Divine Punishment

The most common response to the question about what narratives the bishops found unhelpful and should be resisted was a narrative of the pandemic as divine punishment and/or judgment (n = 7). The bishops were often quite emphatic in their dismissal of the divine punishment narrative describing it as a “very, very unhelpful” (B2) narrative that needed to be “really, really, deeply avoided” (B8).

The resistance to the narrative was also often cast in terms of its perceived theological poverty, with the bishops making statements such as “it's just bad theology” (B6), and “we have to be much more theologically acute than that” (B1). In a similar vein, it was also often expressed as a narrative that simply did not correspond with their understandings of God, either within their theological formation or with their interpretation of scripture, through statements like “God isn't like that […] that's not the God I read about in the New Testament” (B8) and from one bishop simply “I don't believe in a God like that” (B5).

At the same time, nearly all the statements about the unhelpfulness of the punishment narrative were accompanied by some version of the caveat that this was not a narrative they had encountered very often in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. At first, these qualifications seem to raise questions about why the narrative was so salient in the minds of the bishops interviewed, despite its absence in their own experience of the first 6–9 months of the pandemic.

As mentioned in the introduction, the significant history of Christian commentators, writers, and poets interpreting natural disasters as a punishment from God goes some way to explain why the punishment narrative was so consistently mentioned by the bishops as an unhelpful narrative, despite many of them stating openly that they had not come across in relation to the current pandemic (Chester and Duncan 2010). Noteworthy examples include the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake (Braiterman 1998; Kverndok 2010; Mahn 2012) and more recently, the AIDS epidemic that emerged in the 1980s (Kowalewski 1990).

Importantly, however, none of the caveats offered in the interviews question the existence of religious voices that mobilize the punishment narrative in their interpretation of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Rather they function as a way for the bishops to create institutional, intellectual, and geographic distance between themselves and those who endorse it. The qualifications found in these statements consistently places endorsement of the narrative outside the sources that they have chosen to consult (“I haven't come across them directly, or gone out to look for them, but I know the punishment narrative is out there,” B4) outside their network of friends and colleagues (“I've not heard [it] pitched up in the circles I move in,” B5), outside the Anglican Community (“I've not seen much of that in the United Kingdom and in terms of my own community, the Anglican community,” B10), or outside the context of their geographic area (“I haven't seen what I could have feared, it might be happening in other parts of the world,” B1).

Punishment and Exile

Two of the bishops referred to judgment/punishment narrative as unhelpful through or in conjunction with a narrative of Exile. Exile is another narrative that has proved quite popular among Christian commentators on the pandemic (see, e.g., Pecknold 2020). This narrative of the defeat and deportation of certain groups of the Jewish people and the destruction of the Temple by their Babylonian captors in the sixth‐century BCE, is a central Old Testament theme. The core imagery that the Babylonian Exile evokes is one of uncertainty and disorientation with the dissolution of both religious and political institutions. However, it is also recognized by commentators as a period of theological growth underpinning both Jewish and Christian thought (Hiebel 2019).

The narrative in the Old Testament details the reasons for the Babylonian Exile to be interpreted as divine punishment as a result of the people of Judea breaking the covenant of God. It also details lessons learnt during the Exile and the longing for and eventual return to Jerusalem. Christian faith leaders and commentators have drawn extensively on the narrative of Exile not just to reflect on this pandemic but for other times when the Christian church has been perceived to be marginalized in an increasingly secular world (Gibson 2014). Use of the narrative as a metaphor for marginalization draw primarily on its theme of keeping faith in difficult times.

One of the bishops interviewed (B7) began by stating that narratives of the pandemic that imply judgment of God should be resisted, and then spoke of a perceived overuse of the narrative of Exile based on the view that theologically church buildings are not analogous to “homeland.” Following this logic, the bishop felt that the Exodus might be a better metaphor for the church in terms of how the pandemic is causing a reformation of the community “in the desert” (B7). The reason for this preference for Exodus over Exile, though it was not mentioned specifically, may be an effort to avoid the narrative of punishment intrinsic to the metaphor of Exile. Unlike Exile, punishment is not a central theme in the story of the Exodus, best characterized as a narrative of liberation from oppression, overcoming adversity and, moving from the old world to the new.

