Some look at all this, and see the death of anything that might be called universal. Everything is particular, everything is from a perspective, everything is relative. (This is what those who warned me were afraid of. If you look at all that’s out there, you might not accept that this Bible is God’s universal truth. You might lose your faith. But we can lose modernity and hold on to faith.)
I think at the very least, we have to be honest enough to admit that even if there are some universal truths, we cannot help but see them and grasp them from our particular perspective. We can’t stand in that universal, blind, unbiased place. We cannot get outside of our specific particularity of time, place, and culture.
For those of us who follow Jesus, this ought to have been clear long ago. Our faith rests in the One who is (as the Athanasian Creed states) “fully God and fully man”. Jesus himself incarnated the universal into a particular time and place.
The Divine walked Roman roads in a first century Middle Eastern desert, and felt the dust caked on his brown toes.
Even the Divine doesn’t stay in a universal, blind, unbiased place. The Godhead incarnates, and takes the side of the vulnerable and the oppressed. There is no blind justice in the gospels or the prophets. Biblical justice, biblical good news, is partial to those who need mercy, and partial to those who need freedom from oppression.
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