When we begin to speak of the revelation of God’s Word, we are confronted with what has often been referred to as the scandal of particularity. We believe in revelation in the abstract, but we find it difficult to accept specific experiences as the revelation of God. We are too aware of the finite nature of any given experience to believe that it contains anything of the eternal. To speak of the church as literally being the Body of Christ, which includes the incarnation of God’s Word, immediately invites skepticism due to the human nature of the church.
This scandal of particularity is very real. The church is a very human body. Perhaps we can understand the problem better when we remember that this same problem faced those who were relating to Jesus. Many who were physically close to Jesus, part of his village when he grew up, had difficulty in recognizing him as the Christ. “Is this not the son of Joseph the carpenter?” they asked. They had trouble reconciling their assumption that God would come to them in some divine manner with the physical person they had seen develop from childhood and who occasionally did or said things that offended them.
The church faces a similar problem in believing that the Word of God could be revealed to them through the very human institution of the church that sometimes offends them. Yet this is precisely the pattern that is presented to us. In contrast to those who have sought to reform the church according to some idealized pattern, we are looking for how God exxpresses Godself through the church as it is.