A second bishop (B8) spoke directly to the connection between the narrative of Exile and divine punishment, explicitly identifying references to the Babylonian Exile as unhelpful in the context of COVID‐19 because of it. This bishop argued that while it may be tempting to use the narrative of Exile as a metaphor for the predicament of the Christian church during the pandemic, particularly in relation to the suffering endured by many within the faith community and the hardship of being shut out from ones’ place of worship, the narrative needed to be used with caution. A member of the bishops’ team had raised the point that the narrative of Exile in the Old Testament is expressly understood as a punishment for the sins of the people of Israel:

Exile was, you know, directly punishment for sin, and I think those are narratives that we need to be careful to avoid. (B8)

It was clear that this bishop found the narrative of Exile to be potentially useful for the Christian community to understand the COVID‐19 pandemic but was hesitant to endorse it fully precisely because of its implications for punishment for sin. These comments can also fruitfully be compared with the response from a third bishop (B1) who suggested the narrative of Exile as a helpful one in its reference to liminality and questions around what the Christian community might be hoping for in future but was otherwise adamant that a narrative of divine judgment/punishment was decidedly unhelpful.

My mind goes back to that period in Judea's history in Exile in Babylon having lived in that kind of liminal space […] that liminality has been our experience here. Are we hoping to return and see this just as an interruption of a norm that we are happy with or is it going to be […] a whole new norm, normal, or if we go back, how do we go back? […] what kind of church do you want? So, there's a whole lot of issues there about Exile which have been interesting. (B1)

Importantly, the Exile imagery does suggest a return to something that existed previously, while as mentioned above, Exodus is primarily about movement from one world to a new world. The references to Exile show the link between punishment and Exile, but also how the bishops are less categorically negative about the narrative of Exile than about the narrative of punishment. Exile is understood as a useful metaphor “to a point” to signify a time of revival and change but is understood as unhelpful precisely in its links to direct punishment of God and its emphasis on “return” over “renewal.”

The Problem of Control

Taken together, the responses that reference the punishment narrative reveal an underlying discomfort about positing the pandemic as an act of God. This is because the punishment narrative in particular suggests a theology of direct divine intervention. A focus on divine intervention opens up questions of both the extent to which God is in control of events in creation, and the extent to which God chooses to intervene in human affairs. In other words, the majority of the bishops’ responses to the question of unhelpful narratives reflect a particular approach to the Christian doctrine of Divine Providence that moves away from the image of an interventionist God.

This move away from an interventionist God is not unexpected in light of the kinds of theology that likely shaped the theological formation of the bishops interviewed. Western theology in the twentieth century saw a movement from an interventionist God through the development of process theology, kenotic theology, and open theology (Wilkinson 2004, 2010). Process theology broadly understood events in the universe to be the actualization of a set of possible outcomes, and envisioned the power of God as an exercise of persuasion as opposed to coercion (Cobb 1973; Griffin 1975; Pailin 1989). Kenotic theology centers on the self‐limitation of God through creation and Christ in order to allow for both chance in the universe and a degree of human self‐determination (Moltmann 1985; Murphy and Ellis 1996; Richard 1997). And open theology builds on developments in physics stipulating a chaotic, unpredictable universe in reaction to Newtonian mechanics, and envisions a God who intervenes in these chaotic systems in ways not discernible to humans. In this way, God allows for humans to act as free agents within divinely ordained natural processes (Polkinghorne 1989, 2009). The important point to make here is that the bishops interviewed received their theological formation in conversation with theological understandings that stressed the self‐limiting of God's power to intervene in human affairs.

The freedom of human self‐determination afforded by less interventionist theologies is important here. Several of the bishops explicitly linked the problems of the divine punishment narrative to its theological implications and the core objection that it takes both responsibility and agency away from humans:

[the punishment narrative] is just such an unhelpful take on human affairs generally I think […] God is in control and if we pray hard enough God will sort it out ‐ that kind of handing over the problem to God and saying over to you. (B1)

As is visible in the quote above, it is also clear from the responses that the bishops were uncomfortable with the notion of God being in control of the pandemic because of its implications for perceptions about the extent to which we as humans have the capacity to exercise control over God. If the pandemic is a punishment for human sin, the implication is that humans through our actions caused God to cause the pandemic. On the same token, humans could conceivably influence the outcome of the pandemic by controlling God through actions such as prayer, or through otherwise repenting from the sins that caused God to punish us in the first place.

