What a (Sometimes Inanimate) Divine Animal and Plant Has to Teach Us About Being Human: John’s Jesus and Other Nonhumans

Abstract

The Jesus of John’s Gospel is not, or not solely, a human being. The god-man is also a nonhuman animal (a lamb), a vegetable (a vine), vegetable byproducts (bread and a door), and inorganic energy, namely, electromagnetic radiation (light)—all epithets no more or no less metaphoric than ‘Son of God’. Of course, it is Son christology that has commanded centre stage since at least the fourth century. The nonhuman turn in theory, elicited in no small part by the global ecological crisis, impels a shift of attention from Son christology to animal christology, vegetal christology, and inorganic christology. This article seeks to stage that shift, arguing that the Fourth Gospel enacts a profound disturbance of what Mel Chen has termed the animacy hierarchy: the world-structuring human ranking of inorganic material, plant life, animal life, disabled life, ‘fully human’ life—and, one might add, divine life—in terms of perceived intrinsic worth. The Johannine Jesus enacts animacy in multiple interpenetrating nonhuman ways that invite less anthropocentric modes of affective engagement than the Christs of classic orthodoxy, Christs supposedly modelled on the Johannine Jesus.