experience of justice in a resurrected state. The image of the posthumous wiping of tears from the eyes of creatures who have suffered greatly in this realm evokes the prospect of celestial consolation that requires consciousness.

Christopher Southgate contends that “a theory of creaturely immortality must consider what ‘justice’ would require.”Footnote ³² Elaborating upon what posthumous compensation for earthly suffering might entail for nonhuman animals, Southgate distinguishes objective from subjective immortality, poetically characterizing the former as a creature’s continued existence in the “memory of God” and the latter as “some form of embodied post-mortem experience,” suggesting both corporality and consciousness.Footnote ³³ Although Southgate’s distinction between objective and subjective immortality is helpful in demarcating between a view of animal afterlife as cosmic ether and that of a conscious state, the question arises as to whether continued existence in the “memory” of God might be precisely what animates consciousness. That is to say, being itself, and with it, consciousness, might be thought of as sustained presence in the memory of the I-AM-Who-Am, the eternal present that exists beyond finitude. Saint Augustine in his Confessions explored human memory as a “vast and boundless chamber” that can facilitate the retrospective discovery of God’s presence in one’s life.Footnote ³⁴ Might human memory be created in the image of the divine memory that sustains us in being?

Southgate acknowledges the challenge in thinking that resurrected nonhuman animals will be conscious and able to experience posthumous justice, acknowledging that although they are conscious in this life, many nonhuman animals are not cognitively equipped to make moral judgments and hence recognize justice.Footnote ³⁵ On this note, it might be countered that higher mammals can distinguish kindness from cruelty; love from hostility; and, most definitely, pain from pleasure. Nonetheless, Southgate envisions a posthumous transformation that would enhance animal abilities. In this regard, the author’s reasoning would extend to the human zygotes, embryos, fetuses, and children who die before the development of their cognitive abilities and moral sensibilities. Indeed, to limit Christ’s salvific reach to cognitively empowered homo sapiens entails a form of gnosis whereby a particular kind of knowing is deemed essential for salvation. The capacity of cognitively impaired or underdeveloped humans to experience justice, joy, love, and relationships in the afterlife would require a resurrected transformation along the lines of that required by the dog or the maternally neglected pelican chick who perishes while his stronger sibling lives.Footnote ³⁶ These creatures, along with the victims of senility and in a sense, all who die and whose brains cease to operate, would require transformation to experience heavenly bliss.

Further exemplifying speculation regarding the level of understanding that animals in heaven possess, Trent Dougherty envisages that animals in heaven will need to understand that there was good reason for their suffering and understand it in terms approaching those of John Hick’s theory of soul-making, whereby suffering can form a person who is resilient, mature, and empathic.Footnote ³⁷ John Schneider, however, is not convinced that animals will need to understand a justification for their suffering before the grave and will need only the “celestial praise,” a term that seems particularly resonant in the case of dogs whose nature seems to be to crave constant praise and assurance.Footnote ³⁸

Elizabeth Johnson adds her voice to the discussion of animal theodicy, noting that it is not as though God is detached from animals in the midst of their earthly suffering and death, awaiting them from a distant heavenly vantage point. “Seemingly absent, the Giver of life is silently present with all creatures in their pain and dying.”Footnote ³⁹ Johnson wonders whether the divine presence with and within a suffering or dying animal makes any difference and candidly remarks that in one sense, it does not.Footnote ⁴⁰ Johnson observes that suffering may “destroy the creature’s consciousness before death claims it.”Footnote ⁴¹ These frank observations also relate to human animals in their death throes. Their loss of consciousness may arise from anesthesia or from disease or injury itself. One might conclude that the unconscious creature cannot subjectively experience the divine presence. That conclusion, however, is based on a binary understanding of consciousness and unconsciousness. If, however, we think in terms of levels of consciousness, reflecting, for example, the model that Carl Jung proposed, we might countenance the possibility that a creature can experience the presence of God at a level of consciousness other than the waking, fully conscious state.Footnote ⁴²

It was in the unconscious state that Jung encountered the mysterious figure he referred to as Philemon, who seems to carry connotations of the divine.Footnote ⁴³ Granted, enormous speculation would be entailed by surmising that nonhuman animals can experience the collective unconscious as Jung described or have any experience of archetypes. It is not such a leap, however, to observe that dogs, for example, seem to dream, and to raise the possibility that for animals, human and otherwise, a state of dreaming or of the unconscious may segue into posthumous consciousness. This observation of course assumes a perspective of religious faith that allows for the prospect that consciousness can survive the death of the brain.

