I read Ronald Osborn’s book Death Before the Fall while camping on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia’s Straight of Georgia, northwest of the Puget Sound. On multiple occasions I heard the area where we were camping described as “edenic,” “paradise,” “what I imagine heaven to be like,” etc. From my campsite I saw a pod of dolphins and a pod of orcas swimming in the water, a family of deer bounding through the forest, a bald eagle fishing for salmon, all framed by majestic Douglas firs, elegant arbutus trees, and gnarly Garry oaks. I camp at this spot every summer with my family, but Osborn’s book made me see it a little differently this year, for this Eden exists not outside of reality of death but because of it. Obviously, dolphins, orcas, and eagles populate the area because their food is plentiful and their food is other living animals. As Osborn spells out memorably with his own memories of observing the wildlife in Africa, the necessity of predation to the animal world is active here.

But it goes beyond this: the deer came so close to my tent because the island is free of their natural predators. As a result, they are pests; they ate other campers’ food right off their picnic tables. We had to shoo them away from ours as if they were wasps. Speaking of wasps, the park rangers were spraying for them in some campsites, but they did so reluctantly because wasps help control the caterpillar population, which doesn’t seem like a problem until you have to spray for caterpillars. Beyond these animal issues, the reason Douglas firs and Garry oaks frame the landscape on this part of Salt Spring is that there was likely a forest fire some time ago, since Douglas firs only release their seeds in extremely hot temperatures and Garry oaks are found in areas once cleared by fire. Garry oaks are now a threatened species because of forest fire suppression. That is, this Eden would not have existed without death and the destruction of habitat, and I’m not sure the reality of death and destruction to our lives and livelihood has been discussed in relation to how we envision Eden and heaven or the resurrection until now.

All these facts of nature show the extent to which this issue of death in the ecosystem is right before our eyes and remains unexplored, willfully ignored, or explained away by young earth creationists, those who practice creation science, and other biblical literalists. Osborn writes:

Simply stated, the trouble is this: Animals, as far as we know, do not have the capacity for anything approaching human moral reasoning and will never be able to comprehend their own suffering in metaphysical or theological terms that might give that suffering meaning for them. (14)

Biblical literalists, according to Osborn, would presumably respond by arguing that

the natural world . . . was radically altered as a result of Adam and Eve’s decision to eat the forbidden fruit. The blame for all death and all suffering in nature thus fell squarely upon rebellious humans . . . All mortality and all predation in the animal kingdom were the result of a divine punishment or “curse.” (16)

I thank Osborn for broaching this topic in such an interesting way; to my knowledge, no other book successfully deals with these issues in this way regarding young earth creationist’s perspectives, and I would be interested in reading a biblical literalist’s response to Osborn’s book. Most admirably, Osborn is able to apply a wide variety of tools to assemble his argument, including philosophy, theology, biology, history, and biblical studies. He pulls from a wide variety of thinkers to show the logical problems facing much biblical literalism, especially concerning young earth creationism and creation science and their progenitors’ strategies of defense. I will let those trained in philosophy and theology respond to Osborn’s arguments in his middle chapters. As a biblical scholar and Hebrew teacher, I’m going to focus my attention mainly on chapters 1 and 12 of Osborn’s book—what Osborn wrote on Genesis—and some problems that arose in my readings of those chapters. I’ll conclude with a request to respond further to a comment Osborn makes regarding eschatology—a topic that goes beyond the scope of his book, but which he raises nonetheless.

Osborn begins his book with “a plain reading” of the Creation narrative(s) in Genesis. Why do I put the “s” of “narrative(s)” in parentheses? Because I’m truly not sure whether it should be narrative or narratives based on Osborn’s reading. In fact, I’m not sure why the first chapter of Osborn’s book exists in the way it does, unless the whole purpose of his plain reading of Genesis 1 (and 2?) is to show the absurdity of a plain reading of the creation narrative(s). He hints that absurdity is his modus operandi in the penultimate paragraph of the chapter when he writes that Genesis “is a theological text concerned with theological meanings, and it has conveyed these meanings in a form that must be grasped in terms of the prescientific worldview of its original hearers rather than our own modern one” (37–38). Thus, he gives a plain reading to show how strange it must be, but his plain reading is unlike any I have read before and would certainly not correspond with those he sets out to critique in the first place.

Osborn does not merely offer a plain reading from the perspective of a modern literal creationist or its original hearers or any one perspective. For instance, in his retelling of the first week of creation in Genesis 1, just after offering a sophisticated Thomist exegesis of the relationship between creator and creature, he introduces “Adam,” who in every English translation I know of, does not actually enter the scene until chapter 2. Granted, the Hebrew for “Man” or “man” or “humankind” as told in Gen 1:26 is the noun ’ādām, which is the same word as the proper noun in Gen 3:17, but is clearly (plainly!) used as a collective common noun meaning humanity in Gen 1:26–28 since the imperatives “be fruitful and multiply” and “fill” and “subdue” are in the plural and ’ādām is the agent. Also, in 1:27 God creates “the human” in his image (with the article) and elaborates on the human by describing it as “male and female.” It is very difficult to argue that this “human” is the same person as “the human” in Genesis 2, which is, I suppose, part of Osborn’s point, but again, it is not clear. He bounces back and forth between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, identifying Hebrew terms here and there, introducing Jewish midrash1 on the creation narrative at one point, and describing the serpent’s curse in Gen 3:14 as “clearly metaphorical and symbolic language not to be taken literally” (35). I don’t want to overstate my case. Much of Osborn’s “plain reading” of Creation is informative, instructive, and insightful, but I am just not so sure it is “plain” in the sense the word “plain” is normally used.

