Why Christianity’s particularity is better than John Lennon's universalism

In the most general terms I understand liberalism to be that impulse deriving from the Enlightenment project to free all people from the chains of their historical particularity in the name of freedom. As an epistemological position liberalism is the attempt to defend a foundationalism in order to free reason from being determined by any particular tradition. Politically liberalism makes the individual the supreme unit of society, thus making the political task the securing of co-operation between arbitrary units of desire.
Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations, 18.

Particularity is under attack from all points. Much of the church has abandoned what they see as narrow sectarianism for the universal message of love and peace. In doing so they have reversed such sayings as “God is love” to produce “Love is God” - a new form of idolatry.

This is also true when in our thinking about God we begin with the philosophical attributes of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence to yield a God who really knows nothing, has no power and inhabits no place, or when we begin by talking about religious need or spirituality. Rather than speaking of the particular God of Israel known in the nameless name YHWH and in the life and death of the man Jesus, we talk instead of a universal God, shorn of the narrowly secular and worshiped by other religions and creator of the physical world.

The universalising of Christianity is a part of the church’s accommodation with modernism that is embarrassed by the historically particular. The product of this movement is universal morality that can be applied to any man in any situation, a God divorced from particular commands found in scripture; the imposition of a theology of creation that ignores the covenant established in the Old Testament and is directed to an explanation of nature.

When the particular is ignored we get religion based on idealism that can only degenerate into nihilism. This can be the only result because ideas are abstracted from the particular events and acts found in scripture and the particular people of the covenant. Whenever we derive universal moral principles from biblical texts we engage in this abstraction. This is particularly apparent in the case of natural theology. The law or Torah is not a legal code to be taken literally as in Islam. The narratives cannot be separated from the Ten Commandments which cannot be separated from the cultic instructions. They all speak to us about the history of Israel with its God in which religion is questioned and found wanting.

The church must face up to the fact that God is to be found in particular and ancient, often obscure texts, not behind or under these texts, but in them. When the prophet says “thus says the Lord” God actually speaks. When the Eucharist is celebrated God is actually present.

Part of our problem is the use of the word God that is shared by most religions. However, Israel did not have a general word for God but particular words, YHWH, the anonymous name that could not he pronounced, El Shaddai the God of the mountain. This seems to us to belong to the primitive mentality that we have long since left behind. However, when we abstract the particular names Israel had for God we produce a generalised deity that rubs shoulders with Allah, that the scientists can associate with creation and nature, and may be included in the constitution or not. Here we have a firm basis for atheism or a superficial religiosity that can only result in nihilism.

The Christian doctrine of incarnation rests on Israel’s understanding of the presence and action of God in history. Indeed, Israel had no other conception of God other than as He commands and acts. It was only in his commands and his acts that He could be understood to be merciful and abiding in steadfast love. The religion of Israel was a religion of the verb, God said, God commanded, God acted, God created. Any attempt to abstract a general idea of God apart from the specific event was unknown.

The quote above from Stanley Hauerwas may be contrasted to the words of “Imagine” by John Lennon.

Imagine

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

This is the modern hymn: no religion, no countries, no tradition, no ethnicity just a bland fug of brotherly love. This is the idealised end of politics, the end of history. The question is: What kind of world are we entering when the particular is replaced by the universal? Are we to enter into a new era that would bring peace and freedom to all as Lennon would have it? This does seem logical because it seems that most of the world’s trouble is caused by difference. It seems enlightened for us to think that all would be well if we were all the same. But what would we then be? The answer that liberalism gives us is that we would all be autonomous individuals capable of making free choices, surely a minimalist and disastrous formulation.

The projected society of absolute freedom sounds like paradise until we ask about the centre from which that individual could make any choice at all. Remember that this centre must not be infected by nasty history or tradition or religious practice; that would mean that it would not be free! So on what basis is the individual to choose? The only basis that is left once the person has been freed to be himself is desire. Natural desire is to be our guiding light in all things. This means that greed, sensuousness, power, vindictiveness and envy are free to have their way with us. In the words of Paul we are to be delivered over to the elemental spirits of the universe so that we live under the law of sin and death.

