Last week, Pennsylvania
state representative Stephanie Borowicz proposed a resolution that called for a
day of prayer, fasting, and humiliation. The coronavirus, she wrote, “may be
but a judgment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins.” The reactions of incredulity were predictable,
though they perhaps misunderstand the Christian position on prayer. Orthodox Christianity does not
see prayer as an alternative to prudent action, such that praying that one does
not, for example, develop measles renders redundant the need to be vaccinated.
It is rather an acknowledgment that nothing takes place in the created realm
independent of the transcendent reality of God. To borrow the apocryphal saying
attributed to Cromwell, we trust God but also keep our powder dry.
Christian
claims about the meaning of particular incidents of suffering are always on
shaky epistemological grounds because the Bible itself presents such things as
arising for a variety of reasons—from punishment for wrongdoing, as with
Ananias and Sapphira, to the deeply mysterious, as with Job. Yet while
speculation by contemporary Christians regarding the significance of the
coronavirus may be epistemologically misplaced, it is no more so than secular
claims that, for example, certain events indicate that holding particular moral
positions places one on the right side of history. Both represent not so much
metaphysical truth claims so much as rhetorical strategies designed to provide
personal views or preferences with some kind of objective and thus
authoritative status. Appeals to metaphysical teleology take many forms, and
those who deny the privilege to Christians should make sure they also deny it
to themselves.
At some point, however, the COVID-19 crisis will
be over, and the question for Christians will be simple: “What should we learn
from this?” And one thing seems obvious: The levels of general panic
indicate that few of us have been properly prepared for the reality of our own
mortality. As a friend pointed out to me recently, when Jesus references
the tower at Siloam and the murder of Jews by Pilate (Luke 13), he precludes a
simplistic connection between death and particular personal wrongdoing. Yet he
also asserts that such deaths should serve as a reminder that all of us are
destined for the grave. And thence, in Christian theology, to judgment.
Modern Western culture has tried valiantly to
domesticate and marginalize death, both by taming it through
fictionalized representations in movies and TV shows, and by keeping the real
thing out of sight. But as in the case of that other target of the modern
culture of trivialization, sex, we have been mugged by reality. Earlier
societies surrounded sex and death with sacred ceremonies, and for good reason:
They cannot be trivialized, domesticated, or marginalized with impunity. They
are simply too significant and powerful. And so, as #MeToo has led the
Hollywood elite to realize that their sex-as-recreation gospel was falsehood,
so the coronavirus reality has made implausible that comforting thought of
Cicero, that no man is so old that he does not think he will live for another
year. This should remind the church of her priorities. “Redeeming
the arts” doesn’t seem quite so urgent when your immediate problem is not that
of obtaining tickets to the Met but of potentially dying before the box office
reopens after the COVID-19 crisis.
We have clearly become accustomed to remarkably
comfortable lives. How else do we explain fights in supermarkets over toilet
paper? Make no mistake, I regard bathroom tissue as a most wonderful invention,
of greater importance than any cell phone or coffee machine, but it is hardly
one of life’s absolute essentials. And
I have often wondered about the significance of “saving lives.” “ Delaying
deaths,” while culturally tasteless, is technically more accurate. We are born
to die. Death is inevitable, which is why each of us finds it so terrifying.
In this
situation it is the task of the church to mug people with reality before
reality itself comes calling. Yet that note seems to have been signally absent
from the public profile of the church in recent weeks. Efforts to fight the
virus are important; but so is the church’s task of preparing us for death.
This was a point rarely lost on earlier
generations of Christians. Take, for example, the Book of Common
Prayer’s funeral liturgy. Rooted in biblical texts and suffused with biblical
allusions, it speaks powerfully in a manner foreign to our own culture:
Man that is born of woman hath but
a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down,
like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
That is a
liturgy at odds with today’s culture. It is worrying to speculate that it might
also be at odds with the expectations of today’s church.
As Philip Rieff once commented, in past times
people did not go to church to be made happy; they went to have their misery
explained to them. If the Book of Common Prayer is a guide, that is
understandable: Life in the sixteenth century was miserable, and it ended in
death. People wanted the tools to face reality, not distractions to make them
feel good about themselves. Our lives may be, on average, more comfortable
than those of our ancestors, but that is a temporary state of affairs and our
end is just the same as theirs. So, grim as it sounds, it is the task of the
church to fight not so much against physical plagues, which come and go, but
rather against that which Leszek Kolakowski dubbed the age of analgesics.
The church is certainly to help people to live,
but to live in the shadow of mortality. She must set this earthly realm in the
greater context of eternity. She is to prepare people through her preaching,
her liturgy, her psalmody, and her sacraments to realize that death is, yes, a
terrible, terrifying reality we must all some day face, but that the suffering
of this world—or indeed, this passing superficial prosperity many of us
enjoy—are but light and momentary ephemera compared to the eternal weight of
glory that is to come.
Carl R.
Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College,
and senior fellow at the Institute for Faith and Freedom.