Do dogs go to heaven?

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Welcome to Curiously Caitlin, where we try to make theology make sense. Each week, we will hear a kid question about God, theology, or the Bible, and find a scholar who can answer it.

That doesn't make any sense.

It's probably one of the first questions that people sent me when I said I was doing this project. It's a question that kids in my church have come up and asked me. It's a question I remember as a kid asking or hearing people ask, but here is one of the examples of the version of this question we have gotten. Hi, I have a question. Do dogs go to heaven?

What about other animals? So two parts there. Do dogs go to heaven? And what about other animals? What is your initial reaction to this question?

. I mean, on some level, we know why this is a big question. For most kids, it probably is because they know a dog, and they would like to see that dog again. They might know a dog that has died. But there's another reason this question comes up a lot, which is because it doesn't fit the way we talk most of the time about heaven, or even, as you just said, about God's plan for things.

We don't really talk about animals very often. So why do you think this is such a big question? Not maybe why it matters so much to us, because I think that's kind of intuitive why it matters to us, but why does this seem difficult? Or why is this something that people have had to ask in the past?

It ends with Jesus proclaiming, Behold, I'm making all things new. And the biblical view of redemption, or the scope of redemption, according to the testimony of Scripture, is not that we, or animals, are disembodied souls, that upon our death, we get kind of taken up into this ethereal spiritual realm. It's actually that God redeems and transforms the good things that God has made in creation. And we humans have a place of preeminence and significance and importance, and even special authority within God's creation. But we're not the only creatures that God cares enough to make.

We're not the only creatures that God loves enough to call into being and to serve and to feed and to care for. And so Scripture actually ends with this vision of God having mercy on all that God has made, transforming all that God has made. And last time I checked, dogs were creatures that God has made. So we start with this kind of rough idea of heaven, and then ask the question with that in mind. But I think we need the broader perspective on eschatology that I've just.

barely begun to describe. to start with. Another challenge in this question is, I think it comes from some anxiety that some folks have about what Christian faith is all about. The Bible is written by human persons, inspired by the Holy Spirit, addressed to human persons. And so it's going to have a very human-centric.

perspective, and we're anxious to maintain that.

There's this notion that becomes especially powerful and popular and significant from the Renaissance on forward in the Western world, especially through the rise of modern science and the Industrial Revolution and new technologies, that humanity has this godlike capacity.

And I think Christianity has adopted a lot of that in really problematic ways.

That's not how the Bible describes the job God gave humans.

So, anyway, I think those are some of the factors that are involved in complicating the question, making it a challenging, real question for us. But, of course, the reason we ask it is because there are a few people who haven't had a really strong emotional attachment to a non-human creature. And those bonds seem to us to be real, because we actually know we experience them as real. They're not arbitrary. And so we have all these competing things that we receive culturally and often in our faith.

communities, and so we just don't know how to sort them all out, I think.

And we've spent a lot of time on the show in general, talking about, we have a wrong idea about what the end of the story looks like too. It's not just floating on clouds, strumming harps, not living in a body. Bodies really matter. Creation really matters. The other thing I've heard a lot of people say in church, not usually a kid, a kid wouldn't say this, but if a kid did ask a grown-up in church, will my dog go to heaven or do dogs go to heaven?

One answer I've heard a lot of grown-ups give is, well, no, because your dog doesn't have a soul and you need a soul to go to heaven. What would you say to that answer?

The Bible starts with a big cosmic story where humans are just one little part, and then zooms in for our sake, on our role to play in it all.

And then there are a number of other texts that,

especially in the Old Testament, in the wisdom literature, that highlight our commonality with other creatures. Ecclesiastes 3 raises the question whether—nobody knows whether humans go up and animals go down, even. We all receive our breath from God, and God takes it away in our dying. And so we're not actually any different, at least in that particular text, than these other creatures with breath. In Aristotle's work on the soul, Peripsuche, he actually argues that animals do have souls, and plants do as well.

They're just different kinds. And so he's got this hierarchical scheme where he classifies plants as only having a nutritive soul. And then animals have a sensate and a locomotive soul. And then humans, at the pinnacle, have a rational soul.

Sometimes we learn things from our cultural moments that are true. But here Dr. Johnson is describing some ways of thinking that we have learned from philosophical trends in our world that were not helpful, that did not accurately describe God's creation as he describes it to us in Scripture.

And again, I think the anxiety comes in here, especially with the rise of modern science and our awareness of just how incredibly intelligent so many non-human animals are. People are, I think, really anxious to protect human uniqueness, and I'm not denying it at all. It's just we have some of these pressures on us that I think we haven't sorted out especially well.

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That's really helpful. And it's helpful too, because it's not just. hopefully, some adults are thinking through like, yeah, what assumptions am I bringing to this question? But realizing some of that just comes from the things we hear in church. You know, you're talking big philosophical movements.

Some people might think like, that has nothing to do with me. It's like, well, no, that trickles down to the way that we talk in our families, the way we talk in church. And we don't think that we're talking in a specific way or that we're influenced by certain things, but we are. Can you talk a little bit about, so we've covered, yes, animals in general go to heaven. They matter for God's creative intent for all of creation.