I can understand why we want to eliminate the particular because the particular is sometimes not so nice. There are particular passages in the Koran that incite believers to kill unbelievers despite the assurance that Islam is a religion of peace. There are also passages in the Old Testament that prescribe all manner of punishments that we find horrific. Poverty in the third world is produced by particular cultural outlooks that enable large-scale corruption because they are built on tribal and family loyalty.

However, the particular may not be overcome by well meaning abstractions such as human rights and freedom and peace. They may only be engaged by other particulars. Native populations were not dissuaded from head hunting and tribal warfare by well meaning liberals talking about freedom and peace but by missionaries who directed them to another particular, Jesus Christ. We are inflamed by this suggestion because the West has been shamed into abandoning its missionary task by anthropologists who regret the disappearance of their subject matter (native culture), by historians who have made much of early heavy handed and arrogant missionary practices and the general academic drive towards secularisation.

Where the gospel has taken hold, we find ordered communities. In the long term it has been the charter of the UN that has proved fanciful because of its emphasis on universal human rights of which Alasdair MacIntyre has quipped “there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns”.

The West has sought to break down international barriers by abandoning its particular religious heritage. As a result it has left itself vulnerable to a spiritual void furnished only with aphorisms about peace and freedom and rights that float free from the particular and find no purchase in the world. It is no wonder radical Islam accuses it of corruption.

The desire for universal peace and justice is admirable but you cannot get there by ignoring the particular such as the United Nations found when their troops were relegated to being observers of genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans while the Allies are now learning the same lesson in Iraq. The insurgents in Iraq do not share our enlightened vision of a world without differentiation: they will fight for their particular position even if that includes the excesses of a strong man. Hussein may be a bastard but he is their bastard.

The danger with universalism is that it seeks to replace real flesh and blood binding tradition with nothing at all. It fails to understand how indelible religion and ethnicity is because it has itself shrugged off such backward ways. This means that we deal with the world in a naïve way expecting freedom and justice to spring forth from whatever we touch. It is a shock to us when our hand is bitten by the very people we try to help.

The only way forward is to relinquish John Lennon’s dream as dangerous fantasy and begin to understand that we meet the world only in the particular and never in the abstract, no matter how high-minded that abstract may be. We must understand that we have been brought to our present place in history, together with all of our scientific and technological and cultural achievements, by a religion that only dealt with the particular - the particular history of an obscure nation, Israel, and the particular life and death of an even more obscure wandering teacher.

Both the Old and New Testaments resolutely reject any universalising or abstracting tendency insisting instead on history, flesh and memory. Indeed this is the genius of the tradition we have abandoned, that it insisted that it deal only with the real and the particular. It does not champion love as the abstract solution to our lives, as again the Beatles would have it. Love must be enfleshed to exist at all and that is always difficult. Our fascination with story, novels and films that accurately portray particular lives has been inherited from the religious tradition from which our culture springs.

The universalist stance is attractive because those who adopt it feel progressive, enlightened, unshackled from the past and free to make a difference. Armed with a few simple values we may take on the world in the name of health and goodness and truth. It seems we may walk the earth like giants. We are the “over man” of Nietzsche, the ones who have overcome themselves and freed themselves from the servitude of religion. But we are also the hollow men of T.S. Elliot, in fact empty beings detached from common human realities. When the church celebrates Eucharist it points to a particular history and it says “here” in this man Jesus God reveals himself. Then it goes on to eat bread and drink wine, the ordinary substances of life, proclaiming as it does so that He is in us and we are in Him. You cannot get more particular, more sectarian than that. The great “I am" sayings of John pressed the claim home. I am the light of the world, the bread of life, the gate for the sheep, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life.

The decision has been made that if we want to work for world peace, if we want to be internationalists, then we cannot hold to such a narrow view. We must embrace all people and all religions and all points of view. However, universalism may only be opened to us after we have embraced the “narrowness” of Israel, the “particularity” of election, the “singularity” of the Name, the limited course of the story of YHWH and his people.