Christ: Fully Creature

The Christian tradition grappled for centuries with the relationship between Jesus’s human and divine natures, codifying the matter at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE by saying that Jesus was fully human and fully divine.Footnote ⁴⁴ That formula clearly does more to advance the conversation than to end it. Unpacking the Chalcedonian formula, we might note that to be fully human, Christ must be fully creature. Full creaturehood is a logical prerequisite for full humanity. To say that Jesus was fully human and hence fully creature is to identify Jesus’s completeness as evident in the risen Christ. Christ in this sense is the first fruits of completeness in the midst of a good but incomplete creation.

An objection to the designation of the incarnate Christ as “fully creature” might be launched in light of the Nicene formula that Jesus was “begotten not made.” The term “creature,” it might be argued, suggests a being that was created, that is “made”; this, according to the Nicene Creed, is not the case for Jesus. In response, it should be clarified that the phrase “begotten not made” serves a theological purpose in conveying that Christ is of the same substance as the Father, that is, “consubstantial.” There is an allegorical quality to the language in the sense noted by Aquinas in the Doctrine of Analogy to the extent that it serves a theological purpose but is also highly limited in its expression of a divine mystery.Footnote ⁴⁵ It in no way attempts to describe the mechanics whereby the divine became human. Saint Paul does not hesitate to call Christ the “first fruits of creation” (Col 1:15), and the Nicene formula is not intended to diminish Christ’s connection to creation so much as to refute heresy and affirm Christ’s full divinity. Indeed, it might be argued, such is the enormity of the mystery of the Incarnation that no formula can express it without paradox and limitation. Our designation of Christ as “creature” is intended to explicitly acknowledge that Christ was a denizen of creation, not at all to denigrate Christ’s full divinity.

To think of Christ as the complete creature, the creature that has met the end for which it exists in full communion with God, is not, however, to say that Jesus was a rarified gem of biological perfection in the midst of an evolving and imperfect world. Rather, the mystery of Incarnation reflects the presence of the complete in messy intimacy with the incomplete. Science then tells us that in an evolutionary sense, but also in terms of our anatomical composition, we do not exist in a biological vacuum, utterly distinct from the environment that surrounds us and infuses us. On this note, Elizabeth Johnson acknowledges Jesus of Nazareth’s biological interconnection with the rest of the cosmos. “As a creature of Earth, Jesus was a complex living unit in the oxygen and carbon and nitrogen cycles. The atoms comprising his body were once part of other creatures.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Johnson’s recognition of Jesus’s creaturely, biological interconnectedness with the rest of creation challenges the individualism with which his resurrection is routinely imagined. No mammalian body is pristinely segregated from microorganisms—from the bacteria in their gut to the lice in their hair. Would a bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth therefore have included these little passengers? Indeed, the Christian tradition suggests, we are all “passengers” in Jesus’s resurrection.

Johnson notes that the prologue to John’s Gospel asserts that the Word became flesh, sarx, that is. Clearly, it was human flesh that Jesus assumed but still evolved and evolving flesh, in continuity with his evolutionary ancestors and immersed in the organisms that pervade all human bodies.Footnote ⁴⁷ Johnson recognizes the significance for all living creatures: “Then it becomes clear that Jesus’s ministry reveals the plentitude of life not just for one species or for an elite group in that species but for all, including poor human beings, and all living creatures is God’s original and ultimate intent.”Footnote ⁴⁸ While mingling the water and wine during the preparation of gifts during the Mass, the priest prays, “Through the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” Asserting the “ultimate intent” expressed by Johnson, we might pray, “Through the mystery of this water and wine, may all creatures come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our flesh, our creaturehood.” Niels Henrik Gregersen captures the breadth of significance of Christ’s enfleshment for creatures: “Understood in this way, the death of Christ becomes an icon of God’s redemptive co-suffering with all sentient life as well as the victims of social competition.”Footnote ⁴⁹ And if all creatures in their suffering and dying are united with the cosuffering God, so they share in the resurrection of Christ. As Johnson asserts, “I suggest we employ the idea of ‘deep resurrection’ to extend Christ’s affiliation to the whole natural world.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This is not, of course, to say that all of creation will necessarily experience a conscious afterlife or that, even while acknowledging that resurrection entails transformation, all creatures will experience the same degree of consciousness. It is sentience and a species’ capacity for relationships that may be decisive in this matter.

