The Postcode of Paradise: Navigating the Scandal of Particularity in a Secular England

​The "Scandal of Particularity" is, at its heart, the great British awkwardness of the Gospel. In a culture that prides itself on playing fair and universal inclusivity, the idea that God would choose one specific human body, in one specific ethnic group, during one specific Roman occupation, feels very un-English. It is the theological equivalent of God jumping the queue.

​For those of us living in England, our intellectual tradition, from the Enlightenment to modern secularism, tends to favor general revelation. We are comfortable with a God who is a vague force or a divine architect who can be deduced through the beauty of the Lake District or the complexities of a DNA strand. But the Scandal of Particularity demands we look away from the horizon and down into the dirt of a specific Roman province.

​The Roman Reality: A God with a Passport

​Historically, this specificity was what made Christianity so mischievous to the Roman authorities. The Romans were the masters of the universal; they built roads that went everywhere and a pantheon that housed everyone. As long as you acknowledged the Emperor as the ultimate universal authority, you could worship whoever you liked, they didn't care.

​The scandal was that Christians claimed a Galilean carpenter was the only way. The historian Tacitus recorded that Christ suffered the extreme penalty under the procurator Pontius Pilate, a man whose existence is confirmed by the "Pilate Stone" discovered in Caesarea in 1961 by Italian archaeologists. For the modern believer, the struggle is accepting that our salvation isn't found in a grand philosophical theory, but in the execution of a man who actually had a Roman death warrant with his name on it. It’s the "thump" of the Word becoming flesh and hitting the ground.

​The Petersonian "Point"

​Jordan Peterson often explores this by discussing the "archetype" versus the "instance." He argues that while the story of the "Dying and Rising God" is a universal archetype found in many cultures, the scandal of Christianity is that it insists the archetype actually happened in time and space. Peterson notes that:

​"The thing that's so cool about the Christ story... is that the myth became real in history. It's the union of the two."

​The struggle for us is that once a myth becomes history, it becomes demanding. If God is just a feeling, I can ignore Him when I’m busy. If God is a specific Person who stood before a specific Roman Governor, then I have to decide what to do with Him. The particularity of Jesus removes our ability to keep God at a safe, spiritual distance.

​The Offense to "Fairness"

​Living in a multicultural, multi-faith Britain, the Scandal of Particularity feels especially sharp. It feels somewhat rude to suggest that the truth is centered on one Person. We would much prefer the "All paths lead to the same mountain" approach of Eastern philosophy. It’s also more polite at a dinner party or social gathering to take this approach.

​But as C.S. Lewis pointed out in Miracles, God’s "particularity" is actually how nature itself works. An egg is fertilized by one specific sperm; a tree grows from one specific seed. C.S. Lewis argued:

​"The selective, or particular, character of the divine operations... is not a late addition to the religion. It is there from the first."

​The struggle to believe is the struggle to accept that God doesn't do things by committee or by a general consensus. He acts with the precision of a surgeon.

​The Comfort of the Particular

​While the scandal is a stumbling block for our pride, it is the only thing that saves us from loneliness. A universal God is a God of man, but a particular God is a God of Me.

​When I walk through a grey, rainy morning, I don’t need a universal prime mover. I need the Jesus who felt the specific weight of a Roman cross, who felt the specific sting of betrayal, and who knows the specific number of hairs on my head. 

The Scandal of Particularity is the only thing that allows God to have a face, and in that face, we finally find someone who recognizes ours.

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