What is the Connection between Christianity and Vegetarianism?

[This is Skriver's introduction to The Forgotten Beginnings of Creation and Christianity]

The Present State of the Problem in Science and Public Opinion

What role does vegetarianism play in Christianity?

According to the established churches, it has none at all. In "heretical" Christianity, on the other hand, vegetarianism plays a major role; a role which originated with Jesus and the Nazoreans. Christianity began and ended as a Jewish heresy (John 19:19, Acts 24:5).

The problem of whether humans have the right to eat meat (Magnus Schwantje) is foreign to nearly all modern Christians. When a Christian of today is confronted with this question, either on a practical or a theoretical level, their reaction is one of irritation, incomprehension, and absolute defensiveness. A vegetarian is someone to be pitied, tolerated, or rejected. If the vegetarian tries to defend his position on Christian grounds, he will simply be dismissed as a crank and a sectarian. His ideas will be condemned by scientists as unscientific and by the church as heresy. As a result, the vegetarian’s ideas are eliminated from research, from preaching, from public discussion, and public consciousness.

As far as I am aware, there has never been a vegetarian pope or reformer. There is very little that could be written about vegetarianism in Catholicism and even less about vegetarianism in Protestantism. And yet, such eminent non-Catholic Christians as Emanuel Swedenborg, John Wesley, Eduard Baltzer, Ellen Gould White, William and Catherine Booth, Caspar Rene Gregory, and Mathilda Wrede, lived a vegetarian life. But this sort of thing is not common knowledge taught to us in school. The common dogma of the churches is simply this: vegetarianism does not belong in the gospel.

For most Christians, the infallible Pope is the Bible. But this view is mistaken: the Bible has never been infallible. Religious persons have visualized God in their own terms, in innumerable different ways. Thus, even in early Christianity contradictions were discovered in the Bible--the pericopes and antitheses which cannot be simply explained away or straightened out by a "better translation." Not only do we have to contend with this; we have had to deal even more, for thousands of years, with innumerable misinterpretations of these texts. So it is possible to follow the teachings of "the" Bible, and still have wrong ideas about history or even about God’s will. Nevertheless, there have been some enlightened persons who have found and testified to liberating and satisfying truths which they discovered inside and outside the Bible.

Initially, it appears that the Bible and especially the New Testament is anti-vegetarian. The Old Testament has numerous references to the ancient laws of sacrifice and slaughter, and these have been (erroneously) depicted as part of God’s will. But then, in the New Testament, it seems that even with Jesus there is no change in the cultural attitude towards animals, nor is there any change in the nature of animals. The sacrifices of animals in the Temple continue: Jesus’ attack on the cultural slaughterhouse failed. Jesus produces massive amounts of alcoholic drinks, feeds fish to thousands of people, believes that fish and eggs are better food for children than snakes or scorpions (this is, incidentally, the only "egg" in the entire New Testament), and eagerly consumes the passover lamb.

Jesus also tells stories involving meat-eating. In one parable, a king has many oxen slaughtered for his son’s wedding. In another, a father kills the fatted calf for his long-lost son, which is then consumed with great joy. All these are pre-Christian, half-cannibal joys and rites which were obviously sanctioned by the founder of the Christian religion. So it is hardly surprising that the little man in the church pew feels that sanction is given to his cruel indulgence. How is it possible to establish, or add, a Christian dispensation into these text traditions?

And this version of the Bible is being blindly distributed to hundreds of millions of people in the world. In India, Christian missionaries teach the Hindus that their vegetarianism (which has existed for thousands of years) is a pagan practice. These Hindus are taught that faith in Jesus as their redeemer will redeem them also from all vegetarianism--that they ought to receive ham and bacon with thanksgiving, as gifts from God! Many orthodox Hindus therefore cannot accept Jesus as the Highest Guru, or even as an Avatar (incarnation of God), because Jesus is presented to them as a meat-eater, a glutton, and a wine-drinker.

Because of this version of Jesus in the Bible, Jesus gets short shrift from Moslems as well. "When a pious Moslem sees a fellow Moslem drunk, he usually says: ‘That man turned away from Mohammed and converted to Jesus.’" (William Winsch, War Jesus ein Nasiräer?)

