Faith in a time of pandemic (talk delivered 17th May 2020)

My father-in-law, Jim Cassidy, worked as an Area Manager in Water Pollution Control in Bournemouth and its surroundings. This meant he had the pleasure of driving around the beautiful Dorset countryside in the pursuance of his occupation which was, basically, sewage! Regarding this, Jim used to say that sewage “wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but it was his bread and butter”. Well, I could say the same about Immunology – that’s been the focus of my professional life since I fell in love with this subject, around the time that I also fell in love with Sue, over 40 years ago. And both of these loves are still with me today! When people asked me “what I did” and I said “Immunology”, I often get a response of either bemused interest, or disinterested bewilderment. However, in recent months, you have all become, to some extent, experts in Immunology, with everybody now being cognoscente with terms like ‘vaccine development’, ‘protective antibodies’ and ‘herd immunity’. This is just one of the less dramatic consequences of COVID-19.

Part of the shock for us of the COVID-19 pandemic is not only the number of deaths it is causing, but the fact of it being an infectious cause of death to which anybody might succumb. This contrasts with most of human history, during which infections have been the leading cause of death – for example, in 1839 in England and Wales, over half of all deaths were due to infections (mainly tuberculosis, enteritis, pneumonia and typhus), whereas these days the leading causes of death are, as we all know, heart disease, strokes and cancer. Life expectancy has also improved dramatically over the past two centuries – it was about 40 years in 1800, and is about 80 years today. So, until the last few months, nobody alive today in Britain thought that they might die ‘before their time’ of infection.

The keener sense of one’s own mortality that was ever present for our ancestors may be one factor, amongst many, that helps to account for the much higher levels of religious faith in days of yore. It’s therefore an interesting fact that, according to a recent survey by Tearfund, since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, a quarter of adults have watched or listened to a religious service and 1 in 20 have started to pray, who didn’t pray before.

A fair question then to ask is: “Where is God in this crisis?” or even: “Why did God allow this coronavirus?”

There are some who might answer: “Well, God is in control of everything. Indeed, everything is predetermined by God. So, God has caused COVID-19 – He meant it to happen – presumably to ‘teach us a lesson’ in the divine ‘school of hard knocks’! Indeed, the Book of Numbers informs us that, during the wanderings of the Israelites in the Wilderness, on one occasion (and for no obvious reason) – and I quote – “the anger of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord struck the people with a very great plague”. One could argue that the ultimate aims of such a strategy with regard to COVID-19 are laudable – that is, to teach us new priorities about what’s really important in life; to show more respect for the planet; to show more respect for each other; even to show more respect for God or, at least, to give Him ‘the time of day’. But look at the cost! – the deaths of hundreds of thousands (eventually, possibly millions) of innocent people; the grieving of many times more family members and friends; the long-term health consequences for many who survive the infection; the destruction of the worldwide economy and the relativestability and security that it provides. Who could worship a God who operates in such a way, let alone give Him ‘the time of day’? Or, at least, it would be worship out of fear, not out of love.

Others might say that God didn’t actively cause COVID-19, but also decided not to intervene and stop it, even though He could. Perhaps because tampering with nature in this way would contravene God’s high principles in permitting the operation of ‘free will’, which means having to let things run their course without interference. Well, as an analogy, let’s say that your child is rushed into hospital with severe bacterial meningitis where the doctor says, “ I could intervene and possibly save your child, but I think it’s better to let nature take its course as this was clearly meant to be, so I’m not going to do anything.” At the very least, you would have no respect for that doctor – so why should we respect God if he operated in this same way?

So, how should we view COVID-19 in relation to our belief in a loving God? What should ‘faith in a time of pandemic’ look like? Ultimately, this comes down to that old chestnut of theodicy – if God is the source of the Creation, and God is loving, why is there suffering? Or, as C.S. Lewis famously coined it in the title of his book – ‘The problem of pain’.

Well, those who know my leanings in such matters, won’t be surprised if I now refer to the work of the theologian Thomas Jay Oord. Tom has written many books, but two of his most recent (entitled ‘The uncontrolling love of God’ and ‘God Can’t) tackle these issues head on in a relatively novel and, I find, refreshingly cogent way. What Tom Oord emphasises is that, although we all accept that God is loving, we frequently (indeed, almost uniformly) under-estimate how much greater is God’s love than anything of which we ourselves are capable or can fully comprehend. He references, in particular , the letter to the Philippians in which Paul says that Jesus, the personification of God, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave”. The Greek word in this text, translated here as “emptied” is “kenosis” which can also mean “self-giving”. Paul also says in his first letter to the Corinthians that love “does not insist on its own way”. Thus, Tom Oord proposes that God’s love can be defined as ‘self-giving, others empowering’ love. Not in the limited, wavering way of which we might be capable, but in a pure, perfect, immutable and absolute form. Furthermore, Tom argues that God has no choice but to always and everywhere express this self-giving, others empowering love because, as Paul again says (this time to Timothy), “ If we are faithless, He remains faithful – for He cannot deny himself.” In other words, God cannot act other than according to His own nature of absolute love.

