Top Andrew Linzey Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Andrew Linzey Biography

Andrew Linzey (born 2 February 1952) is a British Anglican priest, theologian, author, and prominent figure in the Christian vegetarian movement. He is a member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford, and held the world’s first academic post in Ethics, Theology and Animal Welfare, the Bede Jarret Senior Research Fellowship at Blackfriars Hall.

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Andrew Linzey Quotes

It is an unfortunate fact that those people who are most eloquent in their demand for the conservation of animals are often those most eager to violate animal life at the first opportunity.

Animal, Opportunity, Hunting, Fact, Conservation, People

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

Animal, Attributed, Fear, Infancy, Temples, Theology

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.

Animal, Christian, Considers, Imperative, Spiritual

The Bible nowhere says that animals are just made for human use. It does not say that the whole earth is just ours to do with as we like. Neither does it say that God's sole interest is with the human species. We cannot allow such an important and influential book to become the preserve of those who want to exploit animals. The Bible needs to be read, studied, and reclaimed for the animals.

Book, Animal, Important, Use, Reclaimed, Earth

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.

Doe, Follows, Innocent, Suffering, Transformed, True

It took Christians many years to realize that we cannot love God and also keep humans as slaves. It has taken even longer for Christians to realize that we cannot love God and also regard women as second-class humans. Now is the time for Christians to realize that we cannot love God and hate the Creator's nonhuman creatures.

Christian, Creatures, Hate, Slaves, Taken

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

Animal, Rights, Humans, Trampling

In God's eyes, all creatures have value whether we find them cuddly, affectionate, beautiful or otherwise. Our own perspective-in a way-is neither here nor there. Theology, at its best, can help to liberate us from our own anthropocentric limitations.

Affectionate, Anthropocentric, Beautiful, Eye, Help, Nature

I do not oppose violence simply because it is counterproductive. I oppose it because it betrays animal rights philosophy. Those who resort to such tactics really have not understood that animal rights is about the extension of moral concern to all sentient beings--humans obviously included.

Animal, Included, Philosophy, Rights

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.

Sight, Church, Purpose, Spirit

The point to be grasped from the saintly tradition is that to love animals is not sentimentality (as we know it) but true spirituality. Of course there can be vain, self-seeking loving, but to go (sometimes literally) out of our way to help animals, to expend effort to secure their protection and to feel with them their suffering and to be moved by it-these are surely signs of spiritual greatness.

Greatness, Nature, Spiritual, Spirituality, True, Vain

Although Christianity has a poor record on animals (as it does, it must be said, on the treatment of slaves, women, children, and gays), it is also the case that Christian theology, when creatively and critically handled, can provide a strong basis for animal rights.

Christian, Strong, Children, Gays, Women

Looking back through the mists of time, I recall some distinctly religious experiences in my teens--when I was only fourteen years old to be precise. These experiences opened my mind to the idea of a Creator and that caring for other living things was a Christian duty. My parents were not strongly religious at the time and when I announced at that youthful age that I wanted to be a priest, it not unnaturally provoked some incredulity, even mirth. In the same year, I became a vegetarian, which--for family and friends--was even more vexing.

Christian, Religious, Caring, Years, Duty, Family

If tomorrow we decided only to desist from killing and causing suffering for sport and entertainment, the world would be significantly better for animals. Even this we have failed to achieve.

Animal, Causing, Entertainment, Failed, Sports, Suffering

Animals are God's creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God's sight. . . . Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God's absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering.

Christian, Eye, Animal, Powerless, Sight, Property

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.

Allowable, Biblical, Eye, Grave, Vegetarianism

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.

Christian, Animal, Creative, Seen, Moral, Life

Moral education, as I understand it, is not about inculcating obedience to law or cultivating self-virtue, it is rather about finding within us an ever-increasing sense of the worth of creation. It is about how we can develop and deepen our intuitive sense of beauty and creativity.

Beauty, Education, Creativity, Cultivating, Develop, Deepen