Dr Daniela Rizzo, Associate Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Alphacrucis University College, Sydney, explores the presence of the Spirit within the animal world in this beautifully reflective piece. Drawing on her research in animal theology and pneumatology, Dr Rizzo invites us to reimagine the creatures around us as vital participants in God’s living world, animated and sustained by the breath of God.
It was not in the soaring hymns of a cathedral or the pages of a theological tome that the Spirit found me, but in the hush of a house heavy with mourning. My father had died. I had been praying (really, just pleading) for some trace of God to appear amid the grief, a whisper in the dark. When I prayed for the Spirit’s comfort, what came instead was the soft weight of my cat. He curled up on top of me as I sat defeated on the couch, placed his head against my chest, and stayed. There were no words, no visions, no miracles. Just the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing, syncing with mine- and yet it felt like the Spirit’s tangible comfort. Not just companionship, but communion. A pulse of something holy passed between us, as if the Spirit who hovered over the deep had folded himself into fur and bone. That moment, so quiet it could have slipped unnoticed into the margins of memory, became a seed. Could the Spirit move not only through prophets and preachers, but through purrs? Could the breath of God fill not just lungs shaped like ours, but the creatures we overlook in our search for a blockbuster moment with a miracle-working God?
That question did not let me go. It became the substance of my theological work: a pneumatology of animals. A way of seeing creatures not as decorative backdrops to the human story, but as vital, Spirit-breathed participants in God’s living world. Scripture, when read with eyes wide enough, supports this. Tradition, when unfastened from human pride, echoes it. I have come to believe there is a Spirit-thread running through all flesh, and animals, too, are tugged along by the Spirit’s breath.
The Breath of Life
Creation begins not with a word, but with a wind. Before there is form or speech, there is movement – ruach, the Spirit of God stirring the waters in the dark. It is not a gentle breeze but a force, vast and wild, that hovers like an avian creature, waiting to break open the world. This same breath (this ruach) is what animates life from dust, both in Adam and in every creature that crawls, swims, or takes to the air. The biblical witness does not make fine distinctions here. The breath that fills the lungs of a newborn lamb is not some lesser breath. It is the same divine wind.
The Hebrew words ruach and nephesh – Spirit and soul, breath and life – move through the Scriptures like twin currents. Their meanings resist clean separation. Nephesh does not mean a ghostly soul that floats free of the body; it means a living being, a life that pulses in flesh. When Genesis speaks of “living creatures,” it calls them nephesh chayyah. The term is used for humans and animals alike. There is no ontological hierarchy in breath. What animates one animates all.
This is no accident of language. The Spirit is no respecter of species. Ruach pours itself into creation indiscriminately, not as a possession but as presence, as the essential vitality that binds the living world to its Creator. And if breath is a gift, then it is given to all.
Job knew this. “Ask the animals, and they will teach you,” he said. “In God’s hand is the nephesh of every living thing and the ruach of every human being” (Job 12:7-10). The birds, the fish, the beasts of the earth, they are not mute witnesses to God’s glory. They are vessels of it. They live, as we do, animated by the breath of God.
Philo of Alexandria, writing centuries before modern biology, caught a glimpse of this mystery. For him, the divine breath in Genesis was a fragment of the uncreated Spirit, a share in the eternal Logos, present in all living beings. To be inspired, in the deepest sense, is to be breathed into by God. And that breath does not belong to humans alone.
This, then, is the Spirit’s signature: not control or command, but breath. Not distinction, but communion. Not the exclusive domain of the rational or the moral, but a generous outpouring into all that lives and moves and has its being. The Spirit does not hover above life like an abstraction; it enters it, sustaining it from within—sustaining even the fragile, perishable forms that bleed and bruise and die. Renewal is not an escape from creatureliness. It is the reanimation of it.
When a deer exhales in the cold of morning, when a dog pants after a run, when a dove lifts in the wind—they breathe Spirit. They do not need language or liturgy to be filled with God’s vitality. The breath they draw is the same that hovered over the waters.
The Spirit Amid Suffering
Yet animals suffer—through predation, exploitation, environmental collapse. Do we dare say that the Spirit is present even here?
One of the most powerful images in the New Testament is that of creation groaning (Romans 8:22). The apostle Paul writes that “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” But Paul does not leave us with despair—he insists that the Spirit groans with creation, interceding with sighs too deep for words (Romans 8:26).
