THE CHRISTIAN MAN IN RELATION
TO THE ANIMALS
What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And you have crowned him with glory and honor. You made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet.
- Psalms 8:4-6
Christianity will never be able to purge itself from the curse of the Gnostic heresy until it comes to grips with the fact that when the Bible says God made man "a living soul" (Genesis 2:7), it means to identify man with the animals, not distinguish him from the animals. The Hebrew word for "soul" (nephesh) is also used to describe the animals in Genesis 1:24, which calls them "living souls". Translators have obscured the fact by rendering the passage as "living creature". Although easily corrected by simple word studies, such biased translations are unfortunate because most Christians do not do word studies.
Gnostic doctrine says that man is a spirit trapped inside a body. The Bible teaches that man is an animal created in the "image of God" (Genesis 1:26). It is that image which separates him from the rest of creation. Man is an animal endowed with the ability to rule creation and to have dominion over the animals.
This fact has direct bearing on the theological concept of "free will". Dominion is the exercise of freewill. Man cannot be said truly to have been given dominion over all of God’s creation, if his will is not strong enough to accept or reject, in an ethical sense, all contingencies which the created order presents to his mind as influences (or motives). Animals do not have free will; God did not endow them with dominion. Free will is co-extensive with the realm of dominion God has given to man to rule, meaning the terrestrial universe. Man has not been given dominion in the celestial universe (e.g. the world of angels).
We find here the fallacy of Gnostic doctrine, New Age philosophy and all religions which accept occult premises. These heresies believe man has inherent transcendence, or at least potentially so by his own effort. They believe man has a will strong enough to escape the created order and to create a new order. Man is a god who has within him the seed of immortality. He can create his own life and reality.
Moral Government theology, reflecting its roots in Druidism, is careful to make this distinction between animals which have man consciousness and man who has God-consciousness. Animals are conscious of the phenomenal realm only and all manifestations into the physical realm. But in addition to this ability, man has consciousness of the metaphysical or noumenal realm. He does not perceive God by the five senses, but by intuition. God can manifest Himself physically in a burning bush or as a baby in a manger. But such events are meaningless to animals except as physical events. Man perceives them as points of contact with the celestial realm. Although man cannot, with human attributes, rule in the spirit realm, he is conscious of it, however.
Now, we can begin to see the denigrating results of Gnosticism. Since man is perceived as an incarnate spirit, his real home is not on Earth and in the flesh, but in the celestial realm. What happens to the flesh is of no consequence. Sins of the flesh are superfluous, since the goal is to get rid of the body anyway. Homosexuality, bestiality, cannibalism, and so forth are amoral issues. Following quickly behind such logic is a low view of the animals. Because they are a part of the world of flesh, they may be dispensed with arbitrarily. They are exterminated as pests, or, if one believes spirit beings can be incarnate in animals (Hinduism), they are worshipped. In either extreme, man does not have a dominical relationship as ordained by God.
Man’s relationship with the animals is just as important as any other relationship because it is God-ordained. The rule of the animals is the essence of his dominion task upon the earth. Its neglect will eventually create a mental imbalance. The absence of meaningful relationships with the animals in terms of man’s calling is just as psychologically damaging for man as is the absence of any other relationship. Just because an animal cannot speak does not mean a mutually significant relationship is not possible. Any zoologist will tell you that. Any farmer who still plows his fields with draft horses will tell you that.
Our love for the machine and the automobile has produced an impersonal and, frankly, a deranged society. We have lost touch with reality in our push-button world.
One of those illusions is the notion that the automobile has somehow improved our existence. David Ehrenfeld in his book, The Arrogance of Humanism, presents the following analysis:
Some further examples of end-product analysis will help explain it more fully. In his book ENERGY AND EQUITY, Ivan Illich, a pioneer of this kind of approach, examines the efficiency of the American automobile. His conclusions are both amusing and horrifying. The average American male, he finds, spends approximately four of his sixteen waking hours either driving his car, parking it, and searching for it, or earning the money to make the payments on it, maintain it and replace worn parts, buy gasoline and oil, and defray the costs of a driver’s license, vehicle registration, and insurance. These sixteen hundred hours spent annually on behalf of the car enable the owner to drive an average of 7,500 miles, which works out to 4.7 miles per hour, regardless of individual driving speeds. The ramifications of this end-product analysis would fill a dozen books, but one thing is clear: the fast, luxurious, personal style of transportation offered by the automobile does not really liberate anyone from the true costs of travel. It merely provides an elaborate way of concealing some of the heavy payments we make to maintain the illusion of an effortless lifestyle.
The much heralded personal computer may now be an economic necessity. But its creation was the result of the attempt to cope with the complexity and confusion of a bureaucratic order. It will save us for a season. Abolishing the bureaucratic order would have been wiser.
The quest for an effortless lifestyle is also perverse. When you examine the implications of the Dominion Covenant, you find it to be an ethical paradigm. For instance, the sin of adultery violates the aspect of multiplying and filling the earth. Stealing robs a man of the tools he needs to subdue the earth. Bearing false witness distorts the reality which man governs, leading to wrong economic and ethical decisions. If sin is perverse, so is the neglect, exploitation, and abuse of animals. We cannot escape the conclusion that our intensive technology and mechanization of labor have violated that covenant because it has removed animals and manual labor from the equation. Modern man’s relationship to the animals has not been one of dominion, but one of extermination or exclusion into zoos or wildlife preserves.
We cannot escape God’s order. Even our machines run on fossil fuels (i.e. dead animals and plants). Man was called to physical labor, even in his pre-Fall condition. Man was not made an angel to be imprisoned in the world of virtual reality. He is an animal and needs the environment God has created.
Ecology is Biblical. Consider Deuteronomy 20:19-20, where the Israelites are forbidden to cut down fruit trees, even in time of war. Or consider Deuteronomy 22:6-7 which forbids, by implication, exterminating a species. Consider also the sabbatical years. All of these are impossible in modern society. Orange groves are cut down to build condominiums. Buffalo are hunted to near extinction. Pat Robertson was laughed to scorn by the business community for favoring the Jubilee. Noah would weep.
To restore the foundations and the patriarchy, I think we need to flee the cities and suburbs. That is not to say cities are not valid or important in healthy times. Indeed, for many reasons they are indispensable, as is advanced technology. But these are not healthy times. Sickness requires abstinence from the source of illness to restore health. Real Biblical agrarianism does not exist anymore. Instead, we have agri-business. Farming was meant to be a way of life, a discipline. No society can long exist without it at its base.