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

by N.T. Wright

Trying to jump from an earthquake, a tsunami, a pandemic or anything else to a conclusion about ‘what God is saying here’ without going through the Gospel story is to make the basic theological mistake of trying to deduce something about God while going behind Jesus’ back.

What most of the western Christian tradition has managed to ignore – because it has separated out ‘salvation’ on the one hand from ‘power’ on the other, as though the two were not intimately related! – is that the ‘atonement’ theology of that punch-line comes within the redefinition of ‘power’, and vice versa. The secret of God’s saving power is the self-giving love of the incarnate Son.