One of the bishops (B2) was especially clear about this element of the punishment narrative and its connection to notions of control, including how the pandemic has had an impact on our sense of control generally. The view expressed was that it gives rise to a misguided notion of the extent to which either we humans or God have control over events of the world:

I don't think that kind of narrative is helpful […] I much prefer to say, how do we see God in amidst our circumstances whatever those circumstances are rather than that those are being somehow caused by divine retribution or punishment of any kind. I think that just spreads fear and again gives us the illusion that we can control God through the way in which we behave. I don't see that as a helpful narrative within the Christian story. (B2)

In relation to this, the same bishop (B2) also talked about narratives of end times, eschatological warning from God (i.e., apocalyptic narratives) as unhelpful for similar reasons, that is, they serve to buttress the illusion that God can be controlled through our behavior.

Suffering, Lament, and the Virus

Resistance to narratives that stipulate an interventionist God also ties to understanding of suffering. The notion of a self‐limiting God is partly a response to the problem of evil with the understanding that the freedom of humans to act in the world in combination with the limitations of God to intervene carries with it the risk of suffering (see, e.g., Wiles 1986; Ward 1996). Along these lines, the interviews contain several references to suffering as part of creation, and statements expressing a concern to understand God to be present in the midst of suffering (as alluded to in the quotation above). The bishops’ discourse around God in the midst of suffering was anchored in either theologies of Christ on the cross and/or appeals to the notion of Lament.

Lament was a central theme in retired Church of England bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright's God and the pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath (2020), which was published during the early stages of the pandemic. One of the bishops interviewed referred to his work directly. In it, Wright argues that the appropriate Christian response to the suffering caused by the pandemic is to stay with the suffering, mourn its existence with God, rather than understanding it as punishment for sin or as an eschatological warning. A similar sentiment was evident in the response of one of the bishops who spoke about a need to balance the inclination to identify silver linings to the pandemic and staying with the suffering that it is causing:

I think the balance of Lament and finding silver linings has got to be very much tilted towards Lament and I think in some of the early months some voices in the churches were rushing too quickly towards seeing the positive. (B7)

The theme of Lament and the imagery of Christ on the cross for the bishops, functions as a way to “put God back into the story” of the pandemic, while avoiding the idea that God has somehow willed the suffering into being:

The theme of suffering within Christianity or perhaps to put it another way the centrality of the cross in our faith has always been of significance to me […] it's something that we need to re‐engage with in a really serious way, not in the sense of a kind of romantic idea somehow that that those who suffer are in some way, you know, suffering because of God's desire that they should suffer. It's not anything like that. (B2)

Allowing for suffering was also a way for the bishops to allow for the virus to be a part of creation. The quote below is from one of the bishops providing an alternative to the punishment narrative by invoking the sentiment that viruses are a part of God's creation. The statement is at once an affirmation of the “naturalness” of viruses, and a further distancing from the idea that the COVID‐19 virus is an example of direct divine intervention. This in turn was seen by the bishop as more conducive to the Christian imperative of care on behalf of both the Christian leadership and the faith community as a whole.

I think the task of bishops and Christian leaders is to put up our positive narrative, which is […] viruses are part of God's creation; suffering is a part of the way nature works and our role as a Christian Community is to care for those in need. (B4)

I address the issue of the Christian imperative of care further in my discussion of the behavioral consequences that the bishops saw for understanding the pandemic as divine action below. What I want to draw attention to here is the way in which the bishops navigate the tension between narratives that allow for both suffering and the virus that caused it to be part of creation, while maintaining a resistance to understanding of the pandemic as an act of God.

Special Protection, Complacency, and Heroic Sacrifice

The interviews also show that the bishops’ resistance to an understanding of the pandemic as divine action relates to a concern to counteract potentially negative consequences to human behavior. These can be divided into three separate but interrelated categories. First that it could provoke misguided notions of a special status for people of faith, resulting in reckless behavior endangering ones’ own and others’ safety. Second that it could lead to a general feeling of complacency, thereby damaging the Christian imperative of care. And third (the inverse of the second) that it could invite the imprudent view of the pandemic as an opportunity for heroism and valiant behavior, particularly on the part of healthcare professionals.

