My wife and I had the joy of welcoming a puppy—a red/yellow Labrador Retriever—into our family this past weekend. Her name is Nala. As we welcome this blissfully energetic bundle of love and life into our everyday routine, I promptly turn to thoughts on death. Forgive me.
In all candor, the essay I began for this week’s post needs another week to complete, but I don’t want a week to go unposted. Hence, I thought I’d turn to something lighter to buy myself more time. As I lay in bed at three in the morning, thinking about what to write, wondering why I’m up at three in the morning thinking about what to write, that very source of my sleeplessness became the inspiration for what I ought to write: Do dogs go to heaven?
To investigate this question to its fullest extent, I’m afraid I wouldn’t make it back to report my findings. Accordingly, I think we can agree from the start that there is no one right answer. Scripture doesn’t explicitly address this inquiry either. I once had a professor tell us that there are three things us philosophers can’t know with certainty concerning consciousness, so it’s futile to quest for it: the consciousness of babies, animals, and God. Here, we break all three rules, speculating whether my new baby dog will meet God.
There is only one passage from an author I’ve read that works to provide a possible answer to this question, and that is C.S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain. That being the case, this is not an extensive research essay where I analyze and critique various viewpoints to ultimately offer my argument, but rather a brief explication of how Lewis answers this question. I must add, however, that even if you’re not terribly interested in this question, I drew a profound correlation between Lewis’s answer to the question of animals receiving immortality and his broader thoughts on human salvation.
Lewis approaches this question from the biblically grounded premise of a hierarchy: God → man → animal. Just as man’s cognition is inferior to God’s, an animal’s cognition is evidently inferior to man’s. Lewis tackles this question in a book called The Problem of Pain because he addresses not only human suffering but also animal pain. He argues, though not indisputably, that animals lack consciousness (or at least have an extremely rudimentary form of it) or what might be called “selfhood.” Instead, he suggests that we may assume animals have only sentience. The difference? While sentience is a feeling or sensation like pain, consciousness is the recognition that “I am in pain”—the essence of Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum, where self-aware consciousness is central to human identity.
Another way to think about the God → man → animal hierarchy might be to consider “being lost.” Humans are not just animals; we are the “rational animals,” as Aristotle puts it. We are dependent on God for that rationality, lest we fall back into mere savagery, a gift from on high as we are extensions of His image, where our unification with Him hinges on His gift of salvation and our willing response. Similarly, Lewis argues, this applies to the relationship between humans and animals. While animals may feel pain, only through domestication do they develop a rudimentary consciousness, a selfhood, an “I”—gifted by their human masters. For instance, a dog’s loyalty, responsiveness, and obedience emerge from the owner’s influence, thus making the dog’s identity dependent on this relationship. “And in this way,” Lewis writes, “it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters.” Hence, Lewis speculates that some dogs may “go to heaven,” but only derivatively. “In other words, the man will know his dog, the dog will know its master, and, in knowing him, will be itself.”
This final quote—“In other words, the man…”—is remarkably allegorical to Lewis’s broader belief in human salvation. So, if the prior discussion focused on the “man → animal” half of the God → man → animal hierarchy, we now return to the God → man half.
The first time I was introduced to Lewis’s theological stance on salvation came from reading the final book of his children’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle. Allow me to briefly recount the story. South of Narnia, a fantastic other world of God’s creation where animals and humans are each rational, is the country of Calormen. There, they worship the false god Tash, juxtaposed with the true God, Aslan, who is representative for Christ. Calormen wages a deceptive and ultimately violent war on the Aslan-fearing Narnia, and within the Calormen ranks is a young noble named Emeth. Tash was the only deity Emeth knew. He had a sincere passion to know and honor Tash and found serious disillusionment in the dishonesty, manipulation, cruelty, and disingenuousness of his Calormene leaders and peers. Ultimately, Emeth deserted and fought back against the Calormen cause, recognizing objective right from wrong. At the end of the story, Aslan makes the world new, similar to the prophecy in Revelation, by reuniting all the protagonists (those who followed Aslan) from the entire series in Aslan’s Country. But someone peculiar shows up. Exploring this renewed land, they “found a young Calormene sitting under a chestnut tree beside a clear stream of water. It was Emeth.” He did not just appear there; thinking that Tash was in this new country, he faithfully entered this daunting land out of a desire to meet and know him, only to find that it was Aslan, not Tash, who awaited him. Believing his service to Tash condemned him, Emeth is astonished when Aslan declares, “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me… For all find what they truly seek.”
In another of Lewis’s books, Mere Christianity, he reflects this very idea by writing, “We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.” There is a common concern: what about those who have never heard of Christ or those who are good people but worship another god? Lewis argues that there is a much bigger spiritual war at hand, one between good and evil. So, when we read his idea of, “In other words, the man will know his dog, the dog will know its master, and, in knowing him, will be itself,” we may very well reword it to match his theology of salvation: In other words, God will know His child, the child will know his God, and, in knowing Him, will be united with Him. “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep” (John 10:14-15).
There is certainly room to push back against Lewis’s doctrine of salvation, a notion I have wrestled with for quite some time. I am certainly more fond of it than any salvation doctrine of “if you are baptized, then you are saved” or “if you just believe in Jesus, then you are saved despite your actions.” I don’t have an answer, but here’s why I think it’s something to consider. For one, I believe God is far more just and empathetic than anything we can possibly imagine, and if someone lived a life of pure love and devotion to their neighbor and to some other name for God that was the only one they had ever heard, it seems out of character with the grander scope we can gather of God’s character. On the other hand, it holds believers accountable.
I don’t advance a doctrine of salvation but simply put forth this: What will you do when you stand before Christ? Will you recognize Him? Will He recognize you? Our culture and the Bible alike heavily emphasize the name of Jesus, and there is certainly warrant for this. But might we equally elevate something greater, for ourselves and in our grace for others, as we heed Christ’s warning: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness’” (Matthew 7:21-23). Again, will you recognize Christ? And not by any physical feature, but by His image of righteousness that may or may not dwell within you by which He will recognize you? Will you fall on your knees and run to Christ, like Abraham when the heavenly visitors came down to meet him?
The wild dog will bark, attack, or run away from the stranger, but the tamed dog always recognizes its master, just as its master recognizes it.
Maybe one day I’ll reunite with young Nala. But to end on a trite yet the paramount note, it takes my getting there to find out; and as this essay has unfolded, perhaps that ought to be the only point of investigation (Matthew 7).