In this post I want to think through some of the identity-shattering issues which Covid-19 brings to us as Christians, and suggest some deep seated lessons which we can presently learn that might better prepare us to face our world now, and enjoy heaven later.

These are undoubtedly the strangest of days. We are in a state of upheaval and disruption, and we have no idea when or if normal service might resume. We are living in a cultural pause, an on-air silence which becomes more uncomfortable by the day, an interval which is quickly seeming to be longer than the main show, a fidgeting period of inertia and disquiet, a faltering loss of cultural confidence which is excruciating and disconcerting. Our diaries have been reduced to eraser shavings, our career paths have become bouldered, and our children’s emotional welfare is being buffeted by events which we cannot protect them from. All of our normal is now nominal and ephemeral, a shifting world of worry and what-if which yields few answers. These are days when the capital reserves of hyperbole are terminally depleted.

As Christians, these are also days of great opportunity. There is an obvious sense in which this is the case evangelistically. The pretended sophistication of card carrying existentialists is being exposed as morally and pastorally insufficient, the consumerist bubble is close to bursting, and men and women who are not Christians are asking the kinds of questions normally only reserved for the ICU waiting room or the funeral parlour office. We must, of course, meet that need with a fulsome and candid gospel witness. But there is another opportunity, a learning point for Christians which lies so close to the bone of who we are that the path of greater comfort would be to engage in activism without introspection – yet this is a perspective which might just change our view of ourselves and our world.

In this post I want to think through some of the identity-shattering issues which Covid-19 brings to us as Christians, and suggest some deep seated lessons which we can presently learn that might better prepare us to face our world now, and enjoy heaven later.

The Broken Lordship of Our Little Realms

The past fifteen years have witnessed a gradual human retreat into self-made worlds of our own ordering, the creation of palladiums of consciousness which seemed impenetrable by the outside world. The last five years have watched this intensify to such an extent that the ability of many people to lift their eyes from a screen and engage with a world of contingency and community has been almost destroyed. We have become accustomed to a customised world, we have become realm builders and world shapers who can slide our preference menus in favour of what we want and how we feel, so that reality itself has appeared to be mouldable to our desires and concerns. We have quietly become lords of our own little realms, jealously guarding the fiefdom that big technology companies have conferred on us, exercising autocratic rule on what we consume and what we believe. There is a chance that Covid-19 has altered all of that – if not forever, then at least for now.

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