God’s revelations are always pointed, concrete, and specific. They come not from a Platonic world of ideas and theories about which we can be right or wrong or observe from a distance. Divine Revelation is not something we measure or critique. It is not an ideology, but a Presence we intuit and meet! It is more Someone than something.

All of this is called the “mystery of incarnation”-enfleshment or embodiment, if you prefer and for Christians it reaches its fullness in the incarnation of God in one ordinary looking man named Jesus. God materialized in human form so we could fall in love with a real person, which is the only way we fall in love at all. Walter Brueggemann called this clear Biblical pattern “the scandal of the particular.” We first get the truth in one specific, ordinary place and moment (like the one man, Jesus), and then we universalize from that to the universal truth (the cosmic Christ). Our Franciscan philosopher John Duns Scotus called this the principle of “thisness” (haecceity or haecceitas in Latin). We can only know in focused moments what is always and everywhere true.

+Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 17.