HEALTHY FAITH AND THE CORONAVIRUS
CRISIS:
Thriving in the Covid-19 pandemic
Editors Luke Crawley & Kristi Mair
IVP. E-book. £4.99
ISBN 978 1 789 742 596
Healthy Faith is a new multi-author work from IVP which sets out to respond in a holistic fashion to the challenges presented to human beings in general and Christians in particular by the coronavirus crisis.
Some single-topic multi-author books can feel a bit like a bring-and-share lunch: there’s something for everyone, but not quite enough of the right stuff for anyone. Others turn out to be spoiled broth with too many cooks. Healthy Faith manages to avoid both pitfalls. This is perhaps because the common theme is not a medical, philosophical or theological idea over which some of us will stumble, but the social experience of coronavirus.
The unifying motif in the book, which is found in (almost) every chapter is to begin by unpicking the language and landscape of lockdown and to end by pointing to the one who holds the keys to death and Hades (Rev.1:18). Healthy faith needs to do that. The joy of this book’s approach is that it does so holistically. The theological anthropology is spot on – our hearts, minds, wills, imaginations and emotions are all spoken to, although at circa 255 pages the book takes its time in doing so.
The angles of approach vary – you’ll find thoughts on the meaning of being at home, the stresses of isolation as a single person, a married person or a parent (plus tips!), how to think about work and business, a dose of (non-virtual) reality through stories of suffering from the persecuted church, and some psychological help with grieving the losses we are all undergoing, to name but a few. Paul Copan picks up the old chestnut of natural evil (why do things like coronaviruses happen?) and roasts it in a necessary effort to make it more palatable to us. Those hoping for pat answers may struggle to swallow: our vulnerability to evil is a prompt for us to look for outside assistance.
Dusty gems
Many of the authors are conscious of not living only in this particular moment. There is some fine historical sensibility demonstrated. Dusty gems from Bonhoeffer (Dan Strange) and C.S. Lewis (Kristi Mair, Luke Cawley, Paul Copan, et al) are polished up for us in a thoughtful way. This is desperately needed stuff in a generation where the wisdom of history is less valued than ever before. At the other end of the timeline, the parts of John Wyatt’s chapter which look at dying from the inside of a hospital and the practical resources appended at the end are also invaluable.
While not all of the chapters succeed in getting to the third leg of their assignment (the nitty-gritty of what we all do now), there are some beautiful and arresting thoughts expressed here, and then arranged into steps for us to follow. Try this one for size: Jesus taught us that when we pray, we ought to go to our room, shut the door, and pray to our Father (Matt.6:6). ‘We have all been sent to our rooms now,’ fellow Guildfordian Jill Weber points out. Boom – if you’ll forgive a colloquialism. The implication (not drawn out here) is that a largely prayerless generation is being taught to pray. Is it a coincidence, I wonder, that South Korea, where Christians really know how to pray, has apparently suffered far fewer casualties?
One other strength of Healthy Faith is the use of stories. We live in a generation which knows and tries to write its own narrative, so we need to use real people’s stories to connect. There are plenty here. The help given in reading the Psalms personally and turning them into prayer from a number of contributors is also good. If you are in need of some friendly companionship in your spiritual life, this book has something for you.
Like every reviewer, I’m going to have my own hobby horses and be disappointed not to see them ridden. I felt that the book could have made more of some of the cultural inversion going on: salary vs value (parcel delivery drivers are our new heroes), single people being perhaps better equipped to cope with isolation (although that idea too requires some complication). As Clifford Geertz taught us so many years ago, cultural myths of intractability or inversion are lodestones to understanding that culture. Could we perhaps have heard some theology of the digital, or from someone who is in a ‘vulnerable’ category and almost certain to eventually die from this disease? Where is the diagonalisation of virtual vs reality? I know, I want the world on a plate.
It is impossible to be exhaustive in addressing any of the chosen topics in a chapter. If some of the pieces leave us begging for more development of some sharper points, this is likely why. Healthy Faith is therefore best thought of as a series of overlapping beginnings. As I’ve mentioned in a blog post on one of my own pet subjects, the coronavirus crisis at its most basic is an enforced wait. It offers us the opportunity to refocus our thoughts on the shape of our earthly wait, and hence gain some perspective on what’s happening. If you were looking for a starting point for that refocussing, and some practical resources to boot, you could certainly do worse than start with Healthy Faith. Inevitably, like the proverbial potluck, it may not all be to everyone’s taste, but there is no doubting the intention: to nourish us in a time of sickness. For that, authors, we thank you.
