The scandal of the particular: Specific choices God makes

Did you know Starbucks has 87,000 different drink combinations? No wonder my youngest daughter nearly went cuckoo working there many years ago during college.

Whether it’s Starbucks or your nearest paint store (with colors like “Irish Sunrise” that just looks like a dull pink to me) you’ll find choices galore and for good reason: we demand it. That being true, the quickest way to often anger someone is to make a particular choice without their input.

We hate that.

The Cleveland Clinic says we all possess what’s called “psychological reactance,” which is an inner drive to rebel, and it goes especially berserk when we feel a threat to our freedom or think our choices are being limited. The Clinic’s experts say we get annoyed, panicked, or angry when rules or guidelines are put in place even for our own safety.

“No one really likes being told what to do,” says behavioral health therapist Jane Pernotto Ehrman. “Resistance is engrained into our culture and brains from a young age. Everyone has some form of inner rebel that likes to question or do the opposite of what we’re told.”

The dickens you say.

I vaguely remember an ancient Book stating the same thing about us. One of the most colorful ways the Bible describes humanity is, “stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears” (Acts 7:51).

That’s an ugly combination — one that doesn’t sit well with a God who makes specific choices for us and tells us how we ought to behave. Who does He think He is anyway? 

Talk about a threat to democracy

It’s both comical and sad to watch politicians on both sides of the aisle accuse the other of being a threat to democracy. I’ll do you one better: if you want the supreme threat to democracy, look no further than the Creator Himself. Hear what C. S. Lewis has to say on the matter:

“To be quite frank, we do not at all like the idea of a ‘chosen people.’ Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert; some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.”

And that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

How dare God pick some and exclude others and give us only one way to Him. Where’s the “equity” in that?

But Scripture tells us over and over again, “Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases” (Ps.115:3). He chooses the times, places, and people, and we don’t get a say no matter the size of the temper tantrum we throw.

Theologians term the specific choices God makes the “scandal of the particular” (or “particularity”), which is a lesser-known hallmark of Christianity. While ancient philosophers and polytheists were looking for purpose, truth, and morality in general, big-picture concepts, the biblical authors portrayed a singular God who spoke narrow truth and showed the moral pattern of life by coming through a particular people, as a particular man, in a particular time and place.

How scandalous.

Embracing such a thing as a religion labeled one an “atheist” back in the first century because making that kind of exclusive claim was an outrage in a polytheistic world. Could there really be just one God who made the universe who then actually showed up in bodily form in a small Palestinian village at particular point in time to deliver His cosmic work of redemption?

The dickens you say.

In her work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (that won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction), author Annie Dillard describes that kind of scandalous thought this way: “That Christ’s incarnation occurred improbably, ridiculously, at such-and-such a time, into such-and-such a place, is referred to — with great sincerity even among believers — as “the scandal of particularity.” Well, the “scandal of particularity” is the only world that I, in particular, know … We’re all up to our necks in this particular scandal.”

She’s right.

Vague abstractions and cold universals aren’t ever what you and I are “up to our necks in.” We’re concentrated on specifics — the love of a particular person, a particular event, and so on because that’s where meaning is found. The Catholic theologian John Duns Scotus termed this kind of narrow focus on particular things “haecceity” (which means “thisness”) and he aimed it squarely at how God interacts with us.    

The God of the Bible is not some kind of deistic being who created and then turned His back on it all. On the contrary, Scripture tells us constantly that each one of us matters to Him particularly. He gets our “thisness”.

Jesus said God knows us so well that “the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:30). Christ said He “calls his own sheep by name … I know My own and My own know Me” (John 10:3, 14).

Paul tells us that “The Lord knows those who are His” (2 Tim. 2:19), that our exact names are “in the book of life” (Phil. 4:3), and he says that we, through what's called the “golden chain” in Romans, have been specifically chosen for salvation: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified” (Rom. 8:28–30).

God has made all the particular choices about the how, why, when, and who of salvation and “it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy” (Rom. 9:16).

If you think that’s a scandal, well, join the crowd. On my end, I’m going to get back to painting a room in “Irish Sunrise” and will choose to thank God that He selected me for salvation and “rejoice that [our] names are recorded in heaven” (Luke 10:20).