Book Review: Tom Wright, God and the Pandemic

When COVID-19 shut down the United Kingdom earlier this year, many Christians began blogging or publishing on the pandemic, offering pastoral advice and the like. Tom Wright also wrote an article for TIME Magazine, encouraging us all not to speculate on where this virus fits into the grand scheme of history or end-time prophecy, but instead to lament. While this article did not set the theological world ablaze with controversy, despite its title (‘Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It’s Not Supposed To’), I do recall reading a couple of responses here and there bemoaning the inadequacy of Wright’s position. Now Wright has written God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (London: SPCK, 2020), a relatively short book expressing his thoughts on the matter in further depth.

Essentially, Wright’s contention remains identical to that within his earlier article:

We need to resist the knee-jerk reactions that come so readily to mind. Before we can answer those questions in anything other than the broadest outline, we need a time of lament, of restraint, of precisely not jumping to ‘solutions’. These may come, God willing, but unless we retreat from our instant reactions we may not be able to hear them. If we spend time in the prayer of lament, new light may come, rather than simply the repetition of things we might have wanted to say anyway. (p. xi)

Wright is not so much interested in analysing COVID-19’s impact as he is in explaining why, for Christians, Jesus Christ is central to God’s ways with the world. Thus the majority of God and the Pandemic retells the story of Jesus from its origins in Israel’s history (chapter two), through the Gospels (chapter three) and the New Testament (chapter four), to our present situation and the Church’s role in it. It is in this final fifth chapter that Wright explains further why the Church should lament and what such lament entails for the Church’s action in a post-pandemic world.

I sense that God and the Pandemic could have been published earlier than it was, as in recent weeks I have not detected as many of the ‘why?’ questions I heard in months past. People are no longer asking, it seems, why the pandemic is happening as much as wondering when they can return to normality and if it is safe to do so. If I am right here, then I should emphasise that only the opening chapter seems a little outdated. The real and lasting value of God and the Pandemic resides in its succinct affirmation that Christian life centres on Jesus and finds its meaning and direction in him alone.