The Scandal of Particularity

While reading Patrick Henry Reardon’s The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ, I was reminded of the way in which Bill Edgar started off his commendation of the Reformed faith[i]. Commenting on the scandalous particularity of the God-man Christ Jesus, Edgar says:

“The second person of the Trinity became not humanity in general, but a man, a unique person from a unique place. Jesus Christ and his teachings, as William Temple once put it, were a ‘scandal of particularity.’ In S. Mark Heim’s felicitous expression, ‘If God were to be as human as we are, Jesus must have a fingerprint as unique as each one of ours.’ Only from this extraordinary particularity can Jesus then be universal. He did not look down from heaven and proclaim timeless truths with no application to culture. Rather, he became a real human being, a particular Semitic male, at a particular time of history, because such concreteness is the only way to be human. Because Jesus is a particular man, his message is then truly applicable to all of humanity, to women and to men from every tribe and group.

And so, the message has a shape. It has contours. It is particular in order to be universal. Just as God brought about the redemption of every kind of person through the one man, the God-man Jesus Christ, so his revelation, though encapsulated in words from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages, is universal, valid across all boundaries of time and space and culture.”