LIBERATION THEOLOGY: Animals as crucified beings
If God is love and sin separates us from God, surely there is nothing more sinful than the way we treat animals. We have created hell on earth for our fellow creatures, who we torture and kill by the billions every year. In this sense, animals are victims of the sin of the world, like Jesus.
JON HOCHSCHARTNER: The liberation theologist Ignacio Ellacuría’s concept of ‘the crucified people’ uses the plight of Jesus of Nazareth as a symbol to highlight marginalized, exploited humans of the modern era… The comparison seems fairly commonsensical, given Jesus’ identification with the oppressed of his time. In contrast, the canonized gospels don’t show Jesus to be inordinately concerned with nonhuman suffering. One could argue extending Ellacuría‘s concept to include animals isn’t in keeping with Jesus’ message in the Bible…
From this perspective, we can view Jesus as a great spiritual teacher — limited by his time and place in history — whose fundamental ethic of compassion we want to extend to nonhumans.
In an essay explaining the metaphor, Ellacuría wrote: “The crucified people has a twofold thrust: it is the victim of the sin of the world, and it is also bearer of the world’s salvation.” I support those who argue animals meet the criteria for personhood, but ‘people’ is frequently used as a synonym for ‘human,’ so, for the sake of clarity, I’ll talk about animals as potentially crucified beings…
This might sound outlandish, but it probably wouldn’t be to at least some Old Testament writers. After all, the Garden of Eden is presented as a vegan paradise; meat-eating is only introduced after the mythical Fall. Isaiah promises a world of interspecies peace, where the wolf will live with the lamb. And in Hosea, God says he will make a covenant with the beasts of the field to end human violence.
If God is love and sin separates us from God, surely there is nothing more sinful than the way we treat animals. We have created hell on earth for our fellow creatures, who we torture and kill by the billions every year, as part of our food system. In this sense, animals are victims of the sin of the world, like Jesus and the crucified people.
But in what way is the crucified people, like Jesus, bearers of the world’s salvation, and can we say the same of animals? Frankly, this is the part Ellacuría’s essay which I have the hardest time understanding. Was the liberation theologist merely saying proletarians and peasants are revolutionary subjects as a Marxist or Maoist might?…
Animals are not capable of abolishing domestication. They are not revolutionary subjects in the same way Karl Marx believed proletarians were or Mao Zedong thought peasants were. But I believe that, for instance, by struggling to escape a slaughterhouse, animals can unveil the sins of the world by standing up to it. This struggle implicitly proposes a new demand as the unavoidable route for reaching salvation.
In that sense, animals could be understood as crucified beings, like Jesus and the exploited humans of the modern era Ellacuría was writing about. SOURCE…
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