The Scandal of Particularity

Why couldn’t God just write it in the sky?

AI promises to know everything and solve every problem. Deep down, we all know it can’t. It won’t. And it will probably create as many problems as it solves.

Will AI replace the church, faith, or religion? No—because a relationship with God isn’t just about knowledge. It includes knowledge, but it can never be reduced to it.

Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “I would believe in God if He would just write it in the sky. Why can’t He do that?”

Why not just give us the password to the “get into heaven” subscription?

There are many ways to respond to that question, but I want to draw on an idea often called the scandal of particularity—a concept articulated by Gerhard Kittel and later developed more broadly by Søren Kierkegaard.

The scandal is this: God chose one moment in time, one body, and one culture to reveal Himself through Jesus.

Why not Southern California in the 2000s—where Jack Johnson could have written a song about Him?

Jesus had to come in a particular place and time for a few reasons:

• Love is always particular. A general sense of love isn’t really love at all. As Paul writes in Galatians 5:6, “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”

• God calls people personally. He doesn’t relate to the world in a vague, generic way. He creates individuals and knows them as such.

• Salvation required a real sacrifice from a real life. Sin is costly, and only a human life could bear the weight of humanity’s sin.

• Our bodies matter. We were made in the image of God. Our future is not escape from the physical, but redemption of it. Jesus’ resurrection is the firstfruits—what is true of Him will one day be true of us. We will reflect both the glory of how God created us and the glory of how He redeemed us.

The good news of Easter is that the promise of the Messiah was fulfilled by God Himself. He is the only one who could fulfill every promise—in one body.

AI may make life more efficient, but it cannot make us more human.

Only the true human can do that.