A little book by Walter Brueggemann, Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Anxiety (Eugene: Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf & Stock, 2020) is a comfort and a challenge, a bracing biblical exploration of some pertinent texts for our time of pandemic. A couple of the chapters are reworked from earlier times (1983, 2001) and a third was first published in The Journal of Preachers in March of this year.
Brueggemann, an emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, comes at this topic “slant-wise”. By that I mean that he writes in a way that is profound, but sometimes unexpected. One is brought up short, to ponder; and one feels that one will need to return to read and reflect again. There is an element of the prophetic in it: the virus is shaking out lives, and we need to heed the “summons” of God and to God, to faith and to turning to the “new thing” that God and our changed circumstances calls us.
The first two chapters, “Reaping the Whirlwind” (Leviticus, Exodus, Job) and “Pestilence...Mercy? Who Knew?” (2 Samuel 24:1-14). consider the interpretive framework for understanding how God is at work in a plague. Is a biblical plague best seen through the lens of a transactional “quid pro quo”, God’s response to human “violators” of God’s covenant? Or is it matter or “purposeful mobilization of negative force in order to effect God’s own intent” ?(14) Or is it an expression of God’s “raw holiness” to act as God, not beholden to human intent. In the end Brueggemann finds none of these fits our current time or situation. Rather, we are left with mystery, but a mystery that pushes us to a deeper examination of our Enlightenment rationality. There is also an opening of the imagination to possibilities brought even with the virus (clear skies in China) and the understanding that the final word is not “pestilence” but “mercy”.
There is a kind of progression in the book, from wrestling with the not wholly satisfactory interpretative frameworks canvassed, through offering the possibility of hope when “the dancing can begin again”, and strategies for dealing with the uncertainties, the shutting down of “joyous celebrations”, the devastation to life and livelihood. Two are offered: “relentless, uncompromising hope”, which is “more than a civic assurance that ‘We will get through this.’ It is rather the conviction that God will not quit until God has arrived at God’s good intention”. And, a witness to “the abiding hesed (tenaciuos solidarity) of God that persists amid pestilence” (32).
An examination of Psalm 77 in a chapter entitled “The ‘Turn’ from Self to God” provides a powerful analysis of the way the psalm moves from self-concern and preoccupation with circumstances affecting the self to an awareness of “Thou” which recontextualizes those circusmstances to an openness to a future in God’s hands.
Along the way, the chapter includes a trenchant critique of our consumer society. The “turn” in the psalm “articulates the awareness that we live by gift and not by grasp. On the other hand, observe that in our society of consumer narcissism, a religion of petty moralistic obedience goes with an economics of satiation. That is, in our secularized version of it, we do not hope for God to satisfy all our desires (Ps. 145:16). But we do expect to have all our desires satisfied, even if by another source. So we are part of a culture that holds together consumer satiation and petty obedience. That tight alliance serves to keep us as the agenda, an excuse for not ceding life beyond self, an inability to transfer attention beyond our needs and appetites.” (52, his emphases).
Brueggemann sees the pandemic as opening possibilities for a “new normal”. Writing in the context of the USA, he is particularly taken with the opportunity to treat “prisoners differently, even releasing some who constitute no threat”, developing a neighbourliness that provides financing to those “who need resources in order to survive”, providing a living wage, and “finding generous provisions for students and their debts.” (58) The question is, of course, whether short-term measures in a time of crisis can be translated into more long-term policies and solutions to entrenched inequalities or social injustices.
Imagination, and a new way of envisaging things, is a strong theme in this book. Another helpful and even moving feature of the book is that each chapter ends with a prayer that puts matters pithily and tellingly. Take, for instance, this one entitled “The Giver of Bread and Fish” (Matthew 7:7-11) concluding the chapter, “Praying Amid the Virus” (I Kings 8:23-53).
We do “thoughts and prayers” easily and glibly: we do "thoughts" without thinking; we do "prayers" without praying. We commit that glib act because it is what we know how to do that with an anemic god, or because we are embarrassed to do more, or because it is convenient and costs us nothing. Now, however, we are driven to unthinkable thoughts, about all that is ending, and all this we have lost, and all that leaves us with a sinking feeling. Now, however, we are driven, some of us, to unutterable prayers. We are driven to such prayer by awareness that our usual reliabilities are gone. We are driven to you, the abiding God when other helpers fail and comforts flee. ..........