There is a point to the chapter, though, which relates to the problem of subduing in Gen 1:28 and the question of whether there was death in Eden. The thesis of the book as a whole is how difficult it is to sustain a literal reading of Creation when accounting for the reality of interspecies cruelty between animals. Osborn then, following Wendell Berry, entertains the possibility that things like predatory animals and annoyances like wasps might be in God’s plan after all (151). Our anthropocentric theology, following Gen 1:26–28, is dutifully checked by God’s answer from the whirlwind in the book of Job. Osborn is right to bring in Job in chapter 12 of his book, for the book of Job ends in a long meditation on creation and its overall mystery to us humans. After a lengthy debate between Job and his friends, where Job demands an answer to his sufferings from God more adequate than his friends’ weak ones, God changes the question. God’s answer is to recreate the world after its destruction in the first three chapters, but instead of creating humans as the centerpiece of the work, they are almost an afterthought. The rhetorical effect in the book of Job, then, is that there are mysteries of which we will never have answered. Indeed, one commentator surmises that Job never even hears that God commends his speech in 42:7!2

Unfortunately, Osborn also has apparently not heard that Yhwh has commended Job’s speech, for at times, he sounds like Job’s friends. In Osborn’s words, Job is not merely myopic but nihilistic (152). He describes Job’s words in chapter 3 as Job cursing all of creation when the text never suggests this. Job does invoke the language of Genesis 1 when he says “let there be darkness” (Job 3:4), but that follows the antecedent, “That day.” That is, “on the day I was born, let there be darkness.” He curses only one day, not all of creation. I don’t think it makes me a lamented literalist for making a point out of this. At the very least, the presumption that Job curses all of creation is unfair to Job, who is, after having lost all of his children and livelihood, expressing his true pain. Furthermore, it is not Job that initiates “decreation” language, but the narrator in describing Job’s fate in chapters 1 and 2.3 Osborn’s interpretation of Job seems also to ignore the rest of Job’s speeches, which display a man at a loss of understanding how the world works but not at all one who wants the world to cease. When Osborn compares Job to Ivan Karamazov, who “accepts the reality of God’s existence but. . . . respectfully ‘returns the ticket,’” (152) he ignores the rest of the book Job. Am I wrong to think such a reading is akin to those who argue that God created the plants of the field on the third day and humans on the sixth day according to Genesis 1 and neglect to explain why in Genesis 2 the male human is created before trees, which are created before the female human?

Maybe I am making too big a deal out of Osborn’s interpretation of Job’s first speech since it may not affect his thesis in any horribly debilitating way. On the other hand, it would seem an important consideration for him rhetorically to make accurate statements about the biblical texts he is using to justify his thesis, especially considering much of what he writes is necessitated by improper readings of the biblical text in the first place. Deriding so-called literalism for its unjustifiable interpretations of key texts is a worthwhile cause, but it does not give license to interpret one’s own key texts willy-nilly for the sake of a thesis. In chapter 6, Osborn writes:

One can only be true to the principle of sola scriptura, I am suggesting, if one is also committed to the principle that the biblical narratives—preciely because they are narratives as opposed to rationalistic syllogisms—draw us into a continuous dialogue that must always strive for the greatest possible inclusion of voices among those who continue to desire to be part of the conversation. (84)

I agree with the assessment, but we must at least try to read the same narratives. Is the Job of whom Osborn speaks the same Job the rest of us are reading?

The major problem with Osborn’s free reading of Job 3 is that despite making some very important points—not the least of which is that the creation narratives of Job are no less scriptural than those of Genesis—Osborn leaves himself open to criticism—maybe even outright dismissal—by the very people he intends to critique in the first place. Going back to my earlier criticism on Osborn’s Genesis, how much does it matter that Osborn’s exegesis contains some flaws? Well, I think it matters because the basis of his criticism is not really that literalists cling too tightly to the text, but that they are not honest readers of the text. They ignore problems raised by the text if the problems do not conform to the readers’ predetermined theses. So my concerns are not merely nitpicky observations of someone immersed in a specialty. These are potentially serious problems to a major component to Osborn’s thesis. How much can we trust of his argument if his own response to flawed exegesis is more flawed exegesis?

I want to be clear that as a professional Old Testament scholar with broad amateur interests I found the rest of Osborn’s book compelling and largely convincing. But I am suspicious of my understanding based on these two chapters and the way he engages in my area of expertise. Can I be fully confident of his conclusions in other areas like philosophy and theology? I’ll leave my criticism there and give Osborn the chance to explain what I may be missing.

I do want to bring up one other idea that crossed my mind in the course of reading Osborn’s book. In the chapter on Job, Osborn brings up the behemoth as a sympathetic creature in God’s creation. Osborn could also have brought up Jonah in this regard. In Jonah, the titular character has compassion on a plant, but God has compassion on a city that has many people who “do not know their right from their left and also many behemoth.” That is, the existence of all those animals, who are not described by God as having a sense of morality like the people (it does not seem to matter that they do or do not “know their right from their left”—a phrase that seems to describe the “evil” of Nineveh) seems to be a reason not to destroy the city. But my question is, what about that plant on which Jonah had compassion? And what about the wasps? Osborn discusses the implausibility of literal readings of Genesis, which I have noted somewhat above. He, however, only hints at apocalyptic visions of the eschaton, which introduce related problems. On page 154, he writes:

The God of Job is not a God who glories in defanged lions, which is to say, unlions. Isaiah 11:1–9, by contrast, envisions a future peaceable kingdom in which “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD” and “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid . . . and the lion shall east straw like the ox.” But the Isaiah passage, unlike Job 38–42, contains no parallel language, allusions or references to the Genesis creation. Its orientation is strictly apocalyptic, anticipating a final transformation of the creation without providing any commentary on its origins. (154, emphasis mine)

I wish that Osborn said more about this since it is related to creation. It is no accident that the final chapter of Revelation describes the eschaton with a river and the Tree of Life—a call back to the Garden of Eden. Therefore, even if eschatology goes beyond the scope of the book, I think it is warranted to ask Osborn to discuss the topic here. Also, I’m just curious about it since I’ve spent much of the past year reading several books on trees.

