This is the best theological reflection on coronavirus that I have read so far. It’s a Jesuit Review essay by Tomáš Halík, who is a Catholic priest and a professor of sociology at Charles University, Prague. It offers something of the prophetic perspective that is missing from much of the bland and frankly sub-biblical evangelical commentary that I have come across. It has a distinctly Catholic point of view, but most of what he says has relevance for the whole church. It’s not a very long essay, but I’ll summarise what seem to me the main points.

In a Seven Minute Seminary video on the will of God and natural disasters Ben Witherington, who is a very good biblical scholar, argues emphatically that COVID-19 is not an “act of God”.

One of the main tasks of Jesus’ earthly ministry, he says, was to get rid of disease, decay, and death so it is “hardly likely that we should predicate of God something that Jesus came to correct.” God is not the author of disease decay and death, we are, all the way back to Adam and Eve. Natural disasters are part of the fallen world. Disease, decay and death are what God wishes to overcome; the last enemy to be overcome is death. So we should be “extremely wary of suggesting that, well, God sent all of this to us” as punishment. Besides, if that really were the case, we would have to say that God doesn’t have a very good aim, killing Christians and non-Christians alike.

My wife thinks this is rather heavy reading for Easter, so be warned….

The doctrine of “penal substitutionary atonement”—the idea that God punished Jesus on Good Friday in our place—divides Christians: some find it theologically profound, others find it morally repugnant. My argument has been—see, for example, my recent post on the reconciliation of all things—that, however the doctrine strikes us as moderns, it makes good sense in the context of the New Testament story about Israel. And only in that context. I’ve suggested that Paul’s statement about God putting forward Jesus as a hilastērion by his blood in Romans 3:25 fits this pattern.

A popular text for people who would like to think that in the end all people will be saved is the assertion in Colossians 1:19-20 that through Christ God was pleased to “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” Steve Chalke, for example, whose book The Lost Message of Paul I have been working through, quotes Karl Barth: “I don’t believe in universalism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the reconciler of all.” I have to say that the “brilliant” subtlety of Barth’s solution to the question of who gets saved is lost on me, but I can see the appeal of Paul’s statement: it suggests that ultimately the whole cosmos is reconciled to God because Jesus died. Is that a valid understanding of the passage? I don’t think so.

Enough of Steve Chalke’s book, let’s get back to coronavirus. How do we talk about it theologically? Or, as Baptist theologian and ethicist Roger Olson asks, “Where is God in this pandemic?”

Coronavirus is not one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—that was a very different future, from a very different perspective. Lament may well be appropriate, but at the social or political or global level lament presupposes failure, entails repentance, and looks to God to act to put things right. Lament demands that we speak out.

Enough of the pandemic, let’s get back to Steve Chalke’s book The Lost Message of Paul. Chalke is a somewhat post-evangelical leader in the UK with excellent credentials. In this book he is using the “new perspectives” on Paul that have emerged in New Testament scholarship in recent decades (Sanders, Wright, Hays, Dunn, and Bates, among other, are cited) to support his post-evangelical take on things.

Therein lie the strength and the weakness of the book. I think that a sustainable theology that carries the name “evangelical” in any sense has to get to grips with historical readings of the New Testament, but the programme needs to be carried through consistently. We need to go all the way back before we can work out how to move forward. Chalke hasn’t quite got the nerve, I fear.

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.”