God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath

by N.T. Wright

Faced with the rapid spread of the coronavirus, many people in churches have reached for ‘Christian’ equivalents of the ancient knee-jerk reactions. The world is full of conspiracy theories anyway: some in America think it’s all China’s fault, some in China have said it’s all America’s fault, and no doubt there are a thousand other ideas running around, spreading themselves as easily as the virus itself and in some ways just as dangerously. The blame game is easy – especially when it’s always someone else’s fault. Those who have become accustomed to seeing all issues in terms of today’s low-grade but powerful ‘culture wars’ will simply go for easy answers that reflect that irrelevant standoff. The COVID-19 crisis has, in fact, done to the whole world what Hurricane Katrina did in 2005 for New Orleans: in its devastating impact, it shows that the political and social timbers have already been rotting away. And then there are specifically (would-be) ‘Christian’ conspiracy theories. Some people think they know exactly what’s gone wrong and what God is trying to say through it all. Some are saying, eagerly, that this is the sign of the End. The ‘End-Times’ industry has been massive in America over the last couple of generations. Spin-off versions are popular in most other countries, too. Former highlights include Hal Lindsey’s famous The Late Great Planet Earth, and the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. They construct a horror-movie scenario out of bits and p...

We sometimes have the impression that the coronavirus is providing people with a megaphone with which to say, more loudly, what they were wanting to say anyway.

Conservative politics (and liberal too) have used the pandemic as their mouthpiece to promote their narrative.

Whenever anyone tells you that coronavirus means that God is calling people – perhaps you! – to repent, tell them to read Job. The whole point is that that is not the point. It is Job’s ‘comforters’ who tell him it’s all about sin. They are absolutely clear that God must be punishing Job for some secret misbehaviour. Job is equally clear that if that is so then God is being unjust. The reader, in on the secret from the start, knows that both are wrong, but that the ‘comforters’ are a whole lot more wrong than Job. Quite a different battle is going on. The book of Job rattles the cages of our easy-going piety. It reminds us that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth – more pains and puzzles in heaven and earth – than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Even our ‘Christian’ philosophy. The book of Job doesn’t really have a ‘resolution’. Not a satisfactory one. There is a short ‘happy ending’, but it’s only partially happy: Job gets more sons and daughters to replace the ones he lost, but does that make it all right? God has revealed his power and might to Job, and Job realizes he can’t compete; but does even that make it all right? That might conceivably just leave you with the Stoics: It’s all fixed, you can’t do anything, you might as well put up with it. I think part of the point of Job is precisely its unresolved character.