Is the Coronavirus evil?

Harrell: The coronavirus is part of life in the world that God made

Daniel Harrell the new editor of Christianity Today wrote this disturbing editorial recently, where he argued that the coronavirus isn't evil but actually part of the way God made life. Harrell starts well with a quote from Karl Barth correctly noting that even bacterial illness is part of the Fall. But then he pivots and states that viruses are part of God's original good creation!

"God makes no mistakes, and bacteria and viruses indeed are mirabilis (from the Latin meaning remarkable, or even amazing or wondrous, adjectives frequently used to describe creation) and part of the plan from the start. Death itself is required for organic life to exist."

Harrell goes on to argue that God built viruses into the original creation as part of his plan to allow us freedom. However he buries the lede, it's not just that viruses are necessary part of creation, but part of the catalogue birds, water and atoms that God declares "very good" (Gen 2:31) on the sixth day. It's an editorial so Harrell probably doesn't have time to explain his strange and disturbing theodicy but let me explain a better way of understanding the question of how evil is the coronavirus.

Isham: The coronavirus is a part of the way sin breaks creation

Evil is a moral category - which encapsulates everything on the path to death, life without God.  Adam and Eve actualise this category when they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It did not exist prior to their choice and for reasons which are opaque they choose evil instead of goodness. God then gives them over to this choice which is both an act of mercy and an act of punishment. Time to repent, but also time to see the growing horror, of life without God. This giving-over changes everything.

The entire structure of the Cosmos was altered by sin, this is why God tells Adam, that he'll live under a curse. The ground will produce "thorns and thistles" (3:18) because Adam choose death instead of life, so he'll live out the Serpent's words ("you will not surely die" 3:4) until the abyss consumes them both. God gives Adam and Eve over to the path they have chosen. Therefore the moral category of evil contains both aspects of sin: brokenness and corruption, the outworking of that original offence. You see this theme played out across Scripture and in Reformed theology which describes the gospel as Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration.

Harrell seeks to justify his argument by saying need you bacteria, carnivorous animals and entropy before the Fall otherwise Creation wouldn't function. ("But unless God’s creation defies every characteristic of biological reality, bacteria and viruses are not bitter fruits of the fall" - 3rd paragraph.) However he overlooks/ignores a crucial truth which is also a prominent trope in the world's of CS Lewis & Tolkien, the world has changed and then will change again in the future. When Adam and Eve are banished, the world changes, the diminishing ages in chapter five of Genesis, the radical washing of the flood in Genesis 6 to 8 signal that the almost magical nature of the world in Genesis 1-4 has been lost, that we live in a broken and different world, we live now in the age of sin. 

This way of thinking also helps us make sense of the Resurrection. The disciples eventually recognised Jesus after he rose from the dead, but his body had now been imbued with supernatural powers. Being the Son of God, he could change the universe into purple quarks with a word before or after his resurrection, so the ability to jump through walls is an indicator that while recognisably human his body has been re-made. He's still able to eat fish and carries the scars of death but his body is renewed in a dramatic way. If we belong to Jesus that will happen to us.

Our views compared

Not only does this view make better sense of the Scriptural data than Harrell's view, we are able to correctly view the coronavirus for what it is, evil rather than a some sort of educational process designed by God to make us more enlightened. (Eg "Better to view creation not as something perfect gone awry, but as something begun as very good only not yet finished." 3rd paragraph) The basic plot of Bible and the gospel, is bad news a saviour and then good news. We live at nadir of that story, the coronavirus is a product of Adam's offence against God but Jesus will rescue us from it, either as a survivor or through the agony of death. Harrell's suggested story to explain the goodness of the coronavirus is bizarre, everything good, even things that appear bad and then everything getting better even when it looks worse followed by even better in an up-award trajectory. 

