The Dominion Of Love

Many commentators and users of the Bible have, over the centuries and up to the present day, used the Bible to argue that animals have no rights, that they were put on this earth for our use, and that we have no obligations to them. In his cogent, honest, and fully researched and referenced work, The Dominion of Love, Norm Phelps attempts to encourage all who revere the Bible as holy scripture to open their hearts to the suffering that we inflict upon our nonhuman neighbors. He shows that the right of animals not to be imprisoned, harmed, and killed for our benefit flows naturally from the Bible's message of love and compassion and argues that this is the message of the Bible's most important passages dealing with our relationship to animals. He further responds to the defenses of animal exploitation that are often made based on the Bible. Beautifully written, The Dominion of Love is an essential addition to a growing body of literature that argues for a compassionate and non-exploitative reading of Holy Scripture.

A "marvelous" (Economist) account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.

For centuries Christians believed that God granted humanity dominion over the animal kingdom, meaning that we had a moral right to kill, manage, and eat animals including wildlife. Recently, however, environmental and animal rights activists have assaulted this traditional perspective. They argue that dominion as expressed in meat eating and hunting has resulted in species extinction and environmental degradation. Christian Animal Rights (CAR) activists suggest that the church must reevaluate its traditional beliefs in light of the fact that God's original creation was free of human on animal violence. God, they argue, did not want man's dominion to be expressed through trapping, killing, and eating of animals. These violent activities only came about after the Fall, as God condescended to our hardness of heart. CAR activists point to Christ's sacrificial work of reconciliation as a model for modern Christian behavior: as Christ sacrificed for us, we should avoid eating meat and hunting as ways we can participate in Christ's non-violent work of reconciling creation to himself. In this book, Stephen Vantassel investigates the biblical, ethical, and scientific arguments employed by the CAR movement concerning human-wildlife relations. In this regard, the book engages in practical theology by addressing several important questions: How should Christians treat our wildlife neighbors? Has the Church been wrong in its understanding of human dominion? Does God want Christians to avoid hunting, trapping, fishing, and adopt a vegetarian lifestyle? This book provides answers to these questions by detailing a theology the author calls, "Shepherdism."

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." --Genesis 1:24-26 In this crucial passage from the Old Testament, God grants mankind power over animals. But with this privilege comes the grave responsibility to respect life, to treat animals with simple dignity and compassion. Somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong. In Dominion, we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We attend the annual International Whaling Commission conference, where the skewed politics of the whaling industry come to light, and the focus is on developing more lethal, but not more merciful, methods of harvesting "living marine resources." And we visit a gargantuan American "factory farm," where animals are treated as mere product and raised in conditions of mass confinement, bred for passivity and bulk, inseminated and fed with machines, kept in tightly confined stalls for the entirety of their lives, and slaughtered in a way that maximizes profits and minimizes decency. Throughout Dominion, Scully counters the hypocritical arguments that attempt to excuse animal abuse: from those who argue that the Bible's message permits mankind to use animals as it pleases, to the hunter's argument that through hunting animal populations are controlled, to the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions, and are not conscious of their own lives. The result is eye opening, painful and infuriating, insightful and rewarding. Dominion is a plea for human benevolence and mercy, a scathing attack on those who would dismiss animal activists as mere sentimentalists, and a demand for reform from the government down to the individual. Matthew Scully has created a groundbreaking work, a book of lasting power and importance for all of us.