Christianity and the Scandal of its Particularity

Debates about the “fate of theism” in modern culture often proceed as though what is at issue were a generic belief in some amorphous concept of a “higher being,” vulnerable in roughly the same way as other large‑scale metaphysical pictures to the corrosive forces of historical change. 

Yet from a Christian perspective, which aims to be consistent with the self-understanding of Christians from the time of the early church, the real question is quite specific: namely whether it remains credible, and livable, to confess that the eternal God has definitively revealed himself in the concrete history of Jesus of Nazareth, understood as both human and divine, and which includes his sacrificial death in atonement for our sins and Resurrection. 

This profound and existential question cannot be responsibly posed if we oscillate between a naïve ahistoricism on the one hand: which imagines Christian belief untouched by cultural transformations; and a thoroughgoing historicism, on the other hand, which dissolves ‘Christianity’ into a merely descriptive record of evolving religious ideas. 

With this in mind, I have found it highly interesting to reflect in this Easter Season on the work of one of my Yale professors, Gene Outka, that was sparked by a close attention to points made by Soren Kierkegaard. ¹

While Kierkegaard is rightly thought of, usually, as rather remote from the work of such systematic philosophical theologians as Aquinas or Bishop Butler, the fundamental framing that emerges from points he made – with characteristic force – remains compelling. It frames well the contemporary dilemmas we face. 

This to my mind sets the stage very well for key tasks we are called as Christians to address if we are to respond effectively as we are called to do: to the challenge of mission and witness to our wider culture and society. 

Outka highlights the force with which Kierkegaard – surely correctly – insists that Christian faith rests on a determinate core of revelatory content that remains normatively binding across all eras and epochs, and further, that this content is equally accessible to ‘every man, absolutely every man.’ 

From this, it follows that a credible account of Christianity’s modern plausibility must therefore show how a determinately Christological faith can be set out, as not unreasonable, while also being adequate to the core problems of our human condition: namely sin and our consequent alienation from God, which leave us in need of atonement if we are to be redeemed. Such a faith and teaching cannot be reduced to the exigencies of mere contemporary social change. And this last point remains true even though we should indeed recognize that the ideals of a redeemed world can and should be ones we seek to realize as much as possible in this life, in consequence of our faith in the fulness of that reality which lies before us in the life to come in Christ. 

Accordingly, it is indeed plausible to propose two fundamental theses as presuppositions, namely that “Any contemporary assessment of the plausibility of Christianity must reject both a naïve ahistoricism and a thoroughgoing historicism that dissolves ‘Christianity’ into a purely descriptive history of changing religious ideas.”: and that “Talk of the ‘fate of theism’ is finally inadequate; what is at stake in modern culture is the plausibility of a concretely Christian confession, centred on the claim that the eternal God is definitively revealed in the historical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.” 

Then with this said, we may accept nonetheless that, while modernity has altered the conditions within which we live and think, it has not altered the possibilities. In other words, “Modern cultural shifts do alter the conditions under which belief and unbelief are lived and argued, but they do not alter the basic possibilities: the alternatives of faith and offense (or rejection of theism and Christianity) remain as available, and as demanding, for late‑modern persons as for the first generation of Christians.”

All of which brings us to the so-called “scandal of particularity,” which is inherent in Christianity, which is also what to many makes Christianity so bold – owing the implicit claim to uniqueness that is at its heart. In other words, we simply have to accept as one of the consequences of God’s self‑revelation having been made in a determinate time and place that “the concrete form of a universally directed invitation as such, cannot advantage one generation over another.”

All of this means that, as Outka points out (after Kierkegaard), that “Accounts of the ‘decline’ of theism in modernity are finally subordinate to the call to decision and faith: if the core content of revelation remains normatively intact and equally accessible, the ultimate question is not whether modern conditions make faith ‘too hard’ but whether we will resolve for faith rather than offense and rejection of faith in this concrete cultural situation.” 

To this we should add that “The plausibility of Christianity is shown less by its ability to win a neutral cultural consensus and more by the demonstration, in actual communities of practice,” that faith in the man who was also God, namely Jesus Christ, “remains a livable, intelligible, and morally serious possibility under modern conditions.”

If we can see our way to uphold this perspective and proclaim it effectively, then the plausibility of Christianity in late modernity cannot be measured primarily by opinion polls or by the degree to which Christian claims can be translated into the idioms of secular moral discourse. It turns instead on whether the church can still bear credible witness to a definite revelation – centered on the always paradoxical figure (in this life) of the man who was also God, Jesus Christ – the core content of whose revelation to us continues to summon each generation, without advantage or disadvantage, to the same decision of faith or rejection – and consequent transformation of life when we respond. 

Modern cultural conditions seen in this light can and do indeed reshape the contexts in which that choice is made – both thinning some plausibility structures and thickening others as philosophers sometimes say – but they do not introduce a qualitatively new “scandal of particularity.” For Christianity now, beyond the Incarnation itself, remains as much the key challenge and core of faith as it always has been. The presently prevailing external and cultural conditions neither render faith structurally less or more possible than it was for the first disciples of whose witness to the Resurrection itself we have been reading every day since the Joy of Easter itself.

A theology that can show how the concrete, Christological claim of Christianity is compatible with the challenges we presently face will not only have responded to some of the most serious modern objections, but will also have displayed that Christianity remains, here and now, a rationally responsible and morally serious way of inhabiting the world before God which we are called to share with all those whom we must pray may yet believe and accept it.

1.

“Equality and the Fate of Theism in Modern Culture,” in The Journal of Religion, Vol. 67, No. 3