Where is God in Covid-19? Did He cause it? If not, why does He permit it? These are questions theologians and philosophers have wrestled with through the ages. Of course, the name of the disaster changes, but the questions remain the same.
Philosophers have given lots of different answers to the questions posed by evil, suffering, and disasters (manmade or natural). Some point out that God has created free beings who choose to do evil things. Others say that natural evils are necessary in a world in which humans can have morally significant free will, or perhaps that such evils are part of the necessary environment for humans to grow towards a God-centred life through developing certain character traits that they could not otherwise develop. Alternatively, maybe the world we live in is a necessary environment for God to fix our wills and make us fit for an eternity of union with God (which is an incommensurable good far exceeding the happiness of earthly comforts).
Others, being more cautious, argue that God’s intellect is exceedingly greater than ours, such that if He has a purpose in evil there’s no reason to suppose we would be aware of it, and that our knowledge of the goods and evils in the world and the interconnections between things and events is extremely limited. Moreover, they remind us that our grasp of the divine nature and purposes is naturally riddled with enormous deficiencies, given the existential gap between divine being and human nature. A few others have chosen to bite the bullet, acknowledging that many of the world’s evils are simply gratuitous, resulting from life in a fallen world. In the latter case all there is to do is lament.
There are many variations on such themes, but in a recent article for Premier Christianity RT Kendall, a popular and influential Christian teacher, pastor, & author, asked the question: is Covid-19 a punishment from God? Well, he more than just asked it. He stated his own position fairly clearly:
“It is my view that America is under judgement…I do believe America has received a double whammy in 2020: coronavirus and violence…Never in my lifetime have I seen anything like it.”
Kendall goes much further and stakes out why he thinks America is under judgment:
“America is under judgement for four things: racism, legalised abortions for any reason, approval of same-sex marriage and theological liberalism in pulpits. God is fed up. He has stepped in.”
These certainly are bold claims (though towards the end of the article he backtracks on them a bit and calls for caution, as we will see). So, what is Kendall’s evidence for them? Nothing. Not a single scrap of evidence is presented for any of it. Nothing for the idea that Covid-19 is part of some divine punishment on America, much less for the notion that this punishment is specifically for the things Kendall claims it is. The best he does is some hand gesturing in the direction of there being biblical examples where God punishes people – and even nations – for some sin or other.
Now, most Christians will certainly agree with Kendall on a number of points. For instance, God reigns supreme over the universe, and there is nothing that happens without His authoring or permitting it to happen. Covid-19 did not take God by surprise. Further, few will dispute Kendall’s assertion that “If we really believe in the God of the Bible, then we must concede he is a God who can bring judgement, and we must not dismiss this option out of hand.” True enough, and Kendall reminds us of several biblical examples of this very thing.
However, that’s just part of the story, and in fact towards the end of his article Kendall retreats somewhat from his earlier (careless?) claims: “it could be dangerous to claim Covid-19 is God’s judgement…Who is truly qualified to say this? Caution is required.” It certainly is, not least of all because there are numerous contrary examples in scripture that Kendall doesn’t mention. The entire book of Job is surely a foil to the whole enterprise of trying to pin suffering on unrighteousness of some sort. Or take the man born blind in John chapter 9. When asked by his disciples, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus responds “Neither this man nor his parents sinned…” Consider also Jesus’ rhetorical question in Luke chapter 13 “Or those 18 who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?”
The idea that Covid-19 is some kind of punishment on America is problematic on a number of fronts. Firstly, Covid-19 has affected most of the globe – not just the apparent centre of the universe that is the good old US of A. It seems odd that God would inflict Covid-19 on the entire world because some churches in the USA have liberals in their pulpits conducting gay weddings. Indeed, the spread of Covid-19 appears fairly random rather than the measured dishing out of perfect justice. If God wished to punish the things Kendall mentions, might it not be better to target abortion doctors, Klan members, homosexuals, and liberal ministers in particular? The idea of indiscriminate punishment doesn’t seem consistent with the character of a perfectly just God. In addition, it seems crucial to the notion of punishment and justice that those on the receiving end know why they are being punished. The lack of such an explanation is what makes us recoil in moral indignation when we hear of prisoners held without knowing what charges are being leveled against them. In some of the biblical examples Kendall alludes to, God communicates his rationale for punishment, either directly or through prophets. People aren’t left to guess or speculate. In the case of Covid-19, God hasn’t communicated anything – unless, perhaps, Kendall is claiming some sort of hotline to heaven?
