Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [73]
Today Christian theologians are rediscovering the links between our dietary and spiritual choices. Many are arguing that vegetarianism is the diet most compatible with Christian values like mercy and compassion. The Anglican priest and Oxford professor Andrew Linzey, PhD, argues that “to stand with Jesus is to… honor life for the sake of the Lord of life…. To stand for Jesus is to stand for active compassion for the weak, against the principle that might is right.” For Linzey, this means Christians should be vegetarian.
Theologians like Linzey, I learned, are part of a long tradition of meat abstainers that stretches back to the origins of Christian faith. The Desert Fathers, fourth-century Christian saints, abstained from meat. The fifteen-hundred-year-old Rule of Saint Benedict, a pillar of monastic spiritual practice, severely restricts meat eating. Under the influence of this rule many contemporary monastic orders, especially in Eastern Christianity, are vegetarian to this day.
Some later Christian leaders were semi-vegetarians, like Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), who avoided meat as best they could. Others, like the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (1703–1791), were full-time vegetarians. Many more were vegetarian for limited periods. Still today there is a vibrant Catholic tradition of giving up some or all meat for Lent, the period before Easter.
While contemporary Christian vegetarianism is usually rooted in ethical concerns about the abuse of creation, historically Christians who chose not to eat flesh also saw their diet as a path to greater spirituality and increased sanctity. Both seem like good reasons to me!
I was delighted to learn about this rich tradition of incorporating vegetarian diets into spiritual practice, but I admit that it surprised me at first. It certainly is not something most Christians in America know about. If you do some searching, though—even simply by searching “Christianity and vegetarianism” on the Internet—it’s easy to see just how important the idea of peace among all creatures has been in the Christian moral imagination. Indeed, you don’t need to look any farther than the first thirty lines of the Bible: the diet God ordains in Eden is strictly vegetarian! You don’t need to take my word for that. Jewish and Christian biblical interpreters have agreed for millennia that Genesis 1:29–30, the verse I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is proof that humanity’s first diet was meat free.
It’s a stunning vision when you pause to think about it. When God imagined the perfect world, it was a world where humans did not eat animals, but instead lived on the gifts of food growing on trees and in the ground. According to the biblical narrative, it was only after the fall that humans started eating animals. The ideal is to strive to return to the original perfection. This is why when the prophet Isaiah is describing the messianic era in which the world is again made perfect, he declares that “[t]he wolf shall live with the lamb…and the lion shall eat straw like the ox” (Isaiah 11:6–7). Given this, it makes perfect sense that today more Christians are questioning the rightness of eating meat and are turning toward vegetarianism.
The endorsement of vegetarianism in the first chapter of Genesis is sometimes ignored by Christians who like to emphasize that by the ninth chapter, human beings have been given permission to eat meat. So I decided to look into how that “permission” to eat animals is portrayed in the Bible.
One thing all commentators seem to agree on is that the late tolerance of meat eating doesn’t mean that God just “made a mistake” and realized that slaughterhouses were actually a good idea. A long history of Jewish and Christian commentators have taught that granting permission to eat meat is portrayed in the Bible as a concession to human weakness. In the very same biblical verses where permission to eat meat is given, all humanity is required to drain blood, an ancient symbol of life, from the animals. At first