The academic theologians and experts are of as little help as the laymen at this point. There is no scholarly literature or monographs on the problem of Christianity and vegetarianism. So far, there hasn’t been any interest in the subject, any questioning, any special knowledge, or any obligation to do research. Not only is there total lack of information, there is also a sharp sense of antagonism and rejection when the subject is raised. For example: when a famous Christian personality was a vegetarian for his whole life, it is intentionally concealed in ecclesiastical history, encyclopedias, and obituaries, as if it were totally unimportant for posterity. Or, when a famous person in history like Leonardo da Vinci was a vegetarian, their vegetarian character is taken away from them after they died--as if one had to be ashamed that they dealt with such a trifle as vegetarianism during their lifetime. In older scriptures and editions of texts one may here and there find a remark about the way of life of important people, rather than in modern ones.

It is clear, then, that on the subject of animals, Christianity lags far behind the Eastern religions, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of ethics. Christianity never developed a clear ethic concerning animals. Animals still play a more important role in the Old Testament than in the New Testament. We can already see a conflict between the attitudes of Jesus and Paul towards animals in the accepted Bible. There is no lack of scriptural authority for degrading the value of animals. Even Jesus’ kind words for the sparrow are usually interpreted in favor of humans: humans are better than animals, anyway.

For almost 2000 years Christian scholars have drawn false and terrible conclusions from their Biblical studies. They have concluded that animals have an inferior soul or no soul at all. The animal has no life after death. The animal has no right to live and no right to protection. The animal is not allowed to have a soul, so that it can be unscrupulously hunted, bred, murdered, slaughtered, and vivisected. They say that the animal is part of "creation" and mean by that, that animals are surrendered to humans to do with them as they wish. The animal is simply an object to be used for whatever end the human wishes. If someone wants to describe an atrocity against humans one says: people were slaughtered like cattle. But for animals the massacre is not an atrocity--according to the accepted ideology of human beings.

In light of the fact of all these anti-animal views in Christianity, which cross all denominations and all national borders today, it is hardly surprising that Christianity has said nothing new to the world concerning animals or nutrition (meat eating versus plant foods). On these issues, Christianity is no different from paganism! Christianity has not progressed beyond the followers of Noah or the people around Noah at the time of the flood. Christianity has "freed" itself from all practical questions concerning life and living beings; and it has left these questions to butchers, cooks, doctors, and animal breeders to be answered.

Likewise, it has left political life to the godless brains of physicists, chemists, economists, politicians, and military strategists. From all the people who have studied the Bible you can find one final piece of wisdom: just leave the world, until its end, to the devil and the people who serve him.

All of this information is by way of preparation for the difficulties a vegetarian will encounter, whenever he tries to enter into a discussion of these subjects with Christian society, with the churches and all their supporting organizations. We should not be called starry-eyed about the present state of the world or of Christianity. We know the world much better than all the children and churches of the world.

Only a few Christians become vegetarian because of religion. Some vegetarians have turned away from Christianity in disappointment, and found consolation elsewhere in purer messages from God’s kingdom.

Questions about the beginnings of creation and Christianity, also suggest questions about the principles of creation and Christianity. In the beginning means ‘in principio’. What were creation and Christianity like in principle, before they were incredibly disfigured and corrupted both by Gods and mortals? The vegetarian reasoning within the Bible is leading to a revolutionary reinterpretation of the usual church-like images of God and humans, and will reinstate the rejected tablets containing the laws of holiness and the laws of sanctification.

The awareness of the violation of vegetarian principles in the world’s events evokes unthought-of questions: Is God an unchangeable spirit, ethically impeccable? Is the world in its present state the original creation of God? Is its state the act and fault of one single God? Is the world as created by him still very good as it was at the beginning? What are the powers which cause the ethical chaos within all of creation? Is there really a deliverance from evil? Do Christians of today still take this deliverance seriously, recognize it, want it, and accept it and try it?

Creation and Christianity both had a vegetarian beginning as a holy creation-principle, and deliverance-principle, which continues and persists and remains valid every day until the end of this Age [Aeon]; and after this Age, it will be fulfilled in a new and better world. As a trustworthy Christian, you should not disparage these new things frivolously, by holding them in contempt or trying to forestall the new forces which are today in the process of being born.