Two of the bishops focused on the notion of a special status for people of faith as particularly unhelpful in relation to COVID‐19. The basic idea that they were concerned to refute is that Christians enjoy a higher level of protection from infection simply by virtue of belonging to the Christian community. Importantly, in both responses there was an emphasis on the notion that this protection would (1) be augmented while people of faith are engaged in worship or otherwise engaged in God's work and that it was (2) demonstrably refutable by empirical evidence and logical argument. As an example, one of the bishops (B9) spoke of having received correspondence to this effect:

There's a kind of sense that because we are God's people then when we are about God's business God will protect us from the impact of the virus […] the notion that somehow when Christians are about Godly things God's protection applies in a way that prevents any bad thing happening is blatantly untrue on the evidence. (B9)

This bishop also gave two examples of this type of narrative in action. First, the then very recent assertions of the Greek Orthodox Church that the taking of holy communion would not cause infection (Associated Press 2020) on the rationale that the body of Christ could not become infected. Second, the less recent example of the 1980 assassination of Catholic Bishop Óscar Romero y Galdáme at the altar while saying mass. The latter example especially was designed to underline the fallacy of God providing protection for Christians who are in engaged in God's work using historical evidence for support.

Norman and Reiss (2020) have recently discussed the impact of COVID‐19 on sacramental practices in the Christian Church, highlighting the way in which certain sacramental practices conflict with regulations put in place to mitigate the effects of COVID‐19. Although, these examples were not raised to question the significance of the sacraments for the Christian community, for this bishop, resisting the assertion of a protected status for faithful Christians was of material importance since it spoke directly to arguments about whether or not to keep churches open. The bishop was concerned to refute the argument for keeping churches open on the grounds that while God may not provide protection for the faithful “in our city streets, or in our restaurants or pubs or football matches” (B9), God would provide protection in churches. Ultimately then, this resistance to a notion of special status can be understood as a statement on acceptable levels of biological risk designed to invalidate attempts at theologically arguing for churches staying open.

Another bishop (B10) similarly suggested that the narrative of special protection for people of faith was particularly dangerous in the context of the pandemic. As an example, the bishop referred to appeals to special protection as an argument for not wearing masks in the United States. This bishop drew further connections between this phenomenon and political and ideological synergies in the U.S. context. Differentiating between “political” as opposed to “theological” foundations of this idea, the bishop queried an apparent convergence between those who refuse to wear masks and those who insist on their right to own firearms:

I've heard […] of people who, for example, won't wear a mask because they say that God will protect them. […] the thing for me that underlines the political roots of that, rather than the theological roots is that it's those same people who hold out to carry a gun because they don't believe that God will protect them from their violent neighbour. So, there is no theological coherence in people who say that God will protect them from the virus, but who don't act as though God is protecting them more generally. (B10)

In contrast to the previous argument from history, this is primarily an argument from logic, essentially that it is illogical to believe that God provides special protection from COVID‐19, but not from, for example, gun violence. Yet, both statements of resistance to a narrative of special protection for people of faith intersect with a rejection of a theology that understands God to intervene directly with creation. In resisting the narrative of special protection, both bishops draw a connection between the notion of special protection and denying the potency of the virus as a way to disregard the need for taking measures to protect against it. Insofar as these measures extend to the protection of others, these warnings against complacency chime with sentiments expressed by other bishops, that a potential danger of the punishment narrative is that it could be damaging to the Christian imperative of care:

I find it particularly unhelpful and indeed just theologically poor […] to see the pandemic itself solely or primarily as an act of divine judgment. I also think it's […] really damaging in terms of response and care […] for that to be a primary premise in response to the pandemic. (B6)

Here, the danger of complacency is explicitly linked to a narrative of divine judgment. However, throughout the material, several of the bishops emphasized the importance of the Christian imperative of care for the suffering in a crisis like the pandemic over attempts to understand the reasons for the suffering emerging in the first place. This general emphasis on care for the suffering ahead of seeking explanations for the suffering also corresponds to the emphasis on suffering and lament discussed above.

