Chapter 02, God's Interaction With Israel, The Scandal of Particularity

The Scandal of Particularity

            In the modern era (post-enlightenment timeframe, approximately from the mid 1700’s to the early 1900’s, as exemplified by people like Renee Descartes and Isaac Newton), emphasis was placed on universal truths, the goal being that nobody could deny the foundations of human knowledge and all would agree on every point of dispute.  Since the collapse of that ideology, the emphasis has been placed on the various communities in which knowledge arises, where the community that produces the knowledge is inseparable from the knowledge it produces.  For example, certain tribes of Eskimos have over forty distinct words for snow.  However, those who do not live in a community that shares in this intense experience of snow for long periods of time are not able to distinguish between more than a few different kinds of snow.  This work of theology prioritizes the revelation God has made of God’s self within the context of Israel over all other alleged revelation.  This prioritization of the Old Testament, the acknowledgement that the incarnation of God occurred in the nation of Israel, that when God became a man, he became a Jewish man, and the message taken from that revelation of God to the rest of the world is an offensive thing, often called the scandal of particularity.

            In the modern era, this was offensive because it was perceived to give the Judeo-Christian tradition a privileged status for knowing and understanding the being and work of God.  Within a context that emphasized universal truths and the universal appropriation of those truths through the use of reason alone, this is offensive because it asserts that we can only understand God’s revelation from the Jewish point of view.  It claims that reason alone is not sufficient if it is developed within a foreign framework that is not commensurate with God’s interaction with Israel.  It dares to proclaim that human ways of thinking cannot be put to the service of the gospel until they have been utterly transformed by God’s revelation.

            Now that our culture is moving to a post-modern context, the claim that absolute truth can only be found within the Judeo-Christian tradition has lost none of its offensiveness.  With the turn to localized truth, the belief has arisen that there is either no such thing as universal truths (Truth with a capital “T”) or that, if there is such a universal truth, we have no access to it because all the truth humans can know is of a local character and influenced by the community of the knower in a profound way.  Though post-modernity affirms the value of a particular community as essential to obtaining certain kinds of knowledge, it refuses to believe the Judeo-Christian claim that a particular community (the Jews) might have privileged access to absolute truth so that everyone must participate in that community, in one way or another, to join in that access.

            As a side note, the fact that the community in which individuals find themselves plays a major role in what those individuals can know is support for the need of the one seeking to know God to be participating within a community of faithful people.  One can only understand God and speak about God if they are participating in the worshipping life of the church.  This is why, as Karl Barth has pointed out, any authentic Christian Dogmatics (theology) must be a Church Dogmatics.