Felix Culpa

This phrase, Latin for 'blessed fall' is sometimes used to describe the beginning of sin and evil in our world. Inadequate Christian theodicies in describing the origin of sin, "slide into felix culpa" by either making evil something outside of God's control (eg so called 'free-will defence') or part of God's grand scheme (eg universal order, Leibniz or Thomas Aquinas). An orthodox theodicy recognises that the solution is in part a mystery, but one around which we know the boundaries (an important distinction). Blocher puts it this way "But we can understand that we cannot understand." While much of a Biblical theodicy is mysterious we do know the shape of our answer: how sin arrived (Adam in Eden) when it was defeated (at the cross) and how it will end (in Hell).

[From pages 283-286 in 'Everlasting Punishment and the Problem of Evil' by Henri Blocher]

The pope gets one third of a Christian theodicy right

Everything is a gift from God: it is only by recognizing this crucial dependence on the Creator that we will find freedom and peace.
— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) February 6, 2013

While the Pope's nascent Calvinism should be applauded, it affirms only one side of Blocher's iron triangle of theodicy. ("God is all-powerful, God is good, Evil is evil.") Benedict ignores the biblical emphasis on God's goodness in contrast to the evilness of evil. Wickedness isn't a gift from God.


“Therefore, hear me, you men of understanding:
far be it from God that he should do wickedness,
and from the Almighty that he should do wrong.
(Job 34:10 ESV)

Common Grace and Theodicy

• Providence: God's activity in the world after creation. (Colossians 1:17)
• Grace: God's saving activity. (Ephesians 2:8)

"Calvin also formulated a doctrine of grace at work in the world at large, and distinguished between the grace of Christ, by which one became and remained a Christian, and a 'general' or 'common' grace to which may be attributed the restraint of gross sin. ... Later Arminian theologians rejected the distinction between common grace and the grace in salvation, seeing only a single divine grace held out to every person. They were, however, unable to dispose of the NT references to predestination and election." (Kearsley, 'Grace', New Dictionary of Theology, 280)

Observations and questions:

1. Can we come up with better nomenclature for "common and special grace"?
2. "Common grace" = God's gracious patience with sin and evil in general and magnifies his loving nature.
3. "Special Grace" still makes we wonder about the place of evil in the lives of those who are elect?

A three-fold theodicy

"Against these three temptations [solution by universal order, solution by autonomous freed and solution by dialectic reasoning], Scripture raises the triple affirmations: that evil is evil, that the Lord is sovereign  and that God is good, his creation also being good with similar kind of goodness." (Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 85)

These three affirmations form a "T" says Blocher, or in my mind they a triangular boundary ▲ surrounding our Biblical theodicy (Which is the classic moral and apologetic problem; "If there is a good God why is there evil in the world?"). The centre of which is an "opaque enigma" (p102), a sad mystery unlike the joyful mysteries of the Trinity or the Incarnation. Blocher goes on to give the following warning: "water down one of the three affirmations, and evil to some extent becomes excusable" (p102). So although a Scriptural theodicy doesn't provide an answer to why evil is present in the world, we are able to affirm, in the light of Blocher's ▲ the following four statements about the presence of evil.

What we able to say about Evil in this world:

1. It is always denounced
2. It tends to non-being
3. It flows from Freedom
4. It enters into the plan of God

But a Scriptural theodicy isn't just about defining the extent of the problem, it's also about finding a solution; answering the next question: "what should we do about evil?"  Blocher writes this:

God battles with evil, and will conquer it.  Or rather, God has battled with it and he has conquered it.  We have kept the supreme consideration to the end: that the other 'T' formed by two small beams of wood on the hill called Golgotha, Skull Hill.  There the darkness of the mystery deepened, from the sixth hour until the ninth, the place from which shines forth the light [✝]. (p103)

The solution is three-fold:

1. The Lord Jesus suffers for my evil 
2. The Crucifixion could only take place within God's control
3. The death of Jesus reveals a pure love, it's basis is the unadulterated goodness of God

For those who are interested in the detail behind my summary I've included the relevant (and annotated!) chapter of Evil and the Cross by Henri Blocher. (Thankfully I fall five pages under the (Australian) 10% limit for research.)
Chapter 4 'Scripture on Evil' by Blocher