However, there were also sentiments expressed in the interview that a narrative of the pandemic as divine action could allow the pendulum to swing to the other extreme. One of the bishops made a link between the punishment narrative and the idea of the pandemic as an endorsement of heroism and sacrifice. It was expressed as a particular danger on behalf of health care professionals and other kinds of workers who are central to dealing with the effects of the pandemic. But it included the possibility of this general sentiment spilling over into the rest of the population to be understood as a universal calling from God to behave in ways exemplified by the caring professions:

that […] the virus is God's opportunity to provoke heroic sacrifice, you know, valiant behavior, from certain people, nurses particularly. It's His way of calling us back to a moral lifestyle where you know, people will behave with certain kinds of virtues that we see the nursing profession exemplify. That's all quite suspect in my view. (B4)

This way of understanding the consequences of the narrative that the pandemic is an act of God is a counterpart to the worry that the punishment narrative would lead to complacency and be damaging to notions of care. Here instead, the concern is that the punishment narrative could be perceived as a call to moral betterment, amplifying the Christian imperative of care to unhealthy levels. But it remains tied to the problem of divine action and human control over that action. In this case, the consequence of this narrative would be that the virus becomes understood as a way for God to induce a certain kind of morality, embodied in the caring professions. The implication being that the reasons for the pandemic outbreak represents a loss of this kind of morality in the human population globally, and that God has caused the pandemic as a result of this moral failing.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the narrative that the pandemic is in one way or another the work of the antichrist is conspicuously absent within the data set. Ideas about the antichrist at work gained moment in the run‐up to the final stages of developing the first COVID‐19 vaccines (Singh 2020), prompting refutations from a number of Christian commentators (e.g., Bohlinger 2020; Mbakwe 2020; Barrier 2020). There is only one reference to the antichrist in the data set. Significantly, it comes from a bishop interviewed in the second round of interviews and in the context of the vaccine roll‐out:

We need to speak against those voices that think it is an antichrist in operation. Look, people are already beginning to talk about 666, the mark of the beast in relation to the vaccine when it comes. (B12)

Narratives of the antichrist in relation to the pandemic may become more prevalent as debates around the vaccine unfold within Christian communities worldwide. Examining narratives that link the vaccine with the antichrist and the “mark of the beast” will likely become an important part of understanding the level of willingness among factions of the Christian community to inoculate against the COVID‐19 virus.

Complicating a Complete Dismissal of the Pandemic as an Act of God

As we have seen, the majority view expressed in the interviews is that understanding the pandemic as an act of God has the potential to produce mainly negative consequences for human behavior. However, this majority view is complicated by the occasional endorsement of an understanding of the pandemic as a way for God to encourage humanity to reflect on our values in contrast to seeing it as a punishment for sin:

I think the whole idea that this is God punishing the world for what is clearly our fallen nature and a lot of things that are bad and wrong has been fairly widely pedaled and refuted and I must say I don't think that's a line that I would take. I think I would prefer to say: God can use and is using the pandemic to get us to think carefully about our values, the way we live and all that kind of thing. And I find that a much more helpful approach and a much more Biblical one. (B3)

Despite being presented as a counternarrative to the punishment narrative, this interpretation of the pandemic as an instrument for God to encourage reflection could be interpreted as retaining the core theological problem of placing responsibility for and control over the pandemic in the hands of God. God in this case is understood to use the pandemic, not to punish humans, but to induce humans to reflect on our values and ways of life.

Although control was the main source of concern for the majority of the bishops that I spoke to, the interviews do show an overall concern not to absolve humans of responsibility altogether:

There is an underlying theological principle about our place in creation and our responsibility to creation and the humility and grace that is asked of us by God in doing that well. […] And I think the pandemic has been an environment in which we have been very starkly reminded of that and […] brought to points of repentance […] I think there is judgment in that. (B6)

Consequently, there is a tension visible within the material between a willingness to understand the pandemic as an opportunity to rethink our relationship to God's creation and to each other and the desire to dismiss a narrative of the pandemic as a judgment from God. As exemplified by the quote above, the tension arises because the notion of a need for reflection and repentance contains an element of judgment within it. The statement above also represents an interesting separation between divine punishment and divine calls for repentance, which very much emphasizes the level of directness of the divine intervention stipulated. I return to discuss this tension further in the conclusion when I discuss the moral implications of the general resistance to the narrative of divine punishment for sin in particular.