Vegetarianism
I have decided to become a vegetarian.
When I brought this up with my wife (who has been an on-again-off-again vegetarian for a while) she asked me why the change of mind. What follows is a summary of my change of mind and heart on the matter.
I believe that Yahweh, the creator God, is the good God who created a “supremely good” world. If we look at the beginning we’ll see that people, as well as animals, were vegetarian:
29Then God said, “I now give to you all the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit produces its seeds within it. These will be your food. 30To all wildlife, to all the birds in the sky, and to everything crawling on the ground — to everything that breathes — I give all the green grasses for food.” And that’s what happened. 31God saw everything God had made: it was supremely good.
So, that’s how God’s “supremely good” creation started — with everything eating plants. But, because people rebelled “sin entered the world, and death came through sin” (Romans 5.12), some of us (people and animals alike) became meat-eaters. How can I draw this conclusion? Simple. To eat meat means something has to die. And death is part of the corruption of God’s “supremely good” creation.
But God has rescued all of creation! And God is healing creation — human and non-human alike. With the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God launched the “New Creation Project” (also known as the Kingdom of God or God’s Realm; Mark 1.15). That is, in the final consummation of the New Creation, death shall not exist anymore (Revelation 21.4; see also 1 Corinthians 15).
Isaiah described the New Creation this way:
6The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat; the calf and the young lion will feed together, and a little child will lead them. 7The cow and the bear will graze. Their young will lie down together, and a lion will eat straw like an ox.
The goal then is to take us “back to the garden” as the song goes. One day, we’ll all again be eating only fruits and vegetables (and the products of those things).
As an aside, but an important aside, yesterday I saw a program on Animal Planet about a lioness who “adopted” an antelope calf as he own. The calf was still too young to eat solid food and so, along with the lioness, they both were starving for neither one ate anything. This relationship lasted for 15 days. On the last day, a male lion attacked the calf, killed it, and ate it. This lioness adopted 5 more calves throughout her life. Needless to say, the scientific world was shocked and stunned by this; they’ve never seen anything like it. The host of the program stated that this type of behaviour has never been recorded. I said, “It has too. In the book of Isaiah.” (Of course, the TV couldn’t respond, but I do that a lot — talk to the TV.) Was this a hint of New Creation creeping out into the natural world? Some would say no. This was a fluke. This lioness was a “freak of nature.” Well, I would state that she was a “freak of fallen nature.” But, maybe she’s a kind of “first fruits” of New Creation happening in throughout the rest of the world? Call me a dreamer, but I like to think so.
So, back to my point. The vocation of the church today is to live in anticipation of the consummation of the New Creation. The technical term for this is called “inaugurated eschatology.” We’re called to take some of God's future (if I can put it that way) and bring it into the present. Part of that is to put away death. And part of putting away death is to stop killing animals for food.
Now, I can already hear the arguments (alas, I’ve used them myself for a number of years), “People are made to eat meat. Look at our teeth. You can’t tell me that the teeth of a lion are made to eat grass. That’s ridiculous.” Or “Maybe someday in the future we’ll be eating only fruits and vegetables and the products thereof. But, we aren’t in the future. In this life we are obviously supposed to eat meat. We aren’t in heaven.”
Two things with these arguments:[2] First, yes, because of “The Fall” we’ve eaten meat, we’re eating meat, and we’ll continue to eat meat. Again, this is because of The Fall. But Jesus “reversed the curse!”[3] He showed us a new way of being. He started a new people. He started the New Creation Project and people can be part of that project right now. Saint Paul wrote, “If anyone’s in Christ, that person is part of the new creation” (2 Corinthians 5.17). In other words, if a person’s “in Christ,” they’re not just themselves a “new creature” (as some translations have it) but they’re part of New Creation right now! If we don’t see ourselves within that bigger picture we’re missing a lot of what being rescued (or saved) actually means. Therefore we should be living like we belong to the completed New Creation.
Lastly, if we someone came up to us and said, “Yes, I know it’s wrong to abuse women, but I’m not worried because I’ll be complete and free from that in God’s new world,” if we truly loved that person, we’d hit them with inaugurated eschatology! “Sure, you’ll be holy at some future point. But that’s why you strive to live holy now!” That dualist (gnostic) view is part of the problem within Western Christianity. No. We’re not supposed to just go on living life like everyone else. We’re called to live in anticipation of God’s final consummated world now. We pray for God’s Realm to come “on earth” as in heaven. God is creating, through people, a New Heaven and New Earth. What we do now matters. It’s part of the “building material” for the completed New Creation Project (1 Corinthians 15.58; cf. 1 Corinthians 3.10-15).