Playing devil’s advocate to the argument that the Christ event holds salvific relevance for all who have respired, crept, or crawled along the carnage-laden path of evolution, Niels Henrik Gregersen asks:

By the same token, is there not something both arbitrary and arrogant about bringing the significance of Jesus’s resurrection into the evolutionary process at a given point while asserting its irrelevance to all that preceded that juncture? Such a prospect would render Christ’s conquest of death a pyrrhic victory, giving death the last word for the vast majority of creatures. It would diminish the universality of the Incarnation.

Gregory of Nazianzus’s christological stance, stated in his letter to Cledonius, might be evoked in objection: that which is not assumed is not saved or healed or “redeemed.”Footnote ⁵² Certainly, it lies at the heart of the Christian enterprise to argue that humanity is saved because Christ became fully human. But why stop there? To be fully human, Christ assumed creaturehood, becoming the “first fruits” of creation. It would seem unthinkable to imagine Christ’s saving act as restricted to Jews, Israelis, Middle Easterners, or men. Given the universal significance of the Christ event and its cosmic reach, it seems unwise to too confidently imagine any sentient creatures as utterly excluded from salvation. This inclusive model of salvation is consistent with the trajectory of Vatican II’s teaching on salvation in its “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” and in its “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.”Footnote ⁵³ Rather than envisioning access to salvation in terms of insiders and outsiders, the council held that all people are to some extent in communion with the church and spoke in terms suggestive of kinship and connectedness. This inclusive perspective on the human family may be helpful in envisioning an inclusive model of heaven in which each creature is afforded its rightful place in a manner reflective of the vast diversity of God’s creation.

Dogs as Sacraments

Each monotheistic culture and tradition tends to settle on particular animal imagery to symbolize some dimension of the divine. For one strand of the biblical tradition, it is the image of a sacrificial lamb that has served that function, deeply embedded in liturgical traditions. A sacramental view of the universe as described by Michael Himes recognizes the presence of God in all that is and the potential for any component of creation to serve as a sacrament (denoted by a lower-case “s” as distinct from the seven Sacraments of the Church) if it can awaken us to God’s omnipresent love.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the sense of the word as evoked by Himes, dogs serve as sacraments. Their faithfulness offers living witness to God’s faithful love and a reminder of the faithfulness to which Christians are called. The faithful love to which dogs bear witness challenges behaviorist explanations that reduce dogs’ behavior to responses to external stimuli, most notably food.Footnote ⁵⁵

The phenomenon of the domestic dog represents a friendship that has evolved between humanity and what were originally wolves and other forms of wild canines. The relationship between humans and dogs, though influenced by the dynamics of a postlapsarian world and as such tainted by abuse on the human end of the equation, makes manifest love between God’s creatures of different species. In a sense, this interspecies relationship is a product of evolution. It is a relationship that has evolved in a manner dependent on culture, lifestyle, and geography so that dogs might be broadly perceived as working animals, pets, or a nuisance depending on context.

In those contexts in which humanity has the luxury of sentimentalizing dogs and treating them with affection, the relationship has progressed far beyond the disdain for feral dogs implied in some biblical passages. 1 Kings 14:11 invokes dogs as scavengers who will eat the corpses of the wicked. 2 Kings specifically anticipates that dogs will devour Queen Jezabel. 1 Samuel 17:43 depicts Goliath taunting David, saying, “Am I a dog that you would come to me with sticks?” thus envisioning the beating of dogs. Psalms 22:16 imagines dogs accompanying “evil-doers” in accosting the psalmist. Proverbs 26:11 invokes the image of dogs ingesting their own vomit as a simile for foolishness.Footnote ⁵⁶ These disparaging references to dogs, however, seem to reflect an aversion to pariah dogs, that is, street dogs. Archeological digs in the Levant reveal the remains of large numbers of malnourished and uncared-for dogs who may have invoked in the human population fear of attack, disease, or theft of food.Footnote ⁵⁷

The sad acknowledgment of packs of pariah dogs in biblical lands should be balanced with the pictorial evidence from ancient societies that some dogs were valued since the neolithic age for their utility in hunting and security and later for their herding abilities in agrarian societies. Job 30:1 refers to sheep dogs, whereas Isaiah 56:10-11 alludes to guard dogs. Offering an indication of how some dogs in ancient Egypt were regarded, collars have been excavated, bearing their names.Footnote ⁵⁸ The naming of dogs implies a recognition of their nature as unique, sentient beings just as the diminutive reference to dogs in Matthew 15:26-28 suggests sufficient regard for dogs that they are allowed to hover around the table at mealtimes, seeking their share in the table fellowship so central to Jesus’s public ministry.

