266 religious revolution nowand the aft er as a primitive feature of nature rather than as an instance
of general and recurrent regularities.
Th e supernaturalism that our natural understanding can accept
is a super- naturalism, not an anti- naturalism. It freely recognizes
the radical variability of nature and the inclusive reality of time. It
affi rms that there is nothing that does not change, sooner or later. It
acknowledges that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of
in our philosophy.
However, although such a super- naturalism expands the bounds of
our understanding of how nature works, it can never go far enough to
accommodate the supernaturalism required to preserve the sense of
the story of salvation, this side of the halfway house between belief and
disbelief. An unbridgeable cleft remains between the super- naturalism
that may be justifi ed in natural philosophy and the supernaturalism
that allows the creator of the universe and of its regularities to act, sur-
prisingly, within the created world, in dereliction of its evolving regime.
No dialectic between observation and theorizing could ever reconcile
us to such a supernaturalism. Only a tremendous event, possessing the
power to recognize personalities and events that establish new orders of
meaning and of experience, could produce such an eff ect. It is vision
inspired by an encounter that lies at the heart of such epiphanies: com-
ing face to face with a reality or a teaching that is felt to be irresistible.
Th e second scandal of reason is the scandal of particularity. It arises
from the strangeness of the conveyance of a universal message by
par tic u lar individuals at par tic u lar times and in par tic u lar places. Why
did God assign a major role to the Jews in his plan of salvation? Why did
he become incarnate as a Palestinian zealot in a minor province of the
Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus? Why was the meeting of
Judaism with Hellenism in the early history of this religion allowed to
exert an infl uence out of all proportion to the confrontations among
other cultures in other ages? Why did the human embodiment of God
not take place earlier, to the spiritual benefi t of the many dead who
were denied the light, or later, at a time when the message might have
been less likely to be perverted by compromise with Roman imperial
power?
Th e plot is par tic u lar. Th e message is universal. Th e tension between
the particularity of the plot and the universality of the message is com-