The Comeback of the Old Theological Narratives During the Coronavirus Crisis: A Critical Reflection

Martin Luther had no doubt about it: diseases were a punishment from God. In espousing this view, Luther, who was one of the first people to translate the Bible from Greek into another language, stood on firm biblical grounds. For the Semitic people of the biblical world, this causal connection had been self-evident as well. Diseases, plagues, catastrophes were the consequences of the sin that people commit. Ultimately, the intuition that evil is the result of sin is the basis for the adage that adversity causes people to pray: sooner or later, human beings will be confronted with the contingency of their own lives, which, in the Christian perspective, is rooted in the fact that creation has fallen into sin. This is why the idea that adversity causes people to pray is often trotted out in times of crisis even though it has long been empirically disproven.