Tree behavior can be no less amazing and mysterious than animal behavior, especially when it comes to the fig tree. The fig tree, the leaves of which Adam and Eve covered themselves and to which Micah refers as a sign of the day of the Lord (4:4), have an amazing symbiotic relationship to wasps that evokes images of eros and thanatos more than paradise. Before a fig becomes a fruit, it is an inflorescence. That is, it is an inverted flower that needs a very specialized pollinator to transform into a seed-bearing fruit. That pollinator comes in the form of a female wasp covered in pollen, which enters the end of the fig through a hole so tiny that it severs its wings and legs in the process. Once inside the fig, the wasp lays eggs in the flowers that line the inside of the fig, pollinating them in the process, and then she dies. Once the eggs mature, the males hatch first and find the female eggs, impregnating the female wasps (their unborn sisters) before they hatch. The males then die without ever leaving the fig. The females eventually hatch, pregnant and covered in the pollen from their flowers, and leave the fig in order to find another fig on another tree and start the process over again. The remaining fig, meanwhile, digests the male carcasses, produces its own seed, and becomes the fruit that Micah envisioned would sustain the ones returning from exile. Those inflorescent figs that never receive a pollinating wasp never transform into fruit but fall from the tree. It’s an amazing process but raises all sorts of unpredicted questions that pertain to issues similar to those that Osborn raises. For instance, when the “final transformation of the creation” occurs, does that obviate the need for fig wasps? Will fig trees produce fruit asexually just as the lion learns to eat straw like an ox? Or will they continue to act as fig trees, those most benign-appearing dominatrixes of the natural world, offering wasps a cradle, bed, and casket all in one tasty sarcophagus. And what of the wasps? Are they allowed a place in the resurrection?

I’m not one to expend too much energy on questions like what will happen exactly at the resurrection. I am guessing that I am more like Osborn in this regard. The theological truths of God as creator concerns me less on how exactly God went about creating the world and more on how I will then act now that I know that God created the world, and all the mysteries we may never solve, including the morality of wasps and wasp killing. On the other hand, there remains no shortage of people who consider the issues of young earth creationism and exact details of the eschaton extremely important to the life of faith. Upon my return from Salt Spring Island, I reluctantly reentered the world of social media to witness a mini-firestorm concerning a Christian band who “Rattles Christian World With Revelation That They Don’t Believe the Bible Literally.” Specifically, they do not believe Genesis 1–3 should be read literally. Various sites describe the band as “drifting away from biblical orthodoxy” or even putting their own salvation at risk, all because a singer doubted what Osborn explains is a fundamentally flawed reading of the text in the first place. The band is not alone in their trials within the church, as we in the academic world know all too well. Therefore, it is important that this conversation continue. Besides that, I am curious enough about it to wonder how Osborn might respond to questions regarding wasps, wasp killing, and the strange sexual lives of fig trees.

Ronald Osborn has done a great service in writing this book. The prose is extremely easy to digest but sacrifices little in intellectual rigor. In addition, Osborn’s wit makes the read quite enjoyable. Style aside, there is much commendable about this work. Osborn raises important methodological and epistemological criticisms of both biblical literalism and fundamentalism. He also highlights the severity of the issue of animal suffering for any Christian theodicy, not excluding paradigms of theistic evolution.

While I thoroughly appreciate (and agree with) much of what Osborne states—not the least of which is his challenge to biblical literalism and fundamentalism and his recognition of the severity of the problem of animal suffering for any Christian theodicy—I have many questions about some of his insights and arguments. Happily, one of the best aspects of Osborn’s work is that he welcomes disagreement, provided it occurs respectfully and dialogically. He does not present his position with absolute certitude—such would be a violation of his epistemology and method. Rather, he asks questions and offers insights in order to further an ongoing conversation. In this review, I take his invitation to dialogue seriously, which leads me to emphasize mainly my point of contention with his work: the argumentation concerning animal suffering is at times exegetically problematic and more self-contradictory than dialectical.

Regarding exegesis, Osborn makes a number of claims that strain biblical texts. Some are seemingly minor, such as when he reads the negative connotation of the Hebrew kabash as an expression of humanity’s military task vis-à-vis the entire creation (28) when the author of Genesis 1 uses the term to refer only to the earth, not animals (Gen 1:28).

Other claims are more problematic, such as Osborn’s suggestion that Genesis presents predation (as opposed to simply death) as existing from the beginning and as being part of the “very good” creation. Even in the beginning, when creation is “very good,” Osborn argues that there are “formidable predators,” appealing to the “sea monsters” of Gen 1:21 and, cross-textually, the Behemoth and Leviathan of Job (I address the problematic reference to the Behemoth below). Drawing again on the notion of kabash as military conquest, Osborn writes, “Adam and Eve must wrestle with this side of the created world and bring it more completely under God’s dominion without overriding or exploiting its freedom.” Adam and Eve, for Osborn, are sent into battle to take on the role of both caretaker and redeemer (32–33).

There are two difficulties here. First, as Osborn himself notes, “The strongest argument against such a reading is Gen 1:30, in which animals are given ‘every green herb for meat.’” His response: “We must note that while this verse hints against predation being willed by God, it does not resolve the question of whether the ‘great sea monsters’ or other wild and creeping creatures might not at their first appearing in fact be predatory.” In other words, “It remains an entirely open question whether very good creatures lacking in moral awareness but possessing creaturely freedom or agency might not take that which they have not been given” (33). Thus, the image appears to be that Adam and Eve must conquer predation, which is the result of creaturely freedom gone awry.

This image leads to the second problem. In his criticism of literalism, Osborn acknowledges, “The natural world is filled with creatures that are anatomically ‘designed’—in their internal organs, their instincts and practically every fiber of their physical structures—to exist by consuming other creatures.” Such creatures are “irreducibly predatory” (134). How then did these creatures arise? Osborn is well aware of the question; his answer seems to be the free-process defense (I address this point below). The problem is not this appeal, but rather his claim that creatures may have used their “creaturely freedom of agency” to “take that which they have not been given.” If such creatures are, in fact, predatory by nature, then they are not choosing to take. They are driven by biological necessity to do so. Said differently, given the irreducibly predatory nature of some animals, how can their participation in predation be a choice they exercise within the freedom that God allots them? One might just as well argue that a human chooses to sweat on a hot day.

The greatest exegetical issues, however, surface in Osborn’s reflection on Job. He begins his discussion, quite problematically in my view, with chapter 3, in which Job curses the day of his birth. Osborn reads this text cosmically, arguing that Job is cursing not the day of his birth, but all creaturely existence. He offers as evidence for this view only verse 9 in which Job calls for the day of his birth to be consumed in darkness, which reverses the creation of light in Genesis 1 (151). “Rather than accept a suffering creation and his own suffering within it as ‘very good,’ Job calls for the creation in its entirety to be undone” (151). This claim strikes me as a radical textual leap with deeply insufficient evidence. In chapter 3, Job’s focus is his suffering, the day of his birth. Thus, it is far from established that Job turns “his personal experience of suffering into an indictment against the creation in its entirety—against the injustice of existence” (152).

