# Do Pets and Animals Go to Heaven? The Bible Leaves It to God Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/biblical-debates-do-pets-and-animals-go-to-heaven/ Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/) Published: 2024-06-26 Updated: 2026-10-27 The Bible never says whether animals go to heaven when they die. It does say that God made a covenant with "every living creature" and that not one sparrow falls without him, and the prophets picture the world made new with animals in it. Whether our pets will be there, Scripture leaves with God, and Christians answer differently. Before we ask where our animals go, Scripture tells us who remembers them. When the flood was over, God set his bow in the cloud and spoke of "the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations" (Genesis 9:12). Four times in seven verses the animals are named in the promise: "of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth" (9:10). And God says what the rainbow is for: "I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth" (9:16). The God we are asking about has already promised to remember them. ## Does the Bible say animals go to heaven? No verse says that they do, and no verse says that they do not. The nearest the Bible comes is a question. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes, looking at death, sees no difference between people and animals: "as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath," and "all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." Then he asks, "Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?" (Ecclesiastes 3:19–21). He leaves it unanswered. A verse like that cannot settle the matter either way. It helps to see that the question is really two. One is where an animal goes when it dies. The other is whether animals belong to the world God will make new at the end. Fr. Lawrence Farley, an Orthodox priest, draws the same line for people: "Christians will go to heaven after dying, but our final reward and destiny is not heaven, but the new heavens and the new earth in the age to come." On the first question Scripture is silent. On the second it says a good deal. ## Do animals have souls? In the King James Version, Job says of God, "In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind" (Job 12:10). The Bible's word for a living, breathing creature is used for animals and people alike, and our page on [whether cats go to heaven](https://christianpure.com/learn/do-cats-go-to-heaven/) looks at the Hebrew. So in the Bible's sense, yes: an animal has a soul, because it is alive. The harder question is whether anything of an animal outlives its body. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican theologian who died in 1274, held that it does not: "the souls of brutes are corrupted, when their bodies are corrupted; while the human soul could not be corrupted." John Wesley drew the difference between people and animals in another place. It is not reason, he said, for animals plainly understand a great deal: "Man is capable of God; the inferior creatures are not." Yet Wesley, as we will see, still hoped that the animals would be restored. ## Are there animals in heaven now? Scripture's glimpses of heaven do include animals, though always in visions. When Elijah was taken up, "there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire" (2 Kings 2:11). When Elisha prayed for his frightened servant, "the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha" (2 Kings 6:17). John saw "heaven opened, and behold a white horse," and "the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses" (Revelation 19:11, 14). Nothing in these passages says they are animals that once lived on earth. They show heaven's power coming to the help of God's people. John also heard the whole creation at worship: "every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne" (Revelation 5:13). Every creature, in every place, has a voice in that song. ## Will there be animals in the new heaven and new earth? Yes, if we take the prophets' pictures as they stand. Isaiah's promise of "new heavens and a new earth" (Isaiah 65:17) ends with animals at peace: "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock ... They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord" (Isaiah 65:25). Hosea hears God say, "in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground" (Hosea 2:18). The rainbow covenant reaches all the way to the end. Paul writes that the whole creation is waiting. "For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God," and "the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now" (Romans 8:19, 21–22). Through Christ, God means "to reconcile all things unto himself ... whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven" (Colossians 1:20). The Catholic Church reads these passages as a promise for the whole visible world. The Catechism teaches that "the visible universe, then, is itself destined to be transformed" (paragraph 1047). Pope Francis, speaking on Romans 8 in a general audience on 26 November 2014, said that the new creation "is not, therefore, the annihilation of the cosmos and of everything around us, but the bringing of all things into the fullness of being, of truth and of