People who have developed a relationship with a dog can recognize these creatures’ roles as sacraments, that is, manifestations of God’s faithful love. Granted, dogs do not possess the same measure of free will as does humankind, and their love may be thought of as somewhat akin to the love exhibited by a child. The point is not to equate dogs or dogs’ love with humans and human love but to recognize an evolutionary process and a diversity of sentient beings infused with divine presence. This mindset may encourage circumspection in assuming limits to God’s saving work in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

An Objection: Love of God and the State of Heaven Require Free Will

In this article I have argued that to the extent to which their species is capable of engaging in a loving relationship, sentient creatures may be candidates for salvation. If God is love and heaven is a loving relationship with God, surely it is the capacity to love that renders a creature eligible for salvation. A counterargument, however, might be that love, to be love, must be voluntary, requiring the exercise of free will. On a related note, it might be argued that if animals possess sufficient free will to genuinely love God and partake in the state of heaven, then by the same token, they must also have sufficient freedom to, by their choices, be damned to hell.

In response to this challenge, a freedom-based model of salvation and of hell such as Rahner advanced does not view salvation and damnation as necessarily dependent on explicit, conscious choice.Footnote ⁵⁹ That is to say, hell is a self-imposed consequence of rejecting God, either by means of a catastrophic explicit choice or else by a lifelong concatenation of implicit rejections. Any relevant choices made by a nonhuman animal would be implicit in relation to their interactions with other animals, possibly including human ones. The fundamental option, so to speak, in a nonhuman animal’s life would be exercised in this implicit and gradual manner. Nonhuman animals would be the most anonymous of Christians.

A rough analogy might be drawn with the love of which humans are capable long before their critical thinking is significantly developed. In many places, it is the pastoral custom that children are admitted to the sacraments of Penance and Eucharist for the first time around the age of seven. Their admission to these sacraments presupposes their ability to love God in a manner relative to their cognitive development. Otherwise, they could not meaningfully recite many of the prayers involved, including an act of contrition that must in some way articulate remorse that is rooted in a love of God. Although regarding such children as capable of some measure of love of God, would we also regard them as, at that stage of cognitive development, capable of mortal sin and consignment to hell if they were to die in such a state? Our pastoral practices tend to acknowledge the onset of a capacity to in some manner love God prior to the onset of a capacity to commit mortal sin and be eligible for damnation.

There exists in nature a capacity to love that is precritical and instinctual. If humanity has evolved from nonhuman animals through a long and painful process of natural selection, this renders impossible a primordial period of “original justice” if this includes original immortality such as might be derived from a literalist interpretation of the Adamic narrative. The suffering and death that are intrinsic to the process of natural selection would have characterized the human condition from its outset. A period of “original innocence,” however, remains arguable if it is taken to refer to an era in which all creatures still lacked the cognitive means to deliberately choose evil. With reference to individual creatures, the term “original innocence” might be applicable to a child’s attachment to their mother, a dog’s loyalty to its owner, or a creature’s sacrificial act for the good of its young or of the pack. Certainly, an original innocence of this kind is heavily driven by instinct and evolutionary forces that promote the well-being of the species, but are these facets of the good creation cleanly distinguishable from a form of love? Is a capacity to love to some extent embedded in nature?

The argument that there exists in creatures an original innocence that makes them capable of love does not contradict the position that humans, who are sufficiently cognitively developed to exercise free will, can choose to love or not. Their love of God is voluntary and cannot be forced. The principle that love is always dependent upon the exercise of free will, however, is not absolute as is evident in the Christian doctrine of a God who is love. Such a God, being love by its nature, does not choose whether to love. This is why Plato’s Euthyphro Problem does not apply to the Christian God.Footnote ⁶⁰ Plato ruminates on whether things are good just because God commands them, in which case Plato proposes that God is not good according to any external standard or whether God abides by some external standard of goodness that holds moral authority over God. Contrary to Plato’s ideation of a purely willful god or a morally compliant one, Christianity holds that God is love, and it is God’s nature to be good. In the case of God, therefore, love is not a product of free will and choice. In God’s good creation, we see reflections of this loving nature in creatures that do not possess the capacity to exercise free will and deliberately choose love.

