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CONCLUSION

I have tried to show how Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish, male human, matters for

how we think about the Incarnation in relationship to nonhuman animals (and to a lesser

extent creation as a whole). In recent decades, the Gospel of John’s statement that “the

Word became flesh” has served as a theological impetus to develop a view of the

Incarnation that has significance for all of creation. Focusing almost exclusively on

nonhuman animals and theology, Andrew Linzey was an early proponent of this idea,

though it never played a role beyond a few lines in his work. More recently theologians

such as Gregersen, Edwards, Johnson, and others have developed a notion increasingly

termed “deep Incarnation.”

Deep Incarnation is the idea that in taking up “flesh” the Son took up all that

“flesh” would consist in, including the stardust we now believe helped to form earth,

evolutionary history, and a sense of interdependence with other creatures and our

environment. For The Word to become human flesh, and be truly human, the entire

history and environment of creation has to be involved. Humans are not humans without

all of this. God takes it all up in becoming flesh. In the first chapter I argued that, indeed,

the idea of “flesh” in the New Testament is very much in line with much of what these

theologians have been saying.

Yet these theologians, including David Clough, who has written the first

systematic theology focused on issues around nonhuman animals, largely dismiss the

particularity of the Incarnation. Instead they focus on the cosmic dimensions of

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Christology. Jesus’s Jewishness, his maleness, and his humanity do not play an important

role in the recent literature.

I have tried to show that these three particularities are important for any doctrine

of the Incarnation. Bypassing Jesus’s Jewishness, maleness, and humanity leaves

theology impoverished and distorted. We have two early examples of this problem in

Athanasius and John of Damascus, who used the Gospel of John to claim that the Word

became “matter.” But in switching from the New Testament language of “flesh” with its

deep ancient Jewish roots and its ambiguous meaning (does it mean human, animal, flesh,

or meat?), these authors opened themselves to undermining basic insights of the

Incarnation from particularity. Athanasius prefers to speak about planets and stars rather

than nonhuman animals. Celestial bodies seem more fitting than animal bodies to his was

of thinking. The story he tells is one that looks hard for the beauty and goodness of

creation broadly speaking, but his story is mostly anthropocentric. It is also vehemently

anti-Jewish, which keeps him from looking at the particularity of the Incarnation. There

are similar problems in John of Damascus, who waxes eloquently about the necessity of

hypostasis, but misses the particularity of Jewishness, even deriding Jews as a bunch of

infants for painting animals in their synagogues, a practice that Christians also engaged in

at that time. Some of these mosaics reflected Jewish eschatological hope of creation-wide

renewal.

Jesus’s Jewishness is not a hindrance to developing a theology on behalf of

nonhuman animals. Rather it is extremely helpful and necessary. The eschatology

involved in the specific trajectory of Jesus has to do with a transformation of relationship

in creation so that predators like lions and wolves do not harm prey animals like lambs
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and calves. This eschatology looks forward, but Jewish people also look backward to

God’s original intention of vegetarianism, signaling peaceable relationships as God’s

intention all along. Even Jewish laws that restrict what Jews can touch or eat in

relationship to nonhuman animals point back to God’s intention, and possibly forward to

the messianic age in which the Torah would be fulfilled. That Christians have largely left

behind these laws as “Jewish” is one of the greatest tragedies of Christianity.

Jesus’s maleness shows us that Jesus was a male in a particular way: he was not

the Greco Roman ideal hunter/warrior. Rather, like most Jewish people, he was not a

hunter. When he was in the wilderness it was not as a killer of wild animals, but as the

peaceable messiah. Jesus’s circumcision marked him off in the Greco-Roman world as a

less-than-human male. But, in line with many Jews of his time, Jesus takes this

dehumanization and stands it on its head.

He does this by problematizing what it means to be human. I used a number of

contemporary philosophical ideas about animals and humanity to read Jesus’s humanity

in a way that challenges the most common definition of humanity as sole possessors of

language and reason. The idea that Jesus “becomes-animal” and challenges the

anthropological machine at the heart of defining human identity finds deep resonances in

the Bible as Jesus is depicted as several animals. Most notably this becoming-animal

resonates in Revelation’s human/lion/lamb Messiah, whose own body is animalized in a

way that fulfills the Jewish vision for a creation-wide peace.