More importantly, Job’s focus is not simply suffering, but innocent or unjust suffering (hence his focus on his suffering). The Deuteronomic theology of blessings and curses suggests that obedience yields blessing while wickedness yields cursing (Deut 28), a theology Eliphaz and Bildad promulgate in the narrative. God describes Job as follows: “There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil” (Job 1:8). In chapter 6, Job laments, “O that my vexation were weighed, and all my calamity laid in the balances. . . . O that I might have my request, and that God would grant my desire; that it would please God to crush me, that he would let loose his hand and cut me off! This would be my consolation; I would even exult [Hebrew root, sld] in unrelenting pain; for I have not denied the words of the Holy One” (Job 6:8–10).

The point here is that Job is not opposed to suffering and death, per se. Indeed, he welcomes both! His issue is that his suffering is unjust, for he has “not denied the words of the Holy One,” a claim that God corroborates. This reading strikes against Osborn’s interpretation and his resulting claim that Job’s complaint is one of nihilism or that “the costs of creaturely existence are too high” (152). To put Job’s lament into modern parlance (and in keeping with the themes of Osborn’s text), he protests the aimless and random suffering of “ultra-Darwinianism,” not the presence of just suffering in the form of judgment.

Osborn’s reading of Job continues to be problematic. He maintains that the text offers no rational answer to the question of why suffering occurs. “If one comes to the book of Job expecting or demanding such an answer, God’s words from out of the whirlwind will appear as little more than the tirade of a bullying tyrant” (152). However, Osborn’s emphasis on the absence of reason for Job’s suffering does not survive the canonical text itself. It is true that in the final chapters, God offers no clear answer. Rather, the divine response is “nothing other than the creation itself in all of its stupendous, intricate, frightening, free and often incomprehensible forms” (152). Osborn suggests that such a response is at once “not an answer” and “the only answer possible.”

Yet, the canonical text itself offers another answer. Indeed, the first chapter explains exactly why Job is suffering: God is attempting to prove his point to the satan, the accuser within the divine court. Oddly—and again I am here speaking only canonically, acknowledging that Job may be the compilation of multiple source traditions—God never admits this reason to Job. That is, in the divine expression of flashy anger, God withholds the one piece of information that Job seeks and that the reader knows God has: why Job has suffered.

We may speculate as to why no admittance is made; but that Osborn sidesteps this strand of the text altogether is quite problematic, especially because it challenges his claims about how the text functions vis-à-vis the presence of suffering in creation. That is, while Osborn seems quite willing to embrace the answerless (perhaps we can say unreasonable) divine exposition at the close of the text as a fine response to cosmic suffering, I wonder if he would be as accepting of the notion that all cosmic suffering results from a divine desire to prove a point. I certainly would not accept such a position, but it is nonetheless part of the canonical text and thus cannot be ignored when interpreting the narrative.

Perhaps the most egregious misstep of this chapter, however, comes with Osborn’s discussion of the great predators God cites in the divine diatribe. The text does indeed state that God provides predators with their food. However, it is an extrapolation to suggest that such provision implies that God either created or fully approves of predation. That point aside, a greater issue arises with Osborn’s discussion of the Behemoth. He cites the New English Bible, which describes the Behemoth as “the chief of beasts, the crocodile, who devours cattle as if they were grass” and who God “made to be a tyrant over his peers; for he takes the cattle of the hills for his prey and in his jaws he crunches all wild beasts” (153). God’s admiration of the Behemoth, the great predator, does lend credence to Osborn’s understanding of Job as a positive evaluation of predation at large. The problem is that Osborn has chosen a translation of the text that contrasts sharply with virtually every other translation. Consider the following comparison:

The difference is stark. The NRSV and KJV (as well as in the ASV, NIV, ESV, NASB, and the CJB) translate the Hebrew (חָצִיר כַּבָּקָר יֺאכֵל) as the Behemoth eats grass as an ox. The NEB translates it that he “devours cattle as if they were grass.” In the NRSV and KJV, the Behemoth eats of the fruit of the mountain where other animals play. In the NEB he “takes the cattle of the hills for his prey and in his jaws he crunches all wild beasts.”

It would be difficult to imagine two more disparate renditions of the text. In all but the NEB the Behemoth is a non-predator. In the NEB he is the predator par excellence. Admittedly, a majority of voices does not a flawless translation make. But it is odd that Osborn makes no acknowledgement that virtually every other translation of the Hebrew favors the opposite conclusion of his thesis; namely, that “the Creator takes full responsibility for animal predation, and there is no hint that it is anything other than very good” (154). In most translations, God is most impressed with this great creature, the Behemoth, who does not participate in predation. Indeed, the Behemoth bears similarities to Isaiah’s eschatological lion, which shall “eat straw like the ox” (כַּבָּקָר יֺאכֵל-תֶּבֶן).

This final point—the correlation between the Behemoth and Isaiah’s eschatological lion—strikes forcefully against Osborn’s conclusion: “The God of Job is not a God who glorifies in defanged lions, which is to say, unlions. Isa 11:1–9, by contrast, envisions a future peaceable kingdom in which . . . “the lion shall eat straw like an ox.” But the Isaiah passage, unlike Job 38–42, contains parallel language, allusions or references to the Genesis creation” (154). However, given the thoroughly dominant translation of verse 15, God does in fact glorify in non-predators. The Behemoth is, after all, “the first of the great acts of God.” Furthermore, Osborn’s claim about the lack of parallel between Isaiah and Genesis is tenuous, given that Genesis does, by Osborn’s own account, present the divine desire for a creation absent of predation (see Gen 1:29–30).

The ultimate point of Osborn’s engagement with Job is to present a biblical challenge to both literalists who decry predation as a perversion of God’s good creation and Darwinians who describe evolution as cruel (155). The aforementioned problematics of this chapter notwithstanding, it is also worth noting that the term “good” (Hebrew tov) never appears in the text of Job with reference to the created order and does not appear at all in the final four chapters of the text. Said differently, God never argues that the creation is “good” in the book of Job. God simply presents the created order before Job; and God does so in the context of a canonical narrative in which God permits the satan to prey upon Job—God indeed does provide the predator with prey!

