I want to ask why so many godly, theologically serious people got COVID wrong, and I want to ask it without a victory lap. I took some lonely stands in that period that I still believe were right, but that is not the point, and gloating buys no wisdom. Wisdom is purchased with pain, and a man can buy it with someone else’s pain if he is willing to learn from a mistake he watched another person make. I have my own regrets from those years. I underestimated, and still underestimate, how much of human behavior runs on greed. So this is a post-mortem, not a verdict.
Two failures stand out, and both were decades in the making.
The first is that we were never as gospel-centered as we said. Beginning in the early 1990s, the Reformed world took “gospel-centered” as its name, and the instinct was right. But by gospel we mostly meant justification — that Christ bore the wrath our sin deserved and credited us a righteousness we could never earn. That is glorious, and I will preach it until I die. It is also one benefit of a much larger gospel. The first gospel promise in Scripture is not a promise of justification; it is a sentence of judgment on the deceiver — the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head. The most-quoted Old Testament verse in the New is God seating his King until his enemies are made a footstool. A gospel that judges the liar runs through the whole Bible. We had trained a generation to look inward at personal sin and almost never outward at the deceiver, and then a mass deception arrived and found us with no category for it. The category was there the whole time, plainly stated: men in power are frequently not to be trusted, and greed moves people further than a Christian instinctively believes. Governments lie, people are greedy, prepare accordingly. That is biblical anthropology, not cynicism.
The second failure is that we had been trained to be biblicists — to need a proof text. There is always a gap between what Scripture commands and how that command gets carried out in a particular set of circumstances, and the gap has to be filled with something. I argued earlier in this series that when Paul tells the thief to stop stealing and go to work, he says nothing about how to find a job; the command stands over a space that wisdom has to cross. Biblicism refuses to cross it. If Scripture does not name a thing, the biblicist concludes, Scripture has no data on it. The Bible says nothing about a novel coronavirus, so a striking number of serious theologians simply froze, and one I respect said plainly that Scripture gives no clear guidance on COVID. But Scripture speaks at length to government untrustworthiness, to greed, to mass fear, to what a man is and what moves him. What we had lost was the older Protestant and Puritan habit of reasoning from Scripture by good and necessary consequence — the same habit that lets the fifth commandment govern every relation of authority and not only the one between parent and child. When that habit dies, a believer can hold a Bible and still stand helpless in front of a question the Bible never anticipated by name. The same wooden instinct produced wooden readings of Romans 13, all submission and no discernment, and a strange elasticity with the weak-brother passages, which got stretched to cover arguments they were never written to settle.
Put the two failures together and you get the believer the moment exposed: a man who can recite penal substitution but cannot recognize a lie, who can quote “honor the governing authorities” but has no way to weigh whether a particular authority is telling the truth. That is a discipleship failure, and it is the one this series keeps circling. Scripture hands us principles and expects us to reason from them to the case in front of us. A church that only distributes proof texts has not finished the work. It has produced people who are fluent in the verses and lost in the world.
I am not writing this to relitigate masks or shots, and I am not writing it to make anyone feel foolish. I was fooled about things too, and my hope never rested on my own street-smarts. I remain optimistic about Christ’s reign; I think I can see it advancing. But we are nowhere near the point where a Christian can retire his suspicion and stop thinking. The next test will not arrive with a proof text attached either. If the church means to disciple its people for public life, it has to give them back the fuller gospel — the one that judges deceivers — and the lost art of reasoning from God’s word into a situation it never names. Those were the tools missing in 2020. They will be missing again unless we hand them back.