Years ago I remember Ken Myers noting one of J. Gresham Machen’s insights: The Christian faith is a faith open to historical inquiry and critique. That is, unlike a religion like Hinduism, particular events are central to the truth claim of Christianity. This means Christianity rises or falls on the veracity of certain events which Christians claim to have happened in history.
Jesus Took on a Particular Humanity
Perhaps one of the most astounding claims of the Christian faith is that the second person of the Trinity, the Word, the Eternal and Divine Son, assumed a full humanity, such that Jesus of Nazareth can be said to be fully human and fully divine. This—and many other aspects of the faith—appear as “foolish” to many (1 Cor. 1:18). But the incarnation is not just “history” in some vague and general sense. It is the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity in a particular place and at a particular time. It is also the incarnation of the Son of God in a particular kind of person: a man, a Jewish man, of a certain family, of a certain tribe (the tribe of Judah).
These particularities are sprinkled throughout the New Testament. Jesus was “descended from David according to the flesh” (Rom. 1:3); Jesus was raised in a certain city, Nazareth (Luke 1:26), but born in Bethlehem (Luke 2:11, 15; Matt. 2:1); Jesus’s earthly father Joseph was “of the house of David” (Luke 1:27; 2:4); Jesus’s birth is framed against the backdrop census during the reign of Caesar Augustus and Quirinius (Luke 2:1–2).
The One and the Many?
Christians throughout history have often turned to central Christian truths to try and explain difficult challenges. For example, one of the classic problems or challenges in Greek philosophy has been the so-called “problem” of the “One” and the “Many.” Namely, is reality fundamentally one or fundamentally many?
Parmenides (fifth and sixth centuries B.C.) argued that reality is fundamentally one—manyness or particularity is essentially an illusion. Heraclitus (fifth and sixth centuries B.C.) argued that reality is primarily many—reality is primarily “flux” (thus, for Heraclitus, one never stands in the same river twice; the water is always running and never really the same). Certain Christians eventually would argue that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the proper and perfect answer to this apparent conundrum. Reality is both “one” and “many” (or “one” and “three”) simultaneously and all the way down. God is one God in three persons, and we should hold to the truth that reality can be seen as always one and three as well. A thinker like Cornelius Van Til was especially fond of this way of thinking.
Going deeper into this “problem,” we ought think through how a classic and biblical commitment to the incarnation can and should help us in all of our thinking. We face just as many perplexing questions today as the ancient Greeks ever did. Our challenges today seem in some senses to more ideological and more pointed—as if what is truly good and evil are becoming more clear and more distinct over time. To make this case would take a longer essay. But I simply point to an intriguing observation C.S. Lewis makes in That Hideous Strength (book three of his Space Trilogy). There is a conversation between two of the protagonists, Professor and Mrs. Dimble:
“Have you ever noticed,” said Dimble, “that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?” His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them. “I mean this,” said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. “If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family—anything you like—at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.”[1]
1. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, The Space Trilogy (London: Macmillan, 1946), 283.
Particularism Run Amok
Leave that as it may, I take it for granted in this essay that we are living in a predominantly ideological age. One of the marks of our age is a certain intellectual and ideological tendency to view reality exclusively through particularity. For example, this tendency would suggest that only a woman can understand something about being a woman, or that only someone of a particular ethnicity can understand someone of that same ethnicity, etc.
As is often the case once a certain ideology takes root, there are half-truths in such assertions. Most of us would be happy to say that in least some counseling situations, particularly dealing with certain sensitive issues, it might be good for a woman to provide counsel to a woman, and a man to provide counsel to a man (cf. Titus 2:1–8). There are times where we recognize that this is simply wise. But when such a prudential kind of decision is pushed beyond what it can bear, we start to rub against the incarnation itself in its universal and particular implications.
Here is what I mean: Jesus Christ was a of a particular sex (male), of a particular ethnicity (Jewish), of a particular time (the first century), of a particular place (born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, crucified in Jerusalem), and was of a family of a particular modest income level (cf. Luke 2:24 and Lev. 12:8). But while his life—like all our lives—is by necessity marked by certain particularities, he is nonetheless that particular man who bore the sins of the world. He is a particular man who died to eventually form a people “from (ek) every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9; cf. 7:9). Incidentally, but not accidentally, this universal people will be composed of God’s particular elect—those who are brought out of (ek) every nation.
The Incarnation
Thus, we see that if we take the incarnation seriously, we can love and appreciate various particular differences (whether of sex, ethnicity, geographical place of origin, etc.), while keeping them in universal perspective. But we are not really allowed to glibly particularize an issue and say “it is a white thing,” or “it is a black thing,” etc. At least, we cannot say it and really mean it all the way down.
At the heart of the Christian faith is a truth (the incarnation), which affirms both particularity as well as a kind of universality. A very particular person (Jesus Christ) is able to redeem and gather around him universal persons from every tribe, language, people, and nation. When we take seriously central Christian truths, ideological lanes that exclusively particularize to the exclusion of universalizing are closed down to us—no less, by a baby born in a manger who held both particularity and universality in his hands.
