N.T. Wright's God and the Pandemic: A Short Review and Resonse

 

 Our parish recently completed a reading and study of Bishop N.T. Wright’s short book, God and the Pandemic, and the following is a brief distillation of the notes I wrote for those sessions.  (If you don't have the time to read the book, you can find one of many interviews with Wright here).

Wright approaches the pandemic as a problem of theodicy, and his resource for answering this, not surprisingly, is as a biblical scholar.   He rejects any idea that the coronavirus is sent by God as punishment or curse for sin.  In times such as this, he argues, that church has no easy answer to explain the pandemic, and the only thing we can say is already complained in the psalms of lament (eg, Ps 22, 44, 73) of the innocent sufferer.

The question of “why”, Wright says, is essentially the wrong question.   The innocent sufferer’s question of “why” has already been asked by Jesus on the cross, and has been already been answered in the revelation of the new creation that we see glimpsed in the resurrection.   Since the question has already been thus answered, Wright argues, it is fruitless and even pagan to ask why a sovereign god would do or permit such things and how can we appease that god?

The question the church needs to answer, rather, is what Wright calls the “spirit-driven imperative” of “what”, as in what can we, the church, do when people are in deepest need?  A biblical-historical example of such a practical response is found in Acts 11, when the church in Jerusalem debates how to address a coming famine (Acts 11.27-30).    Their response is to focus on a practical, boots-on-the-ground response, by asking who can we send and how can we help?  This approach shows “one of the great principles of the kingdom of God – the principle that God’s kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be.  God always wanted to work through loyal human beings” (32). 

Not surprisingly for anyone who knows his work, Wright invokes Romans 8 and Paul’s description of creation groaning to be free from its suffering (Rom 8.19-25).  Rather than endure this time of groaning with “Stoic resignation”, the church works with God even as it shares in creation’s groaning, sharing the tears of Christ and also the hard work of Christ.

Besides the work of Christ (healing, feeding, caring, as per Matthew 25), the church’s work is also to hold the world to account.  This truth-telling could include speaking about our misuse of creation (did we eat things outside the food chain that caused this pandemic?) but also addressing our tendency to idolatry (how many of the poor will be sacrificed to the economy in the recovery from the pandemic?).  What we think of as secularism may actually be a time when certain “pagan subtexts” (wealth, medicine, sex, even war) are elevated at the expense of a vision of all of God’s family, regardless of wealth or race, which Wright argues is the original vocation of the church as a model of a new and diverse creation.

In his final paragraphs, Wright expresses some frustration with the restricted role of the church during the pandemic, as shutdown restrictions stifle its voice and witness.  While not dissenting from the public health need for such restrictions, Wright argues that “Public worship of the Triune God, in a public place, - observing whatever security measures are appropriate – has always been a major part of sending out that signal to the watching world” (69).  

I was interested that in reading this book with some parishioners, they were not deeply interested in the biblical framework of Wright’s book.   Rather, their response was to go straight to the practical, asking what we as a church can do in our community, which I suspect, given his reading of Acts 11, would gladden Wright’s heart.

Recently I listened to a discussion between two pastors, Paul Vander Klay and Paul Anleitener, that included their churches’ response to Covid 19.  Anleitener noted that he didn’t think the North American church, which was still in survival mode, had begun to think how to understand the suffering that the pandemic has brought, though he noted wisely that this may not be a problem in the developing world.   If he is correct, then Wright’s wise and Christocentric approach to theodicy is something that the church needs to understand clearly.

 I commend this little book to you as a kickstarter to your own theological and pastoral responses to Covid 19.