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Sunday, August 07, 2005

Good Eating

by Stephen H. Webb
2001, Brazos Press.

A lot of people will tell you today that the United States of America is a divided nation. They point to any number of issues - politics, religion, race, economic status - to highlight the rifts within this "one nation, under God, indivisible." And I think a lot of these observations about national division, although unpleasant, are correct and appropriate for discussion. However, it's also worth considering those values and customs which continue to bring people together - the most prominent of which may be our culture's unique relationship with food.

I say "unique relationship with" rather than "love of" food, because nearly every culture could be said to love food. But it's clear that Americans have led the way in redefining how humans interact with that which nourishes our bodies. We manufacture it, process it, package it, freeze it, reheat it, eat-all-you-can-eat of it, diet from it, and waste it, to name just a few practices that our ancestors (and much of the rest of the world today) cannot easily relate to. And then, there's the concept of the All-American Meal, which, whatever else it includes, revolves around a large piece of meat. Animal flesh has a special place on our daily menu, as well as at our major national holidays, particularly the 4th of July and Thanksgiving.

Now, I don't mean to turn such a unifying factor (food, and specifically meat) into another source of national, and more importantly, ecclesial disunity, but I've recently been convinced of what professor Stephen Webb argues in Good Eating: "the unexamined meal is not worth eating." Drawing on the Bible and Christian history, Webb articulates a "modern systematic theology of diet" focused on how what we eat affects our relationships with God, humans, and animals.

Webb urges us to recall God's original intent for peaceful, ordered relationships between humans and animals as seen in the Garden of Eden, where all creatures were vegetarian (Genesis 1:29-30), while directing us to look ahead to the eschatological Kingdom of God, in which the peaceful coexistence of animal and human life is restored (Isaiah 11:6-9). Within this framework, Webb advocates Christian vegetarianism as a diet that both remembers and anticipates God's reign of peace.
Christian vegetarians suggest that if we pray over our food, then our food should be a reflection of God's intentions for the world. What we eat should say something about the kind of God we worship. Our diet should be holy if we want all aspects of our lives to reflect God's grace. If we say grace over our meals, then we should have grace in our meals, which raises the question of the ethical implications of a diet based on animal flesh (17-18).
Avoiding any kind of legalism or moral self-righteousness, Webb devotes much of the book to exploring the tough questions that any skeptic of biblical vegetarianism might have: Why does God command for animal sacrifices? Didn't Jesus eat meat? Didn't the leading apostles, Peter and Paul, proclaim that the gospel meant freedom from the food restrictions of the Jewish law? While I wasn't convinced by all his arguments, and found some of the extrabiblical historical material to be excessive for the average reader, Webb's overall thesis struck me as quite compelling.

Until recently, I didn't think too much about how what I ate could be an act of stewardship, and therefore, an act of worship. I'm not yet a vegetarian, although I am in the process of rethinking what I eat. Don't get me wrong - I still think meat is delicious, and I'm not saying that Christians don't have the freedom to eat meat. However, our freedom comes at the cost of the one who died as the final sacrifice for our sin - the least we can do is submit our diet to Christ, asking him to help us transform our daily bread into a tangible expression of the gospel.

For more info on food-as-stewardship, check out Sustainable Table.

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