Others Magazine

Early during the COVID-19 pandemic, Time magazine asked N.T. Wright to submit an article reflecting on the coronavirus, detailing a Christian response to the virus, and considering the many implications of the pandemic. The article was the genesis for his latest book, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Response on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath.

For years, anything Wright has written is required reading and this latest text is no different. In the short but very thoughtful volume, he reflects on the Bible, Christian theology, Church history, and particularly prayer and lament, as he explores and answers these questions pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic: What should be the Christian response? How should we think about God? How do we live in the present? What can we learn about ourselves? How do we recover?

Wright is not interested in the partisan or geopolitical blame game, and he does not believe in the unhealthy and unhelpful over-spiritualising of the pandemic.

He writes about present-day prophets who are willing to give us the answers to our current problem. “These range from the cause-and-effect pragmatists (it’s all because governments didn’t prepare properly for the pandemic) to the strikingly detached moralisers (it’s all because the world needs to repent of sexual sin) to valid but separate concerns (it’s reminding us about the ecological crisis). 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.”

Captain Mark Braye is a corps officer in The Salvation Army Canada and Bermuda Territory