Our Faith is particular, not universal

If there's anything Christianity is not, it is a polite, aesthetic, socially acceptable religion designed to make people feel good about themselves. Theologians sometimes refer to the "scandal of particularity," the fact that God selected one people (Israel), and not another; sent His Son at one time (during the ancient Roman Empire) and not another; and devised one way of salvation (through Christ alone) and not another. This particularity stood in sharp contrast to the universality with which the surrounding culture was obsessed. Many of the ancient Greek philosophers, for example, were occupied with the "universal," the generalized meaning of virtue, justice, truth, beauty, and so on. Plato posited an idealized world transcending the present, imperfect, mutable world. To him, the real world is not in the particulars of history but in the universal of eternity. The Christian Faith turned this idea on its head. The reality is what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ — most importantly His death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and reign. The particulars of history, not the universals of eternity, are what mattered.

This particularity scandalized the ancient world. God determined that His Son Jesus would die on a Cross, the most ignominious death to the highly respectable, tradition-maintaining Jews of the day. God raised Him from the dead, thereby hurling a nasty affront at the urbane thought of the time, which considered the body a corrupt, temporary shell from which man's soul would be released at death to return to the pleasantries of another world, unencumbered by the present one. The blood of the Cross and the body of the resurrection stand at the heart of the scandal of our Faith.

Since almost its inception, the Church has suffered from those who wanted to tone down or eliminate the scandal at Christianity's very heart. Paul reprimanded those who wanted to turn Christianity into a racialized moral code - Jews or proselytes who transformed the Faith into a merit-based covenant of works (this is a theme of Galatians).

In the patristic church, a number of the Fathers — particularly in the Greek Church (Clement is a good example) — formed an apologetic that compromised the raw, Biblical Faith with the aesthetic Greek philosophy to which their target audience was committed. These Greek Fathers turned the Faith into a partly "rational" affair, rendering it acceptable to virtually all intelligent people of good will, who could adopt Jesus and preserve their autonomy, too.

Friedrich Schleiermacher launched Protestant liberalism in the 19th century by re-tooling the Faith so as to make it attractive to its "cultured despisers." Doctrine and dogma are divisive, of course, so Schleiermacher interpreted Christianity as essentially the universal "feeling of dependence." He attempted to transform Christianity from a scandalized particular Faith into a reasonable universal Faith.

Today, we live in the wake of these and similar compromises. Many churches are packaged as products in the religious free market designed to appeal to hard-to-win consumers for whom similar churches compete - supply is up, demand is down. "Open Theism" is, at a significant point, an evangelical version of process philosophy, a reduction of God and man to a single causal continuum — neither God nor man is sovereign, but both live in reciprocity with each other. This theory, severely defective though it may be, comports comfortably with contemporary man's lust for autonomy and aversion to authority.

Even the "liturgical renewal" among the evangelicals sometimes bears marks of cultural compromise in the attempt to render the Faith respectable. The symbolic warmth of the sacraments shoves aside the logocentric specificity of Biblical preaching.

Of course, the Faith is scandalous. In fact, it is absurd. We Christians follow a Man who walked the earth and claimed to be God and died an ignominious death and rose from the dead and promised to return. And this whole incredible story is predicated on the validity of an ancient text that claims to be God-inspired! Yes, absurd — to the natural, God-rejecting mind (1 Cor. 2:14). It tells of a Man who claimed to be the way, the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6). What arrogance! — unless it's true.

The ethics of the sacred Book authenticated by Jesus are scandalous. Don't retaliate against your enemy. Love those that hate you. Resist fornication, adultery and homosexuality like the plague. Demand a civil magistrate that submits to God's law. Turn you life over to Another.

When we preach Christ and Him crucified; when we declare the reality of Christ's bodily resurrection; when we demand submission to the absolute Lordship of the risen, reigning Christ, we are communicating scandalous truth, an offensive Truth calculated to convict respectable, self-satisfied sinners alienated from God. When we tone down the scandal, when we are embarrassed by it, when we become convinced that the most effective way to "transition" sinners into the Faith is to make them feel good about themselves, we tread the verge of adopting another religion altogether.

"What arrogance! — unless it's true."

What will be your disposition when you found out it's true? I understand it's a hard belief to grasp, but the one's who have followed in great faith the way of Christ's salvation have provided proof. I know it's hard to believe in any Saint like people, especially in our times. Christ and his Apostles our long in the forgotten past it would seem, but one just needs to look a little harder. I would highly recommend reading on a man by the name of Padre Pio, and Sr. Briege McKenna. Both people of our times.

God Bless, Truth

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