the scandal of particularity (theology): the difficulty of regarding a single individual human (Jesus) as being the savior for all humans

Months after we adopted Quinn, I transitioned from full to part-time teaching. Initially, the transition was more brutal than it should’ve been. Whereas I’d once taught a classroom of 75 students in my introduction to literature course, I now faced a classroom (dare I say classroom?) of five students in my night class. I stood transfixed before these five students who sat so close to me that I could literally read the notes they were scribbling in their notebooks and smell the familiar scent of Axe that wafted off of one young man whose eyes grew larger as he thumbed through our 600+ page American Lit anthology. Until then, I realized that the sum total of my teaching experience had been with larger groups. In these classrooms, my eyes would invariably scan a sea of faces, and often enough, I began to regard them as a mass, an abstract whole, a generality. But this? This wasn’t a whole; these were the individual parts, up close and in person. And it was impossible to see these parts as anything but unique and particular.

Today, I teach an audience of two. Working one-on-one with each of my grandchildren has made me acutely aware of how much you can see and understand when your sole focus in on an individual and his or her learning style. No more teaching to the middle. Every lesson, every day is tailored to Gracyn or Griffin’s particular needs and learning styles. As we lean into each other, our heads bent over the same work, this is about as real as it gets.

There’s something truly scandalous about particularity. It narrows our field of vision and closes the gap. It begs to be known more intimately and invades our personal space. If we blink hard, trying to blur the edges and transform it into some shadowy abstraction, it resists. And if we try to cast it out into some nebulous agglomerate, it refuses to be consumed. It remains scandalously particular.

In Chapter 14 of Miracles, Christian author C. S. Lewis writes of such scandal:

To be quite frank, we do not at all like the idea of a “chosen people.” Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.

Lewis understood how scandalous these words were, how many would chafe at what they would see as a painfully narrow view of redemption. Indeed, the whole idea of one Jewish girl and her bethrothed, of one baby–both divine and human–is scandalous. Out of centuries of possibilities, countless people and places, God chose this time, this woman, this man, and this humble place for the birth of his son. The degree of this particularity is outrageous. This is what Hebrew scholar Walter Brueggemann would call the scandal of particularity. [The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, 1984]

As a rule, we don’t do particular very well. My students, like most politicians, preferred to speak and write in sweeping generalizations and abstractions. We’re big scale, grand scheme kind of folk. The world of abstractions can be a world of rainbows and kittens, all irridescence and spun sugar. Too often, we prefer to maintain our distance and look on from afar, for this allows us to turn away if we see something–or someone–that confuses or grieves us. For better, and often for worse, we hide behind our cloaks of generality, so we don’t become overwhelmed.

As tragic and troubling as 2020 has been, it has brought the particular directly into our households. And this isn’t altogether a bad thing. In many ways, it’s a very good thing. The scope of our lives and world seemed to shrink within our own four walls. Though we had access to the world at large through television and media, our immediate worlds were small and relational. The people within our households became our particular worlds. And this was genuinely scandalous in the sense that there were fewer outside distractions, fewer opportunities to generalize, fewer instances in which we could distance ourselves from others in our homes. At times, it was undoubtedly uncomfortable, perhaps even painful. Yet, at other times, it was wondrous and intimate, for we realized that these particulars–those people and shared moments in our own homes–were the very things that mattered most.

Certainly, I can’t speak for God, but I think he revels in this kind of particularity. After all, he gave his son to a particular mother and father, to the very human experience of living and loving and leaving. Lest we generalize and lest we make his love an abstraction, he gave us a baby. What a scandalous particularity.