Vegetarianism the "Diet of Hope" -- and Some Connections to American Foreign Policy

Here's an interesting Beliefnet interview with religion professor Stephen Webb, author of a new book called Good Eating, who "describes himself as an 'evangelical theologian' whose vegetarian lifestyle is biblically based."  He explains:

I started reading the Bible again from a perspective of compassion for animals, and I felt like I was reading it for the first time. I discovered a whole world of passages about animals.

The trick is to see the Bible framed in terms of God's love for all of creation and the shared destiny of humans and animals. Animals are a crucial part of God's creation. They're there when animals are shown in heaven in the great visions of the prophets.

From this he concludes that [v]egetarianism is the diet of hope, an eschatological diet":

It's a diet of witnessing to your hope that, in the end, God will restore the entire world to God's original intentions. That God will redeem humans and animals alike.

Redeem animals from what? Not their own sins? You have to rethink heaven. It's not just for people who sin--it's for any creature who has suffered, whose life has been incomplete, who's been a victim. Heaven is about the restoration of all things to their original goodness.

I wouldn't want to go around judging everyone who eats meat, but I do think vegetarianism is an act that witnesses to our faith.

Among the interesting exegetical elements: the point that Adam and Eve still ate fruit and nuts after God gave them dominion over the earth (and only ate meat after the fall), and the claim that God gave the Israelites a sickening oversupply of quail as punishment for their being dissatisfied with manna.

It's also interesting that, among other things, this is the same Stephen Webb whose previous book American Providence, according to the publisher's synopsis,

argues for a robust doctrine of providence--a doctrine that he contends has been frequently neglected by American theologians due to their reluctance to claim any special status for the United States. He defends the idea that American foreign policy should be seen as a vehicle of God's design for history.

I wonder if, given our current cultural-political alignments, Professor Webb is the only person in the world who believes in both vegetarianism and the providential role of the United States.

At a deeper level, though, the two positions may be consistent.  In Webb's outlook, both vegetarianism and American providentialism appear to be efforts to bring God's ultimate intentions for the world into the here and now.

It does seem to me, though, that a Christian idea of American providentialism, to be consistent with the kind of "vegetarianism of Christian hope" that Webb defends, has to have two qualifying features: (a) I should have a preference against using military force -- otherwise you're dismissing any Christian eschatological hope that the ultimate norm of peacemaking can be brought into the world's affairs, the very kind of eschatological hope that Webb advocates with respect to diet and treatment of animals.  (Not having read the first book, I don't know what he says about the use of military force.)  (b) It should have an appreciation of how a providential nation can be arrogant and get things wrong. (And the two books may be consistent on this score; according to this review by Jean Elshtain, what Webb's earlier book defends is "a position of chastened providentialism within which providence is felt as a burden that checks triumphalism.")

Tom