Marginal Christianity

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 a...

What Does the Church in America Do in the Coronavirus Pandemic? "The notion that the elderly should give themselves over to infection so that millions can return to their subsistence existence while the disparity with the wealthy can continue to increase is not a rational proposal. If protecting the economy as it is presently organized is a reasonable proposal, I’m sure they’re taking volunteers in hospitals across the country." - Barry Harvey One thing the church does not/must not do is support proposals that privilege the American (or any) economy over people. To so fetishize the economy is idolatry and participation in the larger idolatry of American exceptionalism. The church stands with and under this crisis with its people (of both church and nation). The church shares God’s view that the health and well-being of a community depends on its care for the victims and the vulnerable in their midst. To so care is to meet the needs of those at the margins and t...

“Pandemic” – Lynn Unger “What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch. Promise this world your love– for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, so long as we all shall live.”  

(I interrupt my series of reflections on Joy on some thoughts on the Coronavirus pandemic.) The third quarter of the 2 nd century a.d. saw an horrific plague, which many scientists believe was smallpox. Ravaged the Roman Empire and especially the city of Rome itself. Five thousand people a day were dying in the from the disease in the city at its height. Cyprian, in “On Mortality,” describes the terrifying spectacles this disease caused: “ The intestines are shaken with a continual vomiting; the eyes are on fire with the infected blood; that in some cases the feet or some parts of the limbs are taken off by the contagion of diseased putrefaction.” All who could, especially the elites, fled the plague and removed themselves to safety. The whole scene was an apocalyptic horror movie playing out in real life. There was one group in the city that did not run from this scourge but rather ran toward it: the early Christian church. Armed with both an indefatigable hope and a pr...