Ronald E. Osborn - Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering

InterVarsity Press
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Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
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2014 by Ronald E. Osborn

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All Scripture quotations marked nasb are taken from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

KRYNSKI, MAGNUS J. (TRANS): SOUNDS, FEELINGS, THOUGHTS.1981 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Cover design: David Fassett

Images:
Tiger: DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/Getty Images
Certificate:edge69

ISBN 978-0-8308-9537-3 (digital)
ISBN 978-0-8308-4046-5 (print)

Bless the L ORD , O my soul!...
You appoint darkness and it becomes night,
In which all the beasts of the forest prowl about.
The young lions roar after their prey
And seek their food from God.
When the sun rises they withdraw
And lie down in their dens.
Man goes forth to his work
And to his labor until evening.

OL ORD , how many are Your works!
In wisdom You have made them all;
The earth is full of Your possessions.
There is the sea, great and broad,
In which are swarms without number,
Animals both small and great.
There the ships move along,
And Leviathan, which You have formed to sport in it.

They all wait for You
To give them their food in due season.
You give to them, they gather it up;
You open Your hand, they are satisfied with good.
You hide Your face, they are dismayed;
You take away their spirit, they expire
And return to their dust.
You send forth Your Spirit, they are created;
And You renew the face of the ground.

P SALM 104:1, 20-30 NASB

As a child growing up to missionary parents in Zimbabwe not long after its independence from the apartheid regime of Ian Smiths Rhodesia, death in nature was something I had been exposed to from an early age, albeit not in everyday life. My familys home was in a quiet suburb of the serene and modern city of Harare, famous for its well-groomed golf courses, botanical gardens, and wide boulevards lined with jacaranda and flame trees that bloomed spectacular shades of purple, white or orange depending on the season of the year. Here the most deadly animal one might encounter was a mamba, boomslang or other poisonous snake, although sightings of even these were extremely rare. Urbanization and farming had long since driven Africas famed wildlife far from the places most Zimbabweans lived. Harare was, at least to this childs eyes, a tranquil paradise with endless adventures to be had with my classmates on sunny afternoons as we roamed the city on our bicycles after shedding the gray knee socks and cramped black shoes of our school uniformsthe cruelest legacy, I callowly assumed at the time, of British colonialism. I had much to learn. Often, though, my parents would load my two sisters and me into our mechanically challenged diesel Mercedes sedan, and we would leave the temperate plateau on which Harare sits to camp some 250 miles to the north at a place known as Mana Pools.

Mana Pools is a remote wildlife preserve and UNESCO World Heritage Site with some of the most spectacular game viewing anywhere in Africas southern hemisphere. It was one of my familys favorite retreats during the years we lived in Zimbabwe. After passing the final tsetse fly control station on the main roada low mud hut from which a man in a crumpled khaki uniform would sleepily emerge, armed with a rusty tin canister to spray the undercarriage of our car with a noxious-smelling liquid intended to prevent the deadly insect from returning with uswe were truly into the wild, or into the bundu, as it is called in bantu slang. (One of my prized possessions during my elementary school years was a worn copy of the 1967 classic survival manual Dont Die in the Bundu, by Col. D. H. Grainger of the Rhodesian Army. I never had any reason to put into practice the lessons in this book, but they provided rich fodder for fantasies of heroic feats of a young boy alone against Africas elements armed with nothing more than his trusty Swiss Army knife.)

The final leg of the journey into Mana Pools follows a desolate, unpaved track surrounded by thick brush and dotted by colossal baobab trees that look like the remnants of a lost Jurassic Park. One might drive for hours on this path without spotting another vehicle or human being. The first time my family entered this dusty road, however, we had not gone far before we encountered a fresh lion kill. Three young females had taken down a Cape buffalo, which they had not yet dragged into the cover of the bush. Its legs were splayed at odd angles and its side was opened, exposing an impressive rib cage in shades of white and crimson. The lions were feasting on the carcass in the middle of the road, panting heavily as they tore into its body, their chests and muzzles soaked in blood. The air was filled with the stench of death. My father turned off the car engine, and we sat in awed silence watching them feast at a distance of several meters. At last we continued on our way, dipping into the sandy shoulder of the track as we navigated about this scene of beautiful carnage. The lions paid us little notice. I was nine or ten years old at the time, but the memory is still vivid.

It was usually late in the afternoon when we would at last arrive at the Mana Pools campsite, which lies beneath a grove of acacia trees on a high bank overlooking the Zambezi River. After darkness had settled, someone might shine a powerful spotlight or torch over the nearby marshy inlets, and we would watch the gleaming eyes of the crocodiles blink and then eerily vanish beneath the water like dying stars. We would lie still in our tents as the campfire dwindled to embers and listen to the haunting cries of jackals in the distance.

There is another distinct sound I remember from those nights as we lay in our beds in the bundu. There were no fences or walls in Mana Pools, and wild animals often made their way through camp. Our most common visitors (apart from the kleptomaniac vervet monkeys always seeking a chance to seize unattended food) were herds of elephants. We could often hear their soft tread and breathing just the other side of our tent flaps as they picked up the pods that fell from the acacia trees we slept under. They would frequently pass close enough to step on our tent ropes, although even in the black of night they had an uncanny awareness of the lines and never so much as grazed them. Before dawn, my parents would already be waking my sisters and me for a new safari, since the early hours of the day when the air was still cool and crisp were the best time to spot rare animals. All around us was a world that was deeply mysterious, untamed, dangerous, beautiful and good, waiting to be explored