My exegetical discontents with Osborn’s work stand aside what I perceive to be a confusing line of argument. As one example, it remains unclear to me if, in a final analysis, Osborn accepts predation as good. On the one hand, he appears to refer to predation as part of the “dark powers” at work in creation (150). On the other hand, he suggests that calling predation not good may represent “ingratitude if not contempt for God’s good creation and the earthiness of material existence” (37, 140–41). On the one hand, he writes, “There are things under heaven and in earth that we should not be at peace with, and the jaws of the Behemoth, I would submit, are one” (157). On the other hand, he maintains, “the Creator takes full responsibility for animal predation, and there is no hint that it is anything other than very good” (154). On the one hand, Osborn affirms that we intuitively sense creation is fallen in the suffering among animals (142–43, 157–58). On the other hand, he questions whether such evaluations are in fact baseless projections of human morality (141).

This lack of clarity affects the potency of Osborn’s favored answer to the issue of animal suffering: the free-process defense. Osborn maintains that creation is an ongoing process in which God invites other creatures and realities to play a part (37, 162). This form of creation, Osborn maintains, requires a form of divine kenosis in which God gives creation its own space to develop (161–62). This position reflects closely many of my own theological commitments; but its delineation falls short of any kind of systematic explanation. The issue is not that it relies on mystery (surely all theodicies must do this!). Rather, the issue is that it remains unclear in exactly what it is saying.

First, the lack of clarity is evident in Osborn’s claim: “In the same way we speak of moral evil as resulting from human free will, we should now somewhat analogously speak of natural evil and animal suffering as emerging from free or indeterminate processes” (161). Note the distinction between “natural evil” and “animal suffering.” Does this separation suggest that animal suffering is not a natural evil? What then is natural evil—only those things that negatively affect humans? Or, is this syntax meant to imply that animal suffering is part of natural evil? Osborn’s claim that, for Christianity, death is the final enemy coupled with his belief that “it is only through the kenosis of Christ [i.e., his death] . . . that our eyes have at last been opened to the real nature of good and evil for the first time” (165) seem to suggest the latter—that suffering, death, and predation in the nonhuman world is an evil. Yet, if such is the case, it is unclear how such a claim squares with his arguments that applying such words as “evil” to evolution and predation are human projections that do not necessarily cohere with the biblical witness (as he maintains is the case in the book of Job).

Second, Osborn’s appeal to free process does not yet clearly explain how the shadowy sides of creation burgeon out of creation’s integrity, bought at God’s kenosis. He maintains that God fine-tunes the creation in its ongoing processes; but these processes themselves are the result of and follow cosmic law. Did God make these laws? If so, are not suffering, death, and (it may be argued) predation foregone conclusions if life emerges within a cosmos in which the laws of thermodynamics reign?

Put as simply as possible, Osborn’s solution has neither clearly committed to whether or not suffering, death, and predation are evils nor offered a vision of how the divine will relates to the cosmic laws that render these aspects of biological existence necessary. It does sound helpful to state the creation is not a “design” so much as a “drama” and that “the creation is best seen as an improvisational theater or musical performance in which the director invites the actors—and not human actors alone—to join in writing the script, with all of the danger and all of the possibility that this implies” (162). Yet, as helpful as these claims sound, they have not yet addressed the most troubling question: Do the parameters God sets for cosmic improvisation (i.e., cosmic law) render suffering, death, and predation inevitable in the event that biological life arises? If not, how do these laws come to be? If so, then God does not so much permit the possibility of such “natural evils” and “animal suffering” as much as God renders them a certainty within a set of lesser uncertainties (e.g., what kind of biodiversity will arise within evolution’s mechanisms?).

Let me conclude by reiterating my appreciation for Osborn’s work. Space limitations keep me from sharing the many positive attributes I find in it. If I am here mainly critical, that criticism should only reflect my humble desire to engage Osborn as a knowledgeable dialogue partner in this important conversation. Also, my criticisms are based on my readings of the text, which may or may not always reflect Osborn’s intentions. At any rate, I would without equivocation recommend this text to anyone interested in the issues of both biblical literalism and animal suffering. My discontents notwithstanding, Osborn’s text raises wonderful questions that help move both conversations in positive directions. For that fact I express only gratitude.

Ronald Osborn’s Death Before the Fall is a compelling addition to contemporary theological literature. More specifically, I suspect and hope it will be a helpful interlocutor in the renewed conversation surrounding science and theology—especially as the conversation transpires in evangelical circles. And this, after all, is one of Osborn’s intentions with the text. In the introductory material, he notes, “My goal is not to exhaust possibilities but to provoke honest even if unsettling conversations as one member in the body of Christ addressing others. . . . I want to demonstrate to literalists that one can be a thoroughly orthodox Christian and embrace evolutionary concepts without contradiction” (20).

While the book read somewhat unevenly to me—with more time dedicated to the literalist problem and less time dedicated to the questions of evolution and animal suffering than I had hoped—it must be understood that Osborn crafts the work from a particular paradigm for a specific audience. The time spent on matters of biblical literalism seems intended to poise a more conservative audience to receive the heart of his argument.

Thus, perhaps what I appreciate most about Osborn’s work here is his willingness to showcase his own grappling with the Seventh-day Adventist world from which he hails. In many ways, we are given a window into how one wrestles with yet remains in one’s home tradition. Certainly there are others who find different spiritual homes than the ones of their origin (with the movement from evangelical to post-evangelical being both well documented and discussed). Yet Osborn is one who at this juncture has chosen to remain in the denomination of his youth.

Osborn’s opening lines reveal the deep influence of this inherited faith tradition. He begins, “As a child growing up to missionary parents in Zimbabwe not long after its independence from the apartheid regime of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, death in nature was something I had been exposed to from an early age, albeit not in everyday life” (11). Now, some might contend this is simply a popular way to draw a reader in (i.e., with personal narrative). Yet, as Mark Taylor contends, something essentially theological is happening when one acknowledges the context from which one is writing. Taylor notes, “Putting autobiographical elements into theology is one way to redress the often-lamented distance of theology from peoples’ religious, cultural, and political experiences.”1 This is what Osborn is doing. Thus, Osborn’s introduction is commendable—not simply because it is a step of vulnerability; it is commendable because, I submit, it is responsible scholarship. As Taylor further indicates, “[P]resent North American social and institutional practices feature a thoroughgoing, albeit often well disguised, “abstraction” from material conditions, an abstraction that wreaks abuse and oppression on humanity and on nature; an abstraction that is turning away from, often an abhorrence and fear of, concrete existence. The fault is not abstract thinking; rather it is thinking and practice turned away from the sources of human and natural life: matter, bodies, mothers, darkness.”2 Osborn does not turn away from these sources of human and natural life; for him they stand as the backdrop of the text itself.

