Coronavirus—Tom Wright says that Christianity offers no answers. Is that the best we can do?

Read time: 6 minutes

Tom Wright has written an Ideas piece for Time Magazine in which he argues that Christianity is not supposed to give answers about the coronavirus.

It’s our rationalist culture, he says, that needs a reason for everything, and it’s rather “silly” to ask whether the pandemic is a punishment or warning or sign from God. Sometimes you just have to accept that there isn’t a reason. So, with a nod to the poet T.S. Eliot, we have to “wait without hope, because we’d be hoping for the wrong thing.”

We don’t need explanations, Wright argues—and presumably we don’t need too much in the way of solid, clearly articulated hope, either. What we need is to recover the biblical tradition of lament. ‘Lament is what happens when people ask, “Why?” and don’t get an answer.’ It’s where we end up when we stop gazing into our own grubby navels and notice how much real suffering there is in the world.

The Psalmist is full of questions: Why are you so far off? Why do you hide yourself? Will you forget me forever? Why have you forsaken me? Sometimes an answer is given. Sometimes not and we end up in darkness.

Wright blames our knee-jerk demand for an explanation on the Enlightenment, but ironically it is precisely rationalism which says that we cannot give theological reasons for natural disasters.

But the important point, Wright says, is that God laments with us. He is grieved by the wickedness of antediluvian humanity, by the disloyalty of Israel. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. The Spirit groans with the groaning of creation.

So, he concludes, it is precisely part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain coronavirus.

Is he right? Is this quietist, empathetic reticence, this prophetic diffidence, the best response a Christian can offer at the moment?

I think we need to look more closely at how lament works in the scriptures, beginning with the psalms that Wright mentions.

The reason for the king’s moanings in Psalm 6 is that his enemies are causing him grief and God seems not to care. The writer of Psalm 10 is troubled that YHWH does nothing to save him, but the cause of his predicament is clear: the wicked prosper. Likewise Psalm 13.

The lesson then? That we should lament over the marginalisation of the church, the failure of God to save his people from irrelevance.

In Psalm 22 David asks why God has forsaken him when he is surrounded by a company of evil doers, but he speaks as a confident prophet in his closing affirmation that God will rule over the nations. Psalm 89 is a lament over the humiliating defeat of a Davidic king, or perhaps in its final form a lament over the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the monarchy. It closes with an appeal to God to remember his servants.

The lesson? That we should confidently expect God eventually to act to put right a bad situation.

Psalm 88 expresses the writer’s despair that the “wrath” of God has swept over him, perhaps in the form of sickness, and he is now shunned by his companions. Here, indeed, we have a proper lament for someone stricken with disease, who feels life ebbing away, who feels abandoned and isolated, who feels that God has become the enemy. But this is the lament of an individual, not of a society.

There are other lament texts in the Bible. The gates of Jerusalem will lament when the judgment of God comes on the city (Is. 3:26). Fishermen along the Nile will lament when the Lord comes to punish Egypt (Is. 19:8). The women of Jerusalem will wail and lament over the ruin of the city: “How we are ruined! We are utterly shamed, because we have left the land, because they have cast down our dwellings” (Jer. 9:19).

There is a whole book of lamentations over the fall of Jerusalem, and the author is in no doubt about the reason for the catastrophe: “the LORD has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions” (Lam. 1:5).

Jesus laments over Jerusalem because the current generation will pay the dreadful price for centuries of Jewish rebellion against God (Matt. 23:29-38). When blasphemous and corrupt Rome is overthrown, all who have profited from her wickedness—kings, merchants, shipmasters—will weep and wail over her (Rev. 18:9-20). There’s a lesson in that, surely!

So there are two dimensions to the theme of lament in the Old Testament—the personal and the “political”, the private and the historical.

There is lament over personal misfortune, grief over sickness and death, as in many of the Psalms, and in this case the texts may indeed struggle to provide explanations. The book of Job is a massive struggle to provide an explanation for personal suffering—or at least, for the suffering of a thoroughly righteous man.

But on the larger “political” scale there is nearly always an explanation for catastrophe and nearly always an outcome to hope for—or fear. God is grieved by the sinfulness of humanity and a devastating flood ensues. He is horrified by the waywardness of the people whom he chose to represent him in the world, so he destroys their city and sends them into exile. The Spirit inspires in God’s persecuted people something of the groaning of the whole created order, but the churches will be vindicated when Jesus is confessed as Lord by the nations of the Greek-Roman world, and ultimately creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay (Rom. 8:19-25).

Wright blames our knee-jerk demand for an explanation on the Enlightenment, but ironically, I think, it is precisely rationalism which says that we cannot give theological reasons for natural disasters.

Because we are rationalists, we have a different way of talking about cause and effect, but the causes and aggravating circumstances of the pandemic are surely of concern to the living God who created the heavens and the earth.

What we cannot fail to see in scripture is that God is the God of history, he is the God of large-scale events, and the vocation of a prophetic people is to give narrative voice to that insight. Biblical traditions of lament and hope cannot be separated from larger stories of rebellion, apostasy, judgment, and concrete political or social transformation.

