Do All Good Dogs - and Cats - Go to Heaven?

We seem to be in one of those periods where there is much popular speculation, at least, on the question of animals and the afterlife - or, to rephrase somewhat the title of an animated feature film from some years ago, whether "All Good Dogs" (and Cats, etc., etc.) do indeed "Go to Heaven."


As a person with pets myself, or (as the feline members of the household would put it, "who has the incomparable privilege of being owned by cats and allowed to live in their house, feed them their food, and scoop out that nasty mess from their litter box"), I understand the question very well. 


It is sad to think that those dear little faces whose mere presence in our lives is such a source of comfort to us in our darker hours, whose antics bring us such amusement, whose efforts to cope with a world they understand even less than we do can often inspire us to keep going, will one day pass out of Life - out of our lives - as if they had never existed, leaving a pet-shaped void in our lives with a size that is far out of proportion to either the amount of time they were with us, or the amount of attention we were usually able to give them. 


This is, perhaps, why the idea of the Rainbow Bridge has arisen in recent years. According to a widely-cherished "prose poem" (for lack of a better term), at least those animals which were loved by humans go, upon death, to the Rainbow Bridge, described as being "just this side of Heaven." There they await - in a sort of animal version of the Elysian Fields - the arrival of the human(s) who loved them, at which point the human(s) and the animal(s) "cross the Bridge together." A comforting notion, certainly.


For what it's worth, this is my take on the subject. There are two ways of looking at what has been termed the Christ event in Christian theology: Christ as the One who redeems human sin, or Christ as the One who restores all of the creation to a right relationship with God and with each other. Both views go back to the Bible; Christ as the Restorer of the Cosmos can be found in Romans 8:18-22; Ephesians 1:9-10; and, most famously, in Isaiah 11, where the Branch from the root of Jesse brings a peaceable kingdom where

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard lie down with the kid,

the calf, the young lion, and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall feed;

their young shall lie down together,

and the lion eat straw like the ox.

They shall not hurt or destroy

in all my holy mountain;

for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD,

as the waters cover the sea.

Put it this way: if all Christ came to do was to heal the ills attendant on human sin, then, very likely, no dogs or cats go to Heaven. Not being creatures of human sin, they do not share in the redemption of humans from it. But if, on the other hand, Jesus our Brother, kind and good, came to restore the balance of the whole of God's beautiful creation, then the animals we have loved, and that have loved us in return, will, of course, be there in Heaven with us. That, quite simply, is what I believe. I realize that not all theologies agree with mine, and I'm fine with that. We Quakers have a history of pushing the theological envelope, going all the way back to George Fox in mid-seventeenth-century England, who once got into an argument with another guy who said that women have no souls, or, rather, "no more than a goose." To which I would reply, "True - but there is a type of soul proper to geese, and another to women and men; and it seems to be the nature of the Spirit of God not to rest till all of creation comes home to Him."