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Come, Let us Reason Together

An L. Kate Deal illustration
Maybe because it is the holiday season, I noticed that someone was arguing for "the Christian attitude" toward animals.

Maybe because I taught in a church college for such a long time, I thought of all those arguments about whether or not there is "a Christian perspective" on what a college should be, or whether the president of the college, or the faculty, or the students, or the mathematics curriculum should be "Christian".

I cannot recall whether it was Reinhold Niebuhr or his brother, Richard, who said that whatever particular case one tried to make about something being "Christian", the strongest argument one could make was that there would be some Christians who agreed.  And, or course, that probably even more would disagree.

There isn't "a Christian point of view".  There are a hundred or a thousand Christian points of view.  I suspect that in Tulsa, or Amarillo, or Lynchburg there will be a lot of people who agree that Christians are pretty much like Baptists.  But there are a lot of Baptists, too:  Calvinistic Baptists, Primitive Baptists, General Baptists, Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestination Baptists, Seventh Day Baptists, and Garden Variety Baptists.  Every one of them will be quite willing to tell you what Baptists believe about what a Christian is.  They will not agree, of course.

Once upon a time, I was a Lutheran.  No, no, not that kind of Lutheran!  I was not the same kind of Lutheran Michele Bachmann is said to have been, nor even the same kind that Martin Luther was.  Martin Luther was German.  I was a derivative Scandinavian, and there are those who disagree with me about that, too.  But I can say without fear of contradiction, I think, that I was a Squarehead Lutheran.  However, I must confess that once upon another time, I visited relatives in Norway at Christmas time, and we danced a most somber dance around the Christmas tree, and spoke of relatives who were missionaries in Africa or Stavanger or Somewhere, and I did wonder whether my mother might have had a more adventurous life than she ever told.

Catholic Bishops are especially willing to tell us what Christians ought to believe about birth control, or why priests have three knots in their cinctures, and why sometimes they come untied, and Christians in Nigeria are sending missionaries to explain the truth about Christianity to the United States.  And you have been to South Carolina, haven't you, and danced around the Segregation Tree, or to Salt Lake City?

"What is the Christian attitude toward animals?"

Oh, stop!

 There are those who will agree with you, and with me, but. . . .

Come, instead, let us reason together.


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