N.T. Wright, one of the world’s foremost New Testament scholars, has written a most timely book, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath.
Scholarly yet accessible, the book will appeal to pastors and laypeople alike as it grapples with one of life’s most fundamental questions: Why do catastrophic events like the pandemic happen?
Some Christians have interpreted the pandemic as a sign of the end times, God’s judgment on a fallen world or a reminder of the need to share our faith, but Wright rejects these easy answers. He says shame on us as Christians if we need a pandemic to tell our neighbors the good news.
He doesn’t think that we are meant to understand the “dark power that from the start has tried to destroy God’s good handiwork,” but events like the pandemic give us a chance to be faithful even when we don’t understand God’s divine plan.
It’s a reassuring truth for these perplexing times.