Now, as I just said, Paul tells us that love “does not insist on its own way” – it cannot coerce…it is ‘uncontrolling’. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the ending shows God the Father’s absolute forgiving love for his wayward son. But the beginning of that same parable also shows God the Father’s absolute uncontrolling love for son: he may well have tried to persuade his son not to leave, but he didn’t coerce him – he didn’t lock him in his room or get his servants to block the exit. In fact, not only did the father allow his son to follow the path he chose, but he also gave him his share of the inheritance for which he asked. So, God’s perfect love is also, of necessity, uncontrolling. Tom proposes that the logical consequence of this is that God can’t force his will on anyone or anything in Creation – He cannot coerce – He requires cooperation from within Creation for His will to be done. After all, we often repeat the wish “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done’ – a wish in which our pledge to cooperate with God is therefore implicit.

A major conclusion of this approach is then to state not that ‘God causes suffering’, nor that ‘God allows suffering’, but that ‘God can’t prevent suffering……single-handedly’.

Now this approach not only gives us a believable explanation for why suffering is present in the Creation of an All-Loving God, but it also tells us what we should be doing about it. The word I just used – ‘single-handedly’ – is our call to action! God always works for good and always works against suffering, but absolutely needs our cooperation (as well as the cooperation of the rest of Creation) for His will to be done – for good to win.

So what we should know, is that God hates the suffering caused by COVID-19, because God hates the presence of all suffering within His Creation. Indeed, our suffering causes equal suffering to God Himself. But God needs our cooperation to beat COVID-19; which means that every doctor, nurse, other healthcare professional, pharmacist, care assistant, medical research scientist, epidemiologist, everyone in the chain of food supply, and all of us helping to limit the spread of this virus by following the lock-down requirements – are cooperating with God, whether they realise it or not. So, amongst other things – yes, I believe that locking church buildings to help reduce the spread of corona virus was what God wanted us to do.

And, of course, we are not only God’s ‘hands’ in this Divine/human synergy in fighting the virus, but every prayer that’s said strengthens and consolidates this cooperation.

But, if someone wants to probe deeper, they might counter all that I’ve said by asking, “So why did God createviruses in the first place? If there were no viruses at all, there would be no COVID-19! Indeed, there would no mumps, measles, rubella, shingles, influenza, common colds, ebola, yellow fever, hepatitis B or C…..there would be no AIDS….and, of course, the list could go on!

Well, one way of dodging that question is to answer that maybe God didn’t create viruses – not directly, anyway. An interesting biological fact about viruses is that, within themselves, that are not actually living things – they are not alive! What I mean by this is that they cannot reproduce themselves by themselves, which is a requirement of life. Viruses can only reproduce by infecting other living things, effectively acting as parasites, and commandeering the metabolic machinery of their infected hosts to reproduce themselves. Thus, viruses as we know them could not have existed before other life forms on earth had already evolved – or had been created – however you choose to look at it. Thus, nobody really knows how, or when viruses came into being – we only know that they couldn’t have come first. However, what is also worth knowing is that, although we understandably focus on those viruses that cause diseases in humans (of which there are about 200 types known), across the whole of nature there are millions of different types of viruses ­– all of which must infect something, whether that’s an animal, a plant or another type of microbe. But, importantly, it’s estimated that less than 1% of these viruses actually cause damage to the host organism that they infect. Indeed, many viruses are actually beneficial to their hosts. For example, there’s a multitude of viruses that are naturally present in our bodies that actually protect us by infecting bacteria, and so ‘keeping in check’ bacteria that might otherwise multiply out of control and cause us problems and disease. A very different example, is that one of our own genes that’s essential for the placenta to form during pregnancy is thought to have originated from a virus, hundreds of millions of years ago. So, without that virus there would be no placental mammals, and therefore no ‘us’ today. Without viruses, life on earth would look very different from how it does, and we wouldn’t be here to see it anyway!

However, viruses, like everything else in nature, are constantly changing and evolving – and this is sometimes in ways that are not to our advantage, and may potentially be to our detriment. But, here again, we should consider how we do or don’t cooperate with God – how we work with or against His will. Another idea promoted by Tom Oord is that, when suffering occurs, it is always God’s wish to bring good from the bad. Perhaps some good that may come from this terrible pandemic is a greater realisation of how we should respect, rather than exploit, God’s Creation – not least because that exploitation may prove to be our downfall. Although we don’t know exactly how the corona virus started in Wuhan, it seems probable that we (that is, humans) are at least partially culpable for the emergence of the pandemic. Just as we are for that other major disaster the whole Earth is currently facing – global warming.

Just like the Athenians that Paul preached to all those centuries ago, present-day people worship at many altars, including those of wealth and profit, power and dominance, self-interest and self-centredness. And, for many, the altar of the one true God is seen by them as the altar of the unknown god

So, perhaps one of the key messages that the Church of Christ should be bringing to humanity through this pandemic in terms of our relationship with Creation and God its Creator is, as Paul said, “In Him we live and move and have our being. For we, too, are His offspring.”