A 2020 book, and a lengthening outbreak

The notes take up N. T. Wright’s God and the Pandemic, the 2020 volume they read in a Korean edition from Viator. COVID-19, they write, broke out in 2020 and changed many fields. At first people expected it to end in a short time; the period of the disease lengthened, and a pandemic was declared. Cases and deaths kept rising day by day. Korea, known as a model of control, managed the situation comparatively well, they say, yet the state still urged everyone to keep social distancing strictly, because of the risk of cluster infection.

The virus, they add, affected not only bodily health but also individuals, society, and the state. Many countries went through an economic slump, and social life visibly shrank. Beside the visible crisis came an invisible one. Religion, in that situation, could not stand outside the effect.

Cluster infections, prayer, and a competitive church

In what they call “last year,” while a strong state policy of social distancing was underway, successive cluster infections in Christian groups drew public anger. Many believers kept the rules carefully, they write, but the clusters that did occur in churches were hard to excuse. Behind that, the writer sees a pride that a way through the hardship could be found by prayer alone, together with a competitive structure in Korean Christianity.

In a crisis, they write, conspiracy theories tend to run freely, and those around COVID-19 were countless: that everything could be laid on China, the first country of the outbreak, or that the virus was the product of research being done there. Many churchgoers, they add, thought prayer was the only way to break the crisis, and practiced their faith all the more intensely — and the result, in some cases, was cluster infection. Faith became competitive; people were ranked inside the church; and some, wanting to prove the superiority of their faith, took risks in order to gather. If the devout were wrongly led, they might believe that illness would bypass a Christian, or that Satan could not enter a church.

A God who does not settle chaos in a stroke

From the reading, the notes keep a few harder lines. A friend, they record, was not curious about Christian doctrine so much as this: if God is all-knowing and all-powerful, why does he not stay with those who suffer? They also keep a line that God does not do all things for the benefit of those who love him. God, they write, is not a being who looks down on human beings from on high and settles chaos in a single stroke.

They add a verse, 1 Corinthians 16:16, in which Paul mentions people who “work together” with him and with the whole church — a wording they take as a pointer toward people working alongside one another. The notes leave the subject there, before a later table of terms. The same Korean report, written out more fully, sits on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Student notes on N. T. Wright’s God and the Pandemic (2020), read beside the Korean pandemic years.

Last updated 15 November 2026