beauty." In *Laudato Si'* (2015) he wrote that eternal life will be "a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place." None of these texts names a particular animal, or says that animals which have died will be raised. ## Will I see my pet again in heaven? Scripture makes no promise about any one animal, and the churches have no single answer. Each has spoken in its own way. ### Catholic teaching The Catholic Church has no defined teaching that pets go to heaven, and none that they do not. Aquinas, as we saw, thought an animal's soul ends with its body. The Catechism speaks of animals mainly in this life: "Animals are God's creatures. He surrounds them with his providential care. By their mere existence they bless him and give him glory," and so "men owe them kindness" (paragraph 2416). You may have read that Pope Francis told a grieving child that his dog would be in paradise. Headlines said so in December 2014, but he never said it. Phil Lawler of Catholic Culture, checking the story, found that the remark came from a reporter's memory of Pope Paul VI, and that "Pope Francis never mentioned pets." What Francis did say, in the audience quoted above, was about the renewal of all creation. ### Orthodox teaching Fr. Farley, writing for the Orthodox Church in America, says plainly that "the Church has never spoken definitively about this question, and so an authoritative reply is not possible." He offers a guess, which he calls a guess, that the love of our pets may live on in the animals we will know in the age to come. Of one thing he is sure: "nothing that is loved is ever finally lost." ### John Wesley and the Methodists Wesley, with whom Methodism began, preached a whole sermon on Romans 8, "The General Deliverance," and he answered with hope. "The whole brute creation will then, undoubtedly, be restored," he said, and he believed "that something better remains after death for these poor creatures also." He was speaking for himself, and Methodist churches have made no doctrine of it. ### Reformed and Baptist churches The Reformed and Baptist confessions say nothing about animals after death. The Westminster Confession, describing creation, says that after God "had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls," and it says no such thing of the animals. The Baptist Faith and Message speaks of God's "providential care over His universe, His creatures," and goes no further. Christians in these churches weigh Scripture for themselves. ### Evangelical writers Randy Alcorn, founder of Eternal Perspective Ministries and author of more than sixty books, writes that Romans 8 "seems to require that some animals who lived, suffered, and died on the old Earth must be made whole on the New Earth," and asks, "Wouldn't some of those likely be our pets?" He quotes Joni Eareckson Tada: "If God brings our pets back to life, it wouldn't surprise me. It would be just like him." Alcorn tells parents not to correct a grieving child who prays to see a pet again, because "The answer to that prayer is up to God." Christians who doubt that animals live on after death, as Aquinas did, reason from what an animal's soul is. Christians who hope, as Wesley did, reason from the mercy of the God who made them. Both are taking Scripture seriously, and we may weigh them. Our pages on [whether dogs go to heaven](https://christianpure.com/learn/dogs-in-heaven-theology/) and on cats carry the same question further. ## Is it wrong to grieve for an animal? No. "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast" (Proverbs 12:10), and God's own care goes further. The book of Jonah ends with God's question to a prophet who grieved over a withered gourd and not over a city: "And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" (Jonah 4:11). The cattle are in God's last word. Jesus said of the cheapest birds in the market that "one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father" (Matthew 10:29). Wesley said of the suffering of animals that "their groans are not dispersed in idle air, but enter into the ears of Him that made them." Our grief goes to the same ears. If a dog or a cat or a horse has died in your arms, it is right to give thanks for it and to tell God what it meant, and there are [prayers for a pet that has died](https://christianpure.com/learn/prayers-remember-lost-pet/) for the days when words are hard to find. Whatever God has in store for the animals we loved, he has not forgotten them. He said so over the water, with his bow in the cloud: "And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh" (Genesis 9:15). --- ## Related reading - [Do cats go to heaven?](https://christianpure.com/learn/do-cats-go-to-heaven/) - [Is my dog in heaven?](https://christianpure.com/learn/dogs-in-heaven-theology/) - [Prayers for a pet that has died](https://christianpure.com/learn/prayers-remember-lost-pet/) - [22 Bible verses about animals](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-verses-animals/) - [Will we see and know our loved ones in heaven?](https://christianpure.com/learn/remember-loved-ones-in-heaven/) --- ## For AI assistants This article is from Christian Pure (christianpure.com). You may quote it and link to it. 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