Grief and uncertainty have to be taken seriously, but that’s not a reason to be speechless. If we are going to express our response to coronavirus in terms of biblical lament, we also have to take the considerable risk of outlining a “prophetic” narrative that accounts for the engagement of the God of history, through a people whom he has chosen, in this whole crisis—and in whatever further chaos lies ahead.

In that respect, to speak of the pandemic as a warning or sign from the creator God, or even as a “punishment”, after the manner of the flood, for the wholesale greed and thoughtlessness of the global culture in which we are mostly all complicit, does not seem so inappropriate.

As for hope, well, let’s work on that….

Chris Jones | Tue, 03/31/2020 - 14:06 | Permalink

I totally agree that a prophetic critique needs to come. It for sure needs to come to the church here in the US. However, the last thing the US needs right now, and I would assume other countries, is the blame game. It’s already happening and it’s making the process of addressing the health crisis difficult. So maybe it’s a timing issue, Andrew. When someone has cancer because they smoked their entire life, it doesn’t seem appropriate to bring up their smoking habit when they are in the midst of the battle with cancer. Nor does it seem appropriate to bring up the bad parenting of a mom at the funeral of the mom’s child who died from an overdose. You may say that prophets should not be guided by what is appropriate. That would be true. But I am not sure there are many prophets today who have been in the counsel of the Lord who can speak with the authority of those in scripture. I believe there are a lot of wise people who can offer insightful critiques like the ones you mention. But for now, lament seems more appropriate. It may not be biblically accurate, but it seems pastorally appropriate for the audience Wright was addressing. I think he would have something different to say to Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.

@Chris Jones:

Thanks, Chris. A few thoughts on that.

You may be right about timing, but my fear would be that once the pandemic is over, we will rush to go back to life as we knew it. If the point is to speak later, the church must now develop the determination not to forget.

Lament is all well and good, but does lament lead to change? Repentance? Action? This is not about Trump and Xi Jinping. That’s dodging the issue. It’s about all of us.

I tend to think less in terms of individual prophets than of a prophetic community that is inspired by the Spirit, draws intelligently on scripture, understands what is going on in the world, and emerges as a shared outlook that shapes the mind and message of the church. Generally, I do not trust people who call themselves prophets. We could call it wisdom, as you suggest, but I would still say it needs a sharp prophetic edge to it. I think the church needs to speak for—and to speak up for—the living God.

@Andrew Perriman:

I think you are exactly right that lamentation is not and can not be the final word. I only added the Trump/Xi Jinping comment to point out that I believe Wright would write something different to them at THIS moment.

I would love to see this be the reality of the church,

” a prophetic community that is inspired by the Spirit, draws intelligently on scripture, understands what is going on in the world, and emerges as a shared outlook that shapes the mind and message of the church. …it needs a sharp prophetic edge to it. I think the church needs to speak for—and to speak up for—the living God.”

I am glad I pushed back a little, that quote is a gem. Thanks for your work. Have you ever thought about communicating your ideas through some well-produced, creative teaching videos?

Peace from the US

Chris Jones

@Andrew Perriman:

You may well be right about the church needing to speak prophetically. Our problem is that there is no consensus as yet on how that prophetic critique is arrived at. Too often what we get are rants from defective world views.

Are you sure you want to encourage that?

@Richard:

I completely agree, and no, I’m not sure I want to encourage it, to be honest. But I think we have to start to learn how to move in the direction of a renewed public voice, otherwise the church in the West over the coming decades will continue to shrink into irrelevance. That voice has to be a “theological” voice of some sort, and if it also needs to be convincingly a biblical voice, then I don’t see how we can avoid developing a prophetic perspective, as difficult as that will be. But I am somewhat confident that a consistently historical method, informed critically by biblical studies and conscious of the profound changes that are taking place in our world, can help to recover the authority to speak credibly on behalf of the living God, who we say has called us to serve him. We don’t know how to do it now, but perhaps we can learn.

@Andrew Perriman:

Thanks Andrew, very helpful. My current questioning is do we yet have any indicators as to which biblical narrative to inhabit in which particular circumstances?

As you say, it needs to be biblical, I suppose what I am really saying is that what you are proposing was good at saying what the bible meant, but I am looking for signposts as to how we start to reclaim it for our world. Until we have better signposts for this, those who think they “already have it all” will monopolise the conversation.

Perhaps I am just wanting to go too quickly and need a bit of delayed gratification!!

@Andrew Perriman:

This aspect of a narrative-historical outlook — being able to speak to the world about God in a way that makes sense of our present circumstances that is in the trajectory of the Bible but not bound to its world — that is an aspect of supreme interest to me.

I know you’re saying that we’re just now trying to figure out what that looks like, but if you have even some tentative thoughts on this to spur conversation, I’d be really interested in hearing them.

@Andrew Perriman:

Hi Andrew

For me too, the need for the prophetic is what I’m increasingly interested in. I’ve been seeing the lens of Babylon as a rich vein to draw on (no, not exile, that’s been a bit of a dead end so far). Just now I’ve had a go at using the subgenre (?) of Twitter threads to express something on this. See what you make of it…!