If the cross does provide us with a true picture of what God is like, it follows that God is a redeeming presence in all creaturely experiences of suffering. All innocent suffering will be transformed.

I look forward to the time when the churches come to celebrate and honour the work of animal protection as an imperative arising from their belief in the Creator and in the gospel of the crucified. After all, similarly remarkable things have happened, for example, the growing consensus among churches that the environment should be cared for and protected as a Christian duty--an astonishing turnaround when one considers the prevailing dualism in previous centuries, which expressly discouraged concern for "earthly" matters as distinct from "spiritual" ones.

Familiarity with holy things can often engender blindness, and churches are, for all their merits, institutions that embody, perhaps more than most, the will to perpetuate themselves. In this process, they can easily lose sight of the purpose for which they came into being and, in so doing, frustrate the Spirit.

I fear theology is--in the words attributed to William Temple--"still in its infancy" when it comes to animals.

One cannot get to animal rights by trampling on human rights.

Christian theology provides some of the best arguments for respecting animal life and for taking seriously animals as partners with us within God's creation. It may be ironical that this tradition, once thought of as the bastion of human moral exclusivity, should now be seen as the seed-bed for a creative understanding of animal liberation.

The biblical case for vegetarianism does not rest on the view that killing may never be allowable in the eyes of God, rather on the view that killing is always a grave matter. When we have to kill to live we may do so, but when we do not, we should live otherwise.