I doubt he is. So, what is Kendall really doing? Sadly, I suspect he’s doing what far too many Christians throughout history have done in the face of disasters: blamed it on society’s failure to abide by whatever their pet theological/ethical hobby-horses happen to be at the time. So, famine in Africa becomes the result of witchcraft, AIDS is a judgment on homosexuality, hurricanes are due to gay marriage, and Covid-19 becomes the result of “racism, legalised abortions for any reason, approval of same-sex marriage and theological liberalism in pulpits.”
Ironically, Kendall cites Ludwig Feuerbach’s notion that God is just a psychological projection, that people create God in their own image, with that image typically of a kindly being who takes us all to heaven when we die. I wonder, though, if Kendall might be engaging in a smidgen of projection himself: God as sharing his own theological and ethical viewpoints and willing to pour the bowls of wrath onto those who dare think otherwise. Frankly, such manoeuvres are downright abusive. It’s little better than saying “agree with me and do as I want you to do or God – who agrees with me about all this – will cast burning coals on your head!”
To rephrase Kendall, it could be dangerous to claim he’s engaging in psychological projection. Who is truly qualified to say this? Caution is required. But it seems to me there’s at least as much reason to argue that as to accept Kendall’s crass Covid speculations.
Stephen J. Graham
stephenjgraham 
You are too kind to Kendall and his ilk. Every time he stubs his toe, gets a cold or dents a fender he probably imagines God is teaching him some serious theological lesson, perhaps about the dangers of coveting, lust, pride, greed, etc. But more likely he was simply clumsy, came into physical contact with germs, or forgot to look both ways before driving through an intersection. Same with the weather. Certain regions are known for producing and or suffering hurricanes, tornadoes, eruptions, earthquakes, etc. That’s nature. As for viruses, they mutate wildly, and are the most numerous, and one might say most successful, replicators on the planet. Most of them attack bacteria incessantly. We imagine outbreaks are unusual. They are the rule. Always have been. Intermittent outbreaks are expected as nature shakes up another RNA or DNA mutation (some viruses have DNA, not just RNA, and in fact some viruses even invade other far larger viruses) in regular incessantly changing fashion.
Also, Kendall should consider how common and self centered a fallacy it was in all ancient nations, not just Israel, to imagine the world revolved around them and their major deity. Kings and their subjects attributed good fortune in health, harvest or war, to a deity’s blessings laid upon a nation or individual, and attributed plagues, famine, losses of land or goods in war, to a deity’s displeasure.
Per a widely touted modern day example of such thinking, AIDS is the punishment of an omnipotent being for people involved in gay sex. But how come a thin sheet of rubber, or modern antiviral drugs, thwart such an omnipotent being’s punishment?
These people are basically terrified of “methodologically natural” explanations for the majority of events in their lives or in history, because to them the world and details of their individual lives have to be moved by a personal supernatural force that is everywhere. Otherwise, they feel like God isn’t there. Admitting more than 50% of their lives and history itself might simply be due to impersonal natural laws makes God feel distant. Not all Christians feel this need equally intensely, but like I said, it is a fallacious explanation for why things happen going way back to kings, priests, temples, sacrifices, and self centered kingdoms, long before Israel ever became a nation with its own high god—employed as an explanation for whenever things failed or succeeded.
Today we have relatively trustworthy weather forecasts at least a week in advance, thanks to meteorology, weather satellites, allowing us to prepare for major weather disasters, hurricanes, cold snaps, and get to safety, protecting ourselves to a far greater extent than ever before, from such “acts of god.”
Lastly, if one imagines that the current pandemic is God’s personal will, that makes God someone who obviously loves to crap on the poor and those most vulnerable, which is a vomit inducing image of God.
“The Creator always has his eye on the poor. Nine-tenths of the diseases he invented were intended for the poor, and they get them. The well-to-do get only what is leftover. The vast bulk of the afflictions invented by the Creator are specially designed for the persecution of the poor. The poor’s most implacable and unwearying enemy is their Father in Heaven. The poor’s only real friend is their fellow man; he is sorry for them, he pities them, and he shows it by his deeds. He does much to relieve their distresses; and in every case their Father in Heaven gets the credit for it.
“Just so with diseases. If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time. When exasperated men rise up and sweep away an age-long tyranny and set a nation free, the first thing the delighted pulpit does is to advertise it as God’s work, and invite the people to get down on their knees and pour out their thanks to him for it. And the pulpit says with admiring emotion, ‘Let tyrants understand that the Eye that never sleeps is upon them; and let them remember that the Lord our God will not always be patient, but will loose the whirlwinds of his wrath upon them in his appointed day.’”
“They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.”
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
Divine Providence or Mixed Messages?
https://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2015/09/divine-providence-or-mixed-messages.html