Prophecy and the Virus

What is the calling of a prophet in times like these? Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann suggests the prophetic ministry has two facets: criticising and energising. When the regime is most stable and prosperous, the prophet’s vocation was to point out the rot within the system, the injustice and oppression, which went on, often in the name of the religion. However, when times were hard, and the nation was in exile, it was prophet’s task to articulate hope, and the sense of the future, to indicate God’s new beginning, his new creation, for the nation.

When the culture zigs, the prophet zags; when society zags, the prophet zigs. But this is more than Christopher Hitchen’s idea of the ‘contrarian’, an intellectual gadfly of the establishment. In presenting an alternative viewpoint, the prophet speaks a word from God, not from his or her own mental resources. For, as Henri Nouwen wrote, the Word of God, is a Word from God, birthed in the silence of the contemplative moment.

A.W. Tozer fulfilled this function when, during the revival of Christianity in the USA after World War Two, he warned against the flabby superficiality, and naïve optimism, which dominated suburban white Christianity in the 1950s. When, however, there is a crisis, the prophet proclaims God’s promise. Jurgen Moltmann did this in his magisterial book, “Theology of Hope”, where he explained how the Bible contains a motivating inspiration for change, even in the face of imperialism, exploitation and war, based however not on human movements, but God’s Word.

To a degree, however, Moltmannn’s book was marked by the radicalism of the 1960s, and although he modified this in his 1972 book, “The Crucified God”, his overall theology is marred by a general liberal, humanistic, faith in progress and human goodness, rather than a confrontation with human and natural evil in all its malevolence. Today, with the Coronavirus, we are facing reality, and as the movie has it, ‘Reality Bites’.

This affects other worldview thinkers, like the leftwingers Slavoj Zizek, Srecko Horvat, Terry Eagleton and David Graeber. They have recently attempted to grapple with the problem of failure, and reconstruct a basis for radical hope, because so many of their political hopes have come to naught, throughout the Twentieth Century. Zizek and Enzo Traverso have written about how the Left always progresses through a series of defeats, and trying to learn the lessons contained in them. This has led, in turn, to a deep ‘melancholia’, even a romantic defeatism among Leftists; so that Scifi writer, China Mieville, has even helped launch a journal, called “Salvage”, to express this deep pessimism among Marxists.

Our basis for hope, however, is certain, founded on the Resurrection of Christ. Rather than a vague projection into the future, we have an event, in ‘space-time reality’, as Francis Schaeffer called it. In the resurrection, the future is retrojected into the past and present, as a firm hope, rather than wishful thinking. Facing the Coronavirus, this gives us a foundation for hope.