And for me, part of living in anticipation of that is to not continue bringing death to God’s “supremely good” creation. In other words …
I’ve decided to become a vegetarian.
~~~
In the Love of the Three in One,
Br. Jack+, LC
_________
[1] Scripture quotations marked (CEB) are taken from The Common English Bible. Copyright © 2011 by Common English Bible.
[2] I know this might be understood as a “strawman argument.” That is, I create a false position and knock it down. But, as I’ve said, I’ve heard these points or made them myself.
Comments
Or do you simply mean sentient life?
Niggling questions aside, I like your argument. I've heard many Biblical rationales for vegetarianism, but this one has shades I've never heard before. The eschatological application doesn't surprise me, coming from you! It's a very poetic argument.
I tried being a vegetarian once and God made it clear to me that lifestyle wasn't for me. What I gained from the yearlong experience/experiment was an appreciation for those who choose that lifestyle, and even more of an appreciation for those who are so clearly motivated to it by the Spirit.
I'd encourage you to do research on this topic. There are some connections between that lifestyle and some of the other issues you hold dear. Namely, environmentalism, hunger and poverty.
For example, cows in America consume more grain than most people in third world countries, and they are the primary source of methane gas released into the atmosphere. (I've read these somewhere. Your research might turn up some corroborative facts.) So if we start eating fewer cows, we can slow the population of cows on the earth. That reduces methane gas and frees up grain for human consumption.
That's just a hypothesis at this point, but I'd encourage you to explore it. I'd love to see the long term economic implications as well. If the world were suddenly full of vegetarians, the economic shock to meat producers all along the chain is an obvious repercussion. But once that dust settled, what would the world economy look like? Would it be better or worse.
I also wonder what steps could be taken along the way. If you look at oil companies and auto manufacturers, for example, they are already laying the groundwork for oil- and gas-free vehicles. Hybrids are a step in the right direction. The long term goal is alternative fuels. Well, oil companies have been investing heavily in copper (the core material in electric cells), corn, sawgrass, and other alternative fuel sources for over a decade. (Again, I've only heard this anecdotally, but my purpose here is to give you some leads for your own research.) So they are already positioning themselves to succeed economically in a world that doesn't use oil. How can meat producers do the same thing?
It's a question that Marty and I have raised in the context of organic food vs. chemically and hormonally enhanced or genetically altered food. How can the big agribusiness companies respond to the rising demand for organic foods? At least three ways: 1) Fight it, 2) Co-opt it (through watering down the definition of organic) or 3) Join it. There are companies doing all three. I'd wager that those doing #3 will be the most successful.
It's all about stewardship and sustainability, if you ask me.
Love,
Pinball
Regarding the other comments: Just this afternoon, I read an article that sited a 400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation that showed that 'livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming -- more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.'
The report also shows how methane (a livestock 'emission') 'warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide'. And that 'livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more than two-thirds of the world's emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain.'
The report talks about the deforestation brought about by grazing cattle, 'dead-zones' in the seas (because the waste from the cattle is dumped there), the depletion of water ('it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk'), etc. You can find the article here: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2062484.ece
While agree that it's about stewardship and sustainability, I don't think it's 'all' about that. Yes, those issues are important. But I also think, as you have already stated, we have to look forward. We have to be creative and find ways of progessing that does not leave God's good creation worse off than we found it.
My sister-in-law is an Interior Design professor in Seattle. She's probably going to be doing her doctoral work on the subject of Sustainability. You may have heard it used as "sustainable growth" or "sustainable development". The concept is NOT to return civilization to the Stone Age, but to find ways to build, grow and transport ourselves and other things WITHOUT damaging the earth in the process. It is a VERY forward-looking field, and although many (most?) of the Sustainability philosophizers aren't known to be followers of Christ, the ideas they have are QUITE compatible with the charges of Christ to his followers. In fact, I see things like this as answers to my continual prayer that God would save everyone on the planet.