You said earlier, though, that very controversially, you think snakes go to heaven. Yeah. And so I want to hear specifically about snakes, but I also want to hear about what you think of just, I mean, if we get into the nitty gritty, I've heard, I remember as a kid, having heated debates, you know, little, older kid about whether mosquitoes were a part of creation or a part of the fall, you know, are they intended to exist? well, with us? Is there a, the lion and the lamb kind of beauty of, you know, being in reciprocal, healthy relationship with creation?

Is that possible with snakes and mosquitoes?

But within the text of Scripture and the testimony of Scripture, there is no easy way, like straightforward way, to argue that these things are simply a result of the fall. So, you know, God actually uses, like insects, plagues, for instance, to punish God's people throughout the text of the Old Testament. But there's no suggestion that those things come from or result from imbalance that humanity has introduced into God's world because of sin. You know, we get, if anything, contrary perspectives. I mentioned the first creation account.

on the fifth day, God creates all of the fishes in the deep blue sea and all of the birds above and calls on them to team and to swarm and to thrive and to flourish. That's before, we're just privileged to listen in on this. Like we come the next day later, God has already blessed these other creatures and has called them to do their thing. And then, on the sixth day, and this gets into the snake question just a little bit, God creates every creeping thing as well, which is an inclusive designation that probably.

has snakes and insects and spiders and these other sorts of things that give people that, you know, the willies that freak us out. These are all included as well. And then the refrain is once again, God saw what God had made, and it was good. And then God creates humanity. And then God declares the whole is good, inclusive of all of these things.

So there's not a notion that Adam and Eve's disobedience is what brings about the existence of these things. In classical Christian reflection on creation, everything that is, is good. Everything that God creates is good. And so if a mosquito is, if it exists, then it possesses the unique goodness of what it means to be a mosquito. Its goodness is to our disadvantage.

But there are other texts in scripture that, that recognize what you gestured towards, a little bit, the sort of mutuality and ecological give and take.

So are animals. And we live in different environments with them.

And confronts, and Job confronts Job with that and says, this is, you know, this is beyond your comprehension. We want to bring things down to our comprehension. We want to make it easy. We want to categorize some creatures into the good pile and others into the bad pile. God, you know, do snakes exist?

Yes. Does God need them? No. Well, God must want them to be for some reason.

And the reason is the intrinsic goodness of snakeness.

So, we have to adjust our perspective drastically in the face of, you know, in the face of a judgment like this. But I did want to follow up on the snake question. One of my favorite eschatological texts on non-human creatures and God's redemptive work is in Isaiah 11.. And you know this, the wolf shall lie down with a lamb and a little child will lead them, a lion will eat straw like an ox. And this text actually ends with like what could be thought of as the most dangerous or problematic creatures.

A child will play outside the den of a cobra and put her hand in the hole of the viper. They will not kill or destroy, and my holy mountain declares the Lord and the earth will be full of the knowledge of God. Has that happened? yet? Are children playing with cobras and vipers?

These are representative of probably the two most dangerous types of snakes in the Middle East. No, it hasn't. Well, when is that? That's what we believe we are living towards. That's what we Christians think God is ultimately going to bring about, the reconciliation of all things in Christ, snakes in their goodness included.

So we might think that God is preaching the gospel to our pets, to all creation. Without words, without our words, and not dependent on us. But we also might, I think, need to recognize the call to do that. That the hope and the peace that God is inviting us into actually does, in a way, depend upon the body of Christ, depend upon us, living out the possibility of this peace and reconciliation. now.

That would probably involve both the use of words to our good boys and girls, and also just our habits of life, our behavior, a demonstration that we don't just believe these things, but that God is bringing about such transformation in our lives. So, you know, I don't think you need to sit your dog down and, you know, walk through the Roman road or something like that with them. But I do think that God makes it possible for us to invite us into and calls us into this reconciling work, and I think that that has really significant implications for how we relate to God's other creatures. After all, God gives us dominion. We haven't talked about this text at the end of Genesis 1, but it's really important for what we're considering, and we have to ask the question, okay, well, we know that this doesn't belong to us.

Creation is God's. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, and yet God delegates us this authority. Well, how, then, does God exercise his authority in creation? And the answer in Genesis 1 is God blesses, and God calls it good, and God serves its flourishing, and that's a kind of preaching.

So we need to say this with words and also live it out.

What would you say to them? that would be understandable to a small child, but could open up a little bit of what we just talked about? Not just to say, yes, but a little more.

and yeah, so it's a mystery, but we know God has made known the mystery of His will, a plan for all times, Paul writes in Ephesians 1, to reconcile all things, whether things in heaven or things on earth, in Christ and through the Holy Spirit, and so we can trust that God will not forget your pet.

The young child will put its hand into the viper's nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. This is the end we are awaiting. We are hoping and praying and waiting with expectation for the day that not only are our bodies restored and our relationship with God is made right, but everything broken and wayward about all of creation is made new. Nothing is outside the scope of this coming redemption.

Not little children, not the peskiest animals, not even the fighting that happens between animals. that has nothing to do with us. So when we think about every little heartbreak in our lives, every minor hurt, every small lost dream, every slightly fractured relationship, we can believe in faith that God sees it, cares about it, and will redeem it all.

Curiously, Caitlyn is a production of Holy Post Media, produced by Mike Strelow, editing by Seth Corvette, theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus cute kids, and never any butt news.