Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 82:1 (Spring 2020)
Article: Sentience, Suffering, And Salvation: A Critique Of Key Concepts In Animal Theology
Author: Randall E. Otto

WTJ 82:1 (Spring 2020) p. 153

Sentience, Suffering, And Salvation:
A Critique Of Key Concepts In Animal Theology

Randall E. Otto

Randall E. Otto is Affiliate Faculty in the Christian Ministries program for Southwestern College in Wichita, KS, a Mentor in Humanities for Thomas Edison State University in Trenton, NJ, and Visiting Professor in Critical Reasoning for Chamberlain School of Nursing, global campus. He has also served for nearly thirty years as a Presbyterian pastor.

An analysis of key concepts of sentience, pain, and suffering, and salvation as they pertain to animals demonstrates they are insufficiently conceptualized biblically, philosophically, or scientifically and thus unable to bear the weight required of them in animal theology. Animals and humans differ not merely in degree, but in kind, the rational being of humanity serving as the basis of the self-consciousness and uniqueness that enables humans to see pain has meaning, suffering has purpose, and humans are those for whom the Son of God became human in the incarnation to suffer and die for their salvation alone.

We must never allow the problem of animal suffering to become the centre of the problem of pain … because it is outside the range of our knowledge.”1 So said C. S. Lewis in 1940, before the study of animal cognition in ethology had become a scientific discipline. Cognitive ethology has since suggested that ideas of thought, consciousness, language, and morality, once considered unique to humanity, are found in varying degrees through much of the non-human animal world, particularly in vertebrates. As a consequence of this explosion of study in animal cognition and in view of the Darwinian dictum that the differences between humans and animals are of degree and not of kind, the question of human interaction with the rest of the animal world has come to the fore.

The Christian appropriation of these concerns is stated by their leading proponent, Andrew Linzey, who, asserting that “mammals (at least) experience pain and suffering only to a greater or lesser extent than we do,”2 maintains that “the obligations we have to sentient animals are the same sort of obligations that we have to human beings.”3 These are also obligations of God himself,

WTJ 82:1 (Spring 2020) p. 154

Linzey, Southgate, Webb, Clough, and others maintain in echoing Keith Ward’s contention that, “if it is necessary that each sentient being must have the possibility of achieving an overwhelming good, then it is clear that there must be some form of life after earthly death.… Immortal...