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

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.