Oddly then, it is Osborn’s failure to more fully engage the theological tradition of the Seventh-day Adventist Church that is, for me, a great shortcoming of the text. This is evidenced in one of the final chapters, which focuses on Sabbath ethics. While much could be said about Osborn’s approach to C. S. Lewis’s descriptions of theodicy, Osborn’s reading of Job, and his depiction of divine kenosis, I want to spend the remainder of my time in this review focusing on what Osborn sees as the practical, ethical imperative to his work—that is, attention to the rhythm and meanings of Sabbath.

In my estimation, while there is a renewal of contemporary interest in Sabbath in the Christian tradition, a theological backbone in many of these proposals is not as robust as it should be. In recent history, one can winnow out at least four different Christian approaches to Sabbath practices—with Seventh-day Adventists advocating strongly for one of these positions. In many ways, Seventh-day Adventists have been one of the only Christian communities to consistently and uniquely uphold and practice the Sabbath, yet Osborn only touches on (but does not draw upon) this tradition. In light of the argument in the first half of his book, it would be interesting to see Osborn engage the Seventh-day Adventist traditions of Sabbath. Admittedly, perhaps Osborn does not take this route because he wants to appeal to a more general theological (or evangelical) audience. Nevertheless, I submit something is lost without the specificity of a strong theological rationale for appealing to the Sabbath. Undeniably, Osborn gets much of the history right concerning Sabbath and the Christian tradition. Moreover, he highlights a key dimension of the meaning of Sabbath—that is, extending rest and mercy to other humans, sentient beings, and the rest of creation. In general, I agree wholeheartedly with Osborn that an appeal to embrace Sabbath is important here. Yet, it would have been helpful to have time dedicated to a more precise theological argument for why Christians should embrace an ethics grounded in Sabbath.

I suspect that many readers will approach Osborn’s Death Before the Fall within the framework of the creation versus evolution debate that has long exercised churches and classrooms across the globe. Indeed, Osborn devotes more than half of his book to describing how the biblical literalism with which he was raised leads to scientifically incredible claims of a young earth and a prelapsarian deathless natural world, among other difficulties. While I affirm the importance of these and other “religion and science” discussions, my review will proceed in a different direction. In focusing on “Part II: On Animal Suffering,” I largely neglect what Osborn himself has described as “prolegomena” (his “Part I: On Literalism”) and turn to “what [he] want[s] to say about the theodicy dilemma of animal suffering and mortality” (19).1

The dilemma upon which Osborn asks us to meditate is this:

Animals, as far we know, do not have the capacity for anything approaching human moral reasoning and will never be able to comprehend their own suffering in metaphysical or theological terms that might give that suffering meaning for them. Why, then, would a just a loving God . . . the undivided and good Creator God of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—require or permit such a world to exist? This world is one in which the harrowing suffering of innocent creatures through the violence of other creatures appears at once fraught with terrible savageness and at the same time part of an order that is delicately balanced, achingly beautiful and finely tuned to sustain tremendous diversity of life. If there is a rationally discernible “intelligent design” to the natural world . . . should we not conclude that the design reveals a pitilessly indifferent if not malevolent intelligence? (14)

If we put aside the many places where Osborn either impresses upon his readers the gravity of the problem or humbly acknowledges that there are in the final analysis “no easy answers,” we can read him as providing three discrete responses to the theodicy dilemma of animal suffering (178). The first emerges from his reflections on the final four chapters in the book of Job—“Jewish Scripture’s clearest answer to the problem not only human but also of animal suffering” (151). The second moves Christologically and eschatologically beyond what a “devout Jew or Muslim could . . . affirm” in its claim that neither Genesis nor natural history can be properly understood if we do not begin with a “radically Christocentric understanding of the character of God and the governance of God as revealed in the Jesus of history who is the crucified Savior of the world” (158, 160–61). The third asks Christians to adopt not so much a particular conception of God (theology), but a distinctive set of dispositions and practices (ethics) to live more fully into a vision of “Sabbath rest.” In what follows, I shall raise a few questions about these responses, including how we might sort out the relationships among them.

I. God of the Whirlwind and Divine Command Theory

Osborn turns to the book of Job not only because it provides the “most extended commentary on . . . creation . . . in the biblical canon outside of Genesis itself,” but also to supply counter-evidence to the popular literalist belief that “the biblical writers conceived of all animal suffering as a marker of ‘sin’ or demonic corruption of the material forms of creation” (151). Osborn reads Job as not only challenging God on the grounds of “distributive justice: why do the innocent suffer?” but also on “the problem of nihilism: why is it better that there should be a suffering creation rather than no creation at all?” (151). Osborn’s retrieval of Job for the purposes of theodicy, however, is at best ambivalent: he acknowledges that Job’s existential “case against God’s created order” is “strictly speaking . . . unanswerable in any purely rationalistic or moralistic terms,” admits that God’s response appears as “little more than the tirade of a bullying tyrant” from anyone who comes to the book “expecting or demanding such an answer” (readers of both Job and Osborn’s Death Before the Fall be warned!), and describes God’s answer to Job’s question of nihilism, which points to “nothing other than the creation itself in all of its stupendous, intricate, frightening, free and often incomprehensible forms,” as in one sense being “not an answer to the problem of suffering at all” and in another sense the “only answer possible” (152).

What Osborn finds significant in God’s reply to Job is that God “seemingly delights” in the “wildness and even ferocity of the animal kingdom” and accordingly takes “full responsibility for animal predation” in such a way that leaves no “hint that it is anything other than very good” (153–54). We may be “perplexed and dismayed” by the portrait of God that emerges, but Osborn suggests that the “radical non-anthropocentricity”2 of the book and its “Will the faultfinder contend with the Almighty?” verse (Job 40:2) following the poem’s “description of eagles feeding their young the blood of other animals” are essentially conversation-stoppers (154). “Darwinian theorists” or “creationists” who inadvertently mimic Job in supposing that the “natural world . . . is too wild, too finite and too ferocious to be God’s very good creation” are likewise to be chastised for “faultfinding and contending with the Almighty” in their unwillingness to accept the “forces of chaos” in God’s creation that shield neither humans nor other animals from danger (156).