Saving Relationships

The question of the salvation of nonhuman animals can expose the stark individualism that characterizes much of Christian soteriology, implicitly regarding salvation as an encounter between an individual human being and a divine being. A soteriology that is more attentive to the model of God as Trinity, however, is conducive to the anticipation of salvation that is more than a dyad—even a dyad with the supreme being. The model of God as Trinity is that of a divine community, and salvation by the triune God involves a mutually loving relationship within a community.

Two different thinkers challenge the individualism often apparent in suppositions about salvation. First, Teilhard de Chardin proposes a model of “body” that far exceeds one’s physical body and entails one’s sphere of concern.Footnote ⁶¹ Arguably, this extended model of the body could include loved ones. The resurrected body, as Teilhard de Chardin foresaw, could hence include one’s beloved pets. Teilhard de Chardin’s contemporary, C. S. Lewis, strikes a similar note in surmising that pets might share in their owner’s salvation.Footnote ⁶² Lewis views pets as gifts from God that might persist in the heavenly state—albeit in Lewis’ view, because of the salvation of the human owner. Some animals, Lewis speculates, may be “raised” with their owners, and their loving bonds will prevail in heaven. With implied reference to the doctrine of the Fall and an interpretation of the Adamic myth, Lewis suggests that right relationship with the animals may be a feature of heaven.Footnote ⁶³

Granted, Lewis’s speculation that some animals may enter the state of heaven as an extension of their owners might be argued to maintain a high degree of anthropocentrism, but it also serves to challenge an entirely individualistic soteriology and raise the question of whether we can ultimately be saved in stark isolation from our loved ones and from the human family—or the family of God’s sentient creatures. Might our loving relationships with others, including relationships with nonhuman animals, be a foretaste of heaven as the ultimate loving relationship? Although some might opine that our love of God in heaven will be so all-consuming that loving relationships with spouses, family, and pets will fade into irrelevance, a more Catholic, sacramental perspective would argue that we love God in and through others, and our love for the good creation is not in competition with our love of God but provides the context in which we express it. Such is implied in Rahner’s suggestion that we make our choice for or against God, our fundamental option, in and through myriad implicit choices about created things and persons.Footnote ⁶⁴ From such a sacramental perspective, we love God in and through our pets. Perhaps our pets do likewise.

Salvation itself might be understood as a loving relationship with the Creator and creation, the consummation of such a relationship, and the Creator as the triune Godhead, itself a relationship. Edwards, however, recognizes another dimension of a relational soteriology, the salvation not only of individual creatures but of relationships. Edwards proposes, “In particular, we may hope that the relationship we have with particular creatures, such as a beloved dog, does not end with death, but is taken into eternal life.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Edwards proposes that relationships themselves can be saved and moves beyond a view of animals as candidates for salvation by virtue of their membership in a human household. This shifts the focus from the salvation of individual beings to the salvation of the bonds between beings.

Building on Edwards’s concept of the salvation of relationships, could it be that some relationships are so infused with love as to be subsumed to the state of heaven? Edwards implies that loving relationships between creatures find their teleological end in God. Edwards relates this hope for the saving of our relationships with pets to the doctrine of the communion of saints, a reminder of the communal nature of heaven: “We can hope that, in our participation in the communion of saints, we will also participate in God’s delight in other animals within the abundance of creation that reaches its fulfillment in God.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Going a step further, if nonhuman animals can be saved, all saved creatures might be regarded as saints in the sense entailed by the communion of saints. The eligibility of a particularly loving, brave, and self-sacrificing animal for inclusion in the canon of saints on the basis that it serves as a role model of Christian living may be a question for another day’s work. It does, however, seem pertinent that not all saints are human, by virtue of the inclusion of archangels in the Litany of the Saints.

Edwards essentially develops Rahner’s line of reasoning to clarify that we may be saved in and through our relationships with creatures; and in the context of this article, I would add creatures human and otherwise. Because the relationship does not exist independently of the parties to it, this prospect of the saving of relationships could include the salvation of nonhuman animals. A degree of mutual consciousness is implied by the term “relationship” in this context. The giving and receiving of love require conscious reciprocity. Therefore, a relational model of salvation implies the conscious participation of nonhuman animals in the afterlife.