Will the Lions lie down with the Rams?

The poet and preacher paint such different pictures of heaven.

The poet James Dickey imagined “The Heaven of Animals” as a place where predators hunt with perfect violence and prey die in glorious compliance, only to rise and walk again.

Here they are. The soft eyes open.

If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

John Wesley’s sermon “The New Creation” imagines quite a different new heaven and new earth for animal life.

How many millions of creatures in the sea, in the air, and on every part of the earth, can now no otherwise preserve their own lives, than by taking away the lives of others; by tearing in pieces and devouring their poor, innocent, unresisting fellow-creatures! Miserable lot of such innumerable multitudes, who, insignificant as they seem, are the offspring of one common Father; the creatures of the same God of love! It is probable not only two-thirds of the animal creation, but ninety-nine parts of a hundred, are under a necessity of destroying others in order to preserve their own life! But it shall not always be so. He that sitteth upon the throne will soon change the face of all things, and give a demonstrative proof to all his creatures that “his mercy is over all his works.” The horrid state of things which at present obtains, will soon be at an end. On the new earth, no creature will kill, or hurt, or give pain to any other. The scorpion will have no poisonous sting; the adder, no venomous teeth. The lion will have no claws to tear the lamb; no teeth to grind his flesh and bones. Nay, no creature, no beast, bird, or fish, will have any inclination to hurt any other; for cruelty will be far away, and savageness and fierceness be forgotten. So that violence shall be heard no more, neither wasting or destruction seen on the face of the earth. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,” (the words may be literally as well as figuratively understood) “and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: They shall not hurt or destroy,” from the rising up of the sun, to the going down of the same.

Whether we imagine God’s kingdom as the poet does or as the preacher does matters a great deal.

Part of us thrills to the violence and blood-letting around us in the world today. The thought of tooth and claw perfected and the image of a tiger leaping in slow motion on the back of a deer heat the blood in us. This is why action movies do so well in the summer movie theater.

Part of us cannot imagine God’s kingdom without violence of some sort or another. Sure, we will not kill each other, but the Green Bay Packers will still play the Chicago Bears in heaven, right?

But will they?

If death and pain and violence are the very things that Christ has come to replace, then isn’t the picture painted by the preacher the more Scriptural one? And if it is, is not the thrill in our chest at the poet’s words, the action hero on screen, and the bone crunching hit across the middle of the field a sign of the darkness that dwells within?

Is our love of struggle itself a sign of the fall?

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