Okay, catchy title, but I should really say “half wrong,” as he usually is. Bishop N.T. Wright often sees the big picture of the kingdom of God in refreshing ways that the normal person today can latch onto. It’s made him quite popular. But as a mainline liberal bishop, he gets much wrong in the Bible. Read him with care. His recent Time article is no exception.
His first point in this short article is that Christians
want to explain why bad things happen, because of the Enlightenment rationalist
movement. That’s really silly. There is a natural impulse in the heart of
man to explain the world around him. And
the Bible tells us at many points that God brings about big events to do specific
things: call us to repent, correct us for past sins, etc. All things work together for the good of
those who love Him, Romans 8:28 says. We
want to explain bad things, not because we can, or because we’re too
rationalistic, but because we have an innate sense of God’s providence in our lives.
Now, Wright is right, that we don’t have adequate knowledge
to give a full explanation, for this or any tragedy. But he infers from this that we should have NO
part in offering ANY explanation. Just
because we can’t explain everything, doesn’t mean we don’t find patterns and
clues in Scripture to why tragedies happen.
It’s true, we need to be careful.
I did a word search on pestilence in the Old Testament and wound up in
Jeremiah an awful lot. God was doing a
unique thing there with His people. And
we shouldn’t flippantly assume He’s doing exactly the same thing today. But neither should we recoil in horror to think
God would be so morally repugnant. He
DID correct and teach His people (and judge nations) with plague. And He is shown righteous in the Bible for doing
so. We should explore the possibility
seriously that He is doing something similar today in our own life and in society.
Wright is right to go to the Psalms to lament in horrid times. The Church badly needs to learn to
lament. But Wright insists that there will
be no answer or explanation when we cry to God.
I would rather say, when you lament, God answers in His time, which may
take a while. This is a call to trust
God, and to voice that trust as the Psalmist does. True, as Wright says, the Psalms don’t fully explain
David’s or our troubles, but they do often give clues. When David wonders why the wicked prosper, he
gets a direct answer and gives it to us (Psalm 73:16ff). Wright is right, though, that the Psalms aren’t
there mainly to explain our troubles, but to give us language to talk
faithfully to God amid hardship.
Another point besides all this is that of timing. It's a bad idea when someone breaks a leg and is loaded into the ambulance, for you to jump in with them and explain why God did this to them, unasked. We're at that moment in our pandemic, with the death toll rising. It is a time to wait for the question to arise, on a personal level. (Though I think it's wise to point generally to resources any time.) My beef with Wright here is that he goes further than this, and opposes the point of 1 Peter 3:15: "always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear..."
It’s commonly accepted in the world and in most of the
church now: to even hint that God may have allowed or brought on some tragedy,
to make a point or to punish people, makes Him a moral monster. It does not.
Pat Robertson used to call out Hollywood or homosexuality after a
hurricane as the direct cause. And that
got us used to rejecting thinking about God’s providence at all in tragedy,
because he did it so clumsily. N.T. Wright
is willing to stay inside the world’s wrongly drawn boundaries for God. “A loving God would not...” His last paragraph demands that we NOT try to
suggest possible reasons God might be doing this, and to simply lament
instead. Why the either/or? It is true that a compassionate heart will move to lament first, perhaps. And our explanations should be without a hint of self-righteous "I told you so." But we must be ready to give an answer.
Wright’s view is at least half wrong. It is far out of step with Jesus, who called everyone
personally to repent in the face of tragic news headlines (Luke 13:1-5). It silences a large part of the Scriptures,
which Wright himself is called by God to proclaim to the world. A much better take is John Piper's "Don't Waste Your Cancer" article, or Erik Raymond's recent piece.
God does grieve with us, as the death toll rises.
But we also look to Him to transcend our troubles.
And He has. Easter is
coming.
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