“Red in Tooth and Claw” God’s Love and Animal Suffering

What is it about?

Nature is full of atrocities. Various documentaries attest to how animals cruelly defeat and devour each other. Well-known is Charles Darwin’s example of the parasitic wasp that brings its larvae into the body of a caterpillar. From there, these larvae feed on the caterpillar that is still alive. Thereby, they leave the vital organs intact until all other meat is almost consumed (Darwin 1993, 224). Darwin wrote 13 July 1856 to the botanist Joseph Hooker, “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature!” (Darwin 1990, 178). Thus, the entire animal kingdom is a kingdom of pain, or, as the English poet Alfred Tennyson put it, “nature, red in tooth and claw.” For many people, non-human animals attacking and digesting other creatures seems to contradict a Judeo-Christian testimony of a loving God who created everything. After all, Christianity confesses that God’s love is so great that God died in Christ for this creation. That testimony of self-sacrifice stands in direct opposition to the self-preservation of the animal kingdom. How could a loving God create such a violent nature?

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