Thus, in affirming that “creation, with its suffering and death included, is very good because it is God’s creation,” Osborn effectively casts his lot in this first response with theological voluntarism. There is “incommensurability between human notions of right and wrong and the structure of reality” as per Osborn’s quotation from renowned Hebrew literature and Jewish Studies scholar Robert Alter, which is to say that creation is good because it is the work of God—not that creation, with its attendant pains and suffering, is good for reasons independent of God’s handiwork or will (to invoke the other horn of the Euthyphro dilemma) (156).3 Such a view may preserve God’s sovereignty, but it does so at the expense of removing God as an object of moral admiration. As Leibniz astutely observed in the late seventeenth century, “in saying that things are not good by any rule of goodness, but sheerly by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realizing it, all the love of God and all his glory. For why praise Him for what He has done if He would be equally praiseworthy in doing exactly the contrary?”4

II. Kenosis, Theosis, and Divergence from Classical Theism?

As if the afore-mentioned ambivalent retrieval of Job were not enough, Osborn essentially begins the next chapter by undermining the gains of the former. Christians are cautioned from permitting the “inspired poetics of the book of Job” to inure us to the “scandal in death and suffering,” because our faith “whose central event is the brutal execution of . . . God on a Roman cross” precludes us from forming any “stoical pact with the cruelties of death as divinely fated necessities of life” (157–58). What Osborn offers as the “most constructive” approach to problem of animal suffering, then, is one that retrieves “Christ’s kenosis or self-emptying on the cross, and the ancient patristic understanding of theosis. . . . [wherein] the journey of creation and pilgrimage of humanity . . . end[s] in our final adoption as coheirs of God’s kingdom and ‘partakers of the divine nature’” (159).

In insisting that we understand the doctrines of creation and redemption together, Osborn is keen to emphasize that the “promis[e] . . . of nothing less than a great transformation of all creaturely existence” should not be thought of as a return to any prelapsarian state of perfection (146). In other words, the “destiny of humankind is not simply a recapitulation or recurrence, paradise lost, paradise restored;” instead, the “end is greater than the beginning—and was always meant to be so” (159). Thus when Isa 11:1–9 speaks of a peaceable kingdom wherein “the wolf shall live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid . . . and the lion shall eat straw like the ox,” Osborn insists upon the passage’s “strictly apocalyptic” orientation: it “anticipate[s] a final transformation of the creation without providing any commentary on its origins” (154).

It is Osborn’s fleshing out of kenosis that leads me to ponder where he remains within, and strays from, “highly traditional . . . orthodox Christian[ity]” (20). His kenotic theology is not limited to the incarnation as per Phil 2:6–8, as suggested by his approving quotation of John Polkinghorne’s account of God’s “willing[ness] to share with creatures, to be vulnerable to creatures, to an extent not anticipated by classical theology’s picture of the God who, through primary causality, is always in total control” (161). In further noting that this 2002 Templeton prize-winner’s description runs counter to both a view of “God’s omnipotence entail[ing] his absolute predestination of all events, including even human choices” that is common in “conservative wings of the Reformed tradition” and Barthian beliefs about the “unbridgeable chasm between God and his creation,” Osborn concludes that he has “no stake in defending such pictures of God.” In his words:

Whatever its difficulties, the only position that makes any moral, religious or rational sense of human moral evil to my mind is the one that declares the divine will wills human freedom, and is both powerful enough and self-giving enough to create beings with the capacity to make meaningful, self-defining choices that are morally and spiritually significant. (161)

So is Osborn’s characterization of God as “powerful enough” his quiet way of rejecting the divine omnipotence doctrine of classical theism as, say, process theologians have done?5 Osborn does reference the work of Alfred North Whitehead in his book, albeit to make a different point (97). And does the distance he creates from the traditional Reformed view of God’s “predestination of all events” suggest that he has greater sympathy with the ideas of “open theism” instead?

To be clear, God’s self-emptying for Osborn not only preserves the sphere of human freedom, but also that of other elements of creation. Osborn writes of “natural and animal suffering as emerging from free or indeterminate processes, which God does not override and which are inherent possibilities in a creation in which the Creator allows the other to be truly other” (161–62). While acknowledging that there are “real dangers . . . of sliding into a sheer dualism, Gnosticism or Manichaeism,” Osborn references the “clear sense throughout the New Testament” that God has “permitted parts of his creation—and not humans alone—the autonomy of radical freedom and even defiance, which God himself must now in some sense struggle against” (144). In short, Osborn’s “kenotic Creator” is not one who “utterly dominates animals,” but who, like a director “invites the actors—and not human actors alone—to join in the writing of the script, with all of the danger and all of the possibility that this implies” (162). This is to say that Osborn has not abandoned the idea of a “fallen” natural world (as his reflections on Job might suggest); he believes that the world we inhabit now is a “dim reflection of God’s original creative intent and final redemptive purpose,” but that the groans and travails of creation appeared well before humans arrived on the scene (143, 146).

While Osborn’s first response to the problem of animal suffering led me to think in terms of divine command theory, Osborn’s second evokes in me, as alluded to earlier, some central claims of process theology. How do Osborn’s views compare to what Jay McDaniel has recognized as process theology’s three-pronged way of responding to the theodicy dilemma of animal suffering: (1) “God’s power is, and always has been persuasive or invitation rather than coercive,” (2) “the natural world has creativity that is independent of God’s creativity” and (3) “by virtue of nature’s creativity, patterns of behavior can emerge in the evolutionary process that even God could not and cannot prevent if there is to be life at all”?6 When we additionally consider that Osborn believes in both creation “by divine fiat” and that “God does not only create ex nihilo,” as “the earth itself . . . participates . . . in the creation process/event” in a way that discloses “God’s way of creating . . . [as] organic, dynamic, complex and ongoing rather than merely a sequence of staccato punctuation marks by verbal decree,” we might also query how close Osborn comes to Jay McDaniel’s defense of “relational panentheism”(25–26).7 To be sure, I offer these questions neither in the spirit of rooting out heresy, nor in defense of process theodicies against their alternatives, but only because I happen to work at the epicenter of process theology (Claremont School of Theology) and thus have gradually been primed—especially by my own students—to think in these ways.