This passage has changed how I view the suffering of animals. Their cries are not lost in the void. They are carried by the Spirit, whose presence remains even in the harshest places of the wild. From the hunted gazelle to the displaced koala, each groan is not forgotten. The Spirit does not erase suffering, but remains within it, working toward a deeper healing.
Salvation for All Flesh
Often, when we talk about salvation, we speak in terms reserved for human souls. But the prophet Joel declared that in the last days, God’s Spirit would be poured out on “all flesh” (Joel 2:28). Peter repeated this vision at Pentecost in Acts 2, and it became the hallmark of the early Church.
Could “all flesh” really mean all? Might the Spirit’s redemptive work include animals too?
Early theologians like John Wesley thought so. He envisioned a future where animals would be restored and transformed, their capacities enlarged in God’s renewed world. More contemporary theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann and Denis Edwards have argued that animals are not just objects of compassion but subjects of divine love, destined for inclusion in the new creation.
If salvation is cosmic—if it extends to “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1), then surely the animals, who suffer under human sin and ecological destruction, are also swept up in this redemptive promise. Pentecostal theology, which celebrates the Spirit’s immediacy and transformative power, has something profound to offer here: a Spirit-baptised creation, where even non-human creatures are embraced by the Spirit’s renewing presence.
The Voices of Creation
In my research, I’ve begun to wonder if animals have their own kind of tongues—not the speech of sermons or syllables, but something unique to their creatureliness. Pentecostals speak of glossolalia, tongues that break through ordinary language, carrying groans too deep for words. What if animals, too, speak in this way: an animal glossolalia, perhaps? What if their calls, cries, and silences are part of a cosmic chorus?
The psalmist seems to think so. Psalm 148 doesn’t just call on people to praise the Lord—it summons sea monsters, wild beasts, creeping things, and flying birds. Revelation speaks of every creature in heaven and on earth, even under the earth and sea, lifting their voices to the Lamb (Rev 5:13). These aren’t just poetic turns. They are glimpses of creation in full chorus.
Birdsong at dawn, the moan of a whale rolling through the deep, the low growl of a lion at dusk, the hum of bees in the clover—each could be a kind of tongue, not ours, but the Spirit’s. They may be sounding out the breath that first stirred the waters. The Spirit moves, after all, not only in churches but in fields and forests, deserts and ocean depths. When a cat purrs softly beside you, might they be articulating the joy or ache of being alive?
Even Scripture leaves room for this. In Numbers 21:32, a donkey speaks—not in metaphor, but in plain speech. It is not a parable. It is the moment God gives voice to the non-human animal, setting her words among all the voices in the Bible. The Spirit, it seems, does not mind strange mouths.
Maybe animals have always been speaking, not to us but to God. Maybe we’ve mistaken their songs for background noise when they were always liturgy. And if their voices matter to God, then they ought to matter to us.
Conclusion: A Shared Breath
To believe in the Holy Spirit is to trust in a God who breathes life into the dust and lingers within the world. God’s presence does not retreat from the material but saturates it. Every creature, then, carries that breath, not in metaphor, but in essence.
When I remember my cat comforting me through my grief, I remember that theology does not live in abstraction. The Spirit speaks through what is wild and often overlooked, and at times, it purrs.
But sometimes, it also prophesies.
To hear creation rightly is a spiritual responsibility. If the animals speak, then ours is the calling, as the imago Dei, to listen and serve. And if the Spirit moves through all flesh, then all flesh matters to God.
Dr Daniela Rizzo is an Associate Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Alphacrucis University College in Sydney, Australia. She has recently completed her PhD, titled “Theological Foundations for a Pneumatology of Animals,” which constructs a systematic pneumatology that affirms non-human creatures as participants in the Spirit’s life-giving, redemptive work.
In addition to her teaching role, Dr Rizzo serves as the Director of Higher Education Diplomas in Leadership and Ministry at Alphacrucis University College. Her research aims to provoke critical thought about the relationship between God and creation, emphasising the theological significance of animals.
Dr. Rizzo has contributed to academic discourse through publications such as “Animal Glossolalia: A Pneumatological Framework for Animal Theology” in Pneuma (2024), where she explores the idea of animals participating in spiritual expression through the Spirit. She has also written “Animals in Relationship with God,” discussing the spiritual connections between humans and animals.
