Is N. T. Wright’s View about Coronavirus Crebible?

N. T. Wright recently offered a response to some efforts to explain the coronavirus pandemic in terms of a divine judgment for human sins and idolatries (“Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To,” //time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/). He opines that the usual silly suspects will tell us why God is doing this to us. A punishment? A warning? A sign? These are knee-jerk would-be Christian reactions in a culture which, generations back, embraced rationalism: everything must have an explanation.” They, heirs of rationalists and Romantics, want clarity and relief through understanding what is going on.

Christians, however, must eschew such “dodgy explanations” and turn instead to the practice of lament over these tragic and horrible happenings in our world. Indeed, this seems the only response that is biblically warranted in Wright’s judgment. “It is no part of the Christian vocation,” he writes, “to be able to explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead.” The Psalms provide our biblical warrant for this, as does, more importantly, even God himself who exhibits such grieving and lamenting at the time of the flood, the rebellions of his people Israel, and, most poignantly, in their rejection of God himself when he came in person among them as Jesus of Nazareth. “The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit.”

Lament, Wright thinks, may well lead us to “new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific understanding, new hope.” And maybe even new wisdom for our leaders.

Now I have no complaint with Wright’s promotion of the unjustly neglected practice of lament in the church. Nor is there any shortage of the “usual silly subjects” and their “dodgy explanations” for pandemics as divine judgments. We know they exist, who many of them are, and we do well not to adopt their perspectives or practices of biblical explanation and theology.

But is there no middle ground here? Has not Wright employed an “excluded middle” approach both with regard to those who offer such “explanations” and the Bible’s approach to lament? What if there are credible, responsible spokespersons from within the broadly evangelical tradition Wright inhabits who offer faithful, critical, and even reasonable explanations and expositions for such crises as in some fashion biblically warranted judgments from God and affirm both such explanations and laments are theologically appropriate forms of ecclesial response to the worlds suffering and tragedies? People who are not the same ilk of the “usual silly subjects”?

If there be such folk then Wright’s analysis is at least incomplete and at worst wrong. Even more recently Peter Leithart of the Theopolis Institute has made such a case (“Is This A Judgment?,https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/is-this-a-judgment/?fbclid=IwAR0T1QpshY4B9dlrDmu3nIwhOXtmi8Me6SOEzPFiUg4bITJKhGrz9y7fCYI). He is from a different, theologically narrower, strand of evangelicalism than Wright, is a creative and prominent exegete and observer of American culture, and a worthy counter-weight to the case Wright has made.  Leithart and Wright agree on much more than they might disagree on, so Leithart is not one of those “silly subjects Wright complains of.

Leithart believes it is hard to deny that this pandemic looks a lot like the situation that prevails in biblical descriptions of divine judgment. “It's difficult to read biblical descriptions of cities and nations under judgment without being struck by the resemblance to the world, April 2020.” He adds, “Some will say the virus didn't do all this. The response to the virus did. There's truth to that, but it doesn't alter the point. The pestilence-and-shutdown have produced a situation that's looks an awful lot like a judgment of biblical proportions.”

Why would God bring such a massive calamity on us, we might ask? Part of the answer Leithart thinks lies in the nature of judgment which is part punishment for sin but even more fundamentally a “revelation” or diagnosis of what’s been going on in the culture to warrant such punishment. “Judgment is always apocalyptic in the original sense. As God punishes, He unveils,” he writes. Further, the ultimate end of judgment is the creation of a world reflecting God’s kingdom, not punishment.  

He believes the reasons for regarding this worldwide scourge will differ from area to area. Being American, Leithart can only speak for how he sees the things in the U.S. And he adduces 10 reasons reflecting our transgression of the 10 Commandments as a people, and they are largely persuasive.

He also brings forth the Psalms to buttress his argument but to a very different effect. “To call the pandemic a judgment is not to slip into fatalism or hopelessness. Quite the opposite. Christians want God to assert Himself as judge. Every time we sing the Psalms, we voice our hope that He will set things right and we rejoice at the prospect: For He comes to judge the earth.”

So Leithart believes that this pandemic is “from” God and intended as a judgment that both punishes America for what it has become and reveals to rot that brought us to this situation. He does not mention lament but I have no doubt he would affirm that to as a faithful response to this crisis.

He represents to my mind a credible advocate of what I have called the “excluded middle” that Wright leaves out his argument. But his argument holds no water against a figure like Leithart. That would require a much different argument than the one he makes and bases his wide-ranging conclusions on. And that opens up the possibility that a view like Leithart’s is an accurate take on the biblical view of a pandemic like the one we are in the middle of. His view seems clearly preferable to me that what appears the selective and one-sided view Wright presents.

Wright’s desire to take the field from the “usual silly subjects” is proper and warranted. But the case he makes seems unwarranted and weak. Leithart, though not addressing these same subjects, presents a more compelling case against their views as against Wright’s own. At any rate, Wright’s view that lament is the only warranted biblical response to this pandemic can and should be questioned. Perhaps he can offer a further more nuanced and detailed argument to support his case. Short of that, the case made by Leithart offers a credible and more persuasive view that Wright’s. At least that how I see it.