III. Sabbath Rest and the Relationship between Theology and Ethics

If Osborn’s first two responses to the problem of animal suffering provide ways to understand the dilemma intellectually, his third provides guidance on how to respond to the matter practically. Readers discover in his final chapter that what counts ultimately for Osborn is not “detached theologizing,” but “concrete and ethical action that brings Sabbath peace to our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom” (175).

After recalling his own familial traditions of Sabbath-keeping and situating the meaning of Sabbath in Hebrew Scripture as oriented more “toward the future rather than the past or even the present,” Osborn reminds us of the many ways in which the “radical generosity” and “Sabbath economics” of the sabbath day, sabbath year, and “sabbath year of years, the Jubilee” also reflect “profound ecological concern” (167, 169–70). To illustrate, he uses the extension of Sabbath hospitality to nonhumans and even the land in Exod 23:11 (in periodically requiring the land to lie fallow and in permitting the wild animals to eat what the poor do not themselves harvest) to make two points. The first may have implications for agriculture, conservation, and wildlife management in his underscoring of the ways that biblical Sabbath regulations link “productivity and fruitfulness of the earth . . . to human noninterference in the natural world as a regular corrective to human subduing” (170). The second suggests that we do no violence to the text when we translate the biblical concern for animal welfare into the language of rights (“This command of free trespass may be the earliest law of wild animal rights in human history, closely following on the commandment in the Decalogue that domesticated animals shall not be made to work on the Sabbath (Ex. 2010)” (171). Other portions of Scripture that Osborn highlights for animal ethics include the rabbinic teaching, which Jesus himself references, that Sabbath laws can be broken to alleviate the suffering of animals (Matt 12:11–12) and biblical and other Jewish traditions that condemn hunting for sport (171).

This all I can affirm, as I have written elsewhere about the ways in which Christians can take action in their own lives and in public policy on their convictions regarding the intrinsic value of all creation of which the Sabbath traditions in the biblical texts profess.8 In addition, I share Osborn’s encouragement for Christians to focus on the “moral dimensions of the Sabbath,” am likewise aghast at the slaughterhouse realities of “nine billion animals butchered annually in the United States—the cattle routinely dismembered alive, the hogs plunged still conscious into vats of boiling water, the birds packed so tightly into cages to be trucked thousands of miles that they often arrive crushed and suffocated on delivery,” and am intrigued by his apparent Matt 25: 31–46-inspired reading of who “true” creationists may turn out to be—Jane Goodall, among others, over George McCready Price for having “fought to protect the lives of animals when others who loudly claimed to be God’s chief spokespersons viewed the task of actually caring for the creation with reluctance, nonchalance, or outright disdain” (173–74).

Nonetheless, two aspects of his final chapter on animal ethics caught me by surprise. The first was a series of theology-ethics connections wherein Osborn implied that those who interpret Genesis literally are less likely to respond compassionately to animal suffering than those who do not. The second was Osborn’s neglect to draw upon several tradition-specific practices and arguments that I as an outsider thought would have held special meaning (and thus rhetorical power) for Seventh-day Adventists—the primary audience to which the book is addressed as an “open letter” (18).

Taking these in turn, I remain puzzled by Osborn’s implications that biblical literalism leads to apathy about animal suffering, that beliefs that animals are “cursed” after the fall undermine the ability or willingness to “care about the abuse inflicted every second of every day upon sentient creatures in slaughterhouses,” and that those who suppose that animals will ultimately be destroyed by God won’t invest time and energy in alleviating their pains on this side of the eschaton, among other claims (173–74). While Osborn does concede that there is no “inevitable link between biblical literalism and indifference to animal suffering,” he still greatly overstates the relationship (174).9 Ethical views about appropriate human-nonhuman animals, in my view, are much more “freestanding” than he suggests—they are underdetermined by theology.

How so? For one, the notion that the time and resources activists spend on improving the lives of other animals should in many cases be redirected to needy humans is not peculiar to young earth creationists, but widely shared by many Christians of all stripes and by non-Christians as well.10 Second, one can readily provide several counter-examples to Osborn’s notions of causality or even correspondence. Aquinas famously held that the “nature of animals was not changed by man’s sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs,” but his rejection of a literalist reading of Genesis on that score didn’t prevent him from reaffirming traditional views (from Aristotle and Augustine) that “their life and death are subject to our use.”11 And no less than Ellen G. White, a pioneer and recognized prophet of Seventh-day Adventism, believed that Genesis 1–11 was “divinely intended to be interpreted historically, and not only theologically” and accordingly affirmed beliefs in “six, literal, empirical, historical 24-hour days of creation, culminating with a literal 24-hour Sabbath day of rest.”12 Still, she not only urged Adventists toward vegetarianism for reasons of health, but also in light of the “cruelty to animals that meat eating involves.”13 Osborn’s attribution of indifference to animal cruelty to the holding of certain theological beliefs thus stands as one of the book’s weakest claims. He is much more successful, however, in placing the blame on sin that need not be peculiar to any denomination or type of Christian (let alone person): “manic human greed,” the infliction of “pain and death upon other sentient creatures for the sake of their own pleasure or profit” (172, 175).

The case of Ellen G. White brings me to the second surprising element of Osborn’s chapter. Why didn’t Osborn commend, much less acknowledge, the Adventist church’s well-known institutional support for, and practices of, vegetarianism? Recall Osborn’s deep concern about anthropogenic “planetary destruction” and the prospect that humans will “devour the earth” in such a way where it is “no longer clear that other species will survive” (174–75). Even if the roughly 30 percent of Adventists who follow recommended church teaching about eating a plant-based diet do so primarily out of beliefs about its health benefits, they would still be (inadvertently) acting in stewardly ways. For a widely-cited UN study on the global livestock sector found that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (a bigger share than that of transport), that the livestock sector is single largest anthropogenic user of land, that the industrial processes involved in rearing animals for food heavily impacts the world’s water supply and poses a threat to the earth’s biodiversity.14 Osborn might accordingly have invoked the Adventist church’s well-known advocacy for vegetarianism, explained the ways in which eating no or less meat contributes to planetary (not just personal) health, and then demonstrated how its co-founder Ellen G. White herself concluded that the “moral evils of a flesh diet are not less marked than are the physical ills” in “destroy[ing] the tenderness with which we should regard these creatures of God.”15