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No, Coronavirus Is Not the Apocalypse; It Could Be Worse Than That

No, Coronavirus Is Not the Apocalypse; It Could Be Worse Than That

Section titled “No, Coronavirus Is Not the Apocalypse; It Could Be Worse Than That”

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  • Rodney Stark has argued that the self-sacrificial Christian response to the devastating ebola-like plagues that swept through the Roman world in the third century did much to establish the credibility of Christianity and its superiority to paganism. I see that the thesis has been getting a lot of coverage recently. It may be of great historical significance, but I’m not sure it offers much guidance—or comfort—for the church today. On the one hand, arguably, such compassion is one of the things that modern secular humanism has retained from its Christian upbringing. There is a great deal of neighbourliness in evidence at the moment. On the other, we now have professional social and medical services. It’s the doctors and nurses who are being applauded from balconies in Spain and Portugal. The churches are empty.
  • Would that work today? I doubt it, but we have become a burdensome population on this shrinking earth, and it may be a more appropriate model than Stark’s. The suspicion is growing among scientists that it is the large-scale disruption of the natural environment that is forcing novel pathogens into the human population. Isn’t repentance—a transformative change of mind, a radical change of behaviour—exactly what is needed? And isn’t that something that the church should be good at? Surely there is another story welling up from the depths of an increasingly fevered social consciousness—a story about the fragility of culture and meaning and truth, the vanity of the modern self, the inadequacy of our economic and technological infrastructure, the pointlessness of consumption, the knife-edge vulnerability of our ecosystem. The current pandemic has caught us by surprise, but it is easily assimilated as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.