Christian Particularity

 Nineteenth Wednesday after Pentecost

One of the things secular humanists (and many mainline Christians) find so difficult about Christianity is its particularity. The God created or spontaneously combusted universe is incredibly vast and getting bigger every millisecond. The idea of one particular person sent by God to one particular part of one particular planet at one particular time in our universe's 14.8 billion year history for the salvation of one particular species on that one particular planet is just too small for them to grasp. 

It was much easier before 1923. The universe was much smaller in our understanding then. In 1923 the astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the Andromeda nebula wasn't a nebula at all. It was another galaxy. Previously we thought our galaxy, the Milky Way,  was the universe. Now we are aware that our galaxy is but one of millions stretching far beyond what the telescope named for Hubble can see.

Here's some quick travel notes. We have great accelerated our rocket travel speeds over the last decade. We're now up to 50,000 mph on our latest interplanetary probes. A light year is 6 trillion miles (6,000,000,000,000). The nearest star to us (other than the sun) is Alpha Centuri, 4.2 light years away. Somebody can work out the math for me, but to the best of my recollection at our current top rocket speed rate it would take us about 23,000 years to get to Alpha Centuri. The closest galaxy other than our own is Andromeda, which is 750,000 light years away. On a clear night you can faintly see it with the naked eye. The faint light you see is the light of 750,000 years ago. Andromeda may have changed a lot by now. And of course Andromeda is our nearest neighbor galaxy. We have now seen galaxies 18,000 times farther away than Andromeda. I have no faith in alien sightings and flying saucers. It would simply take them too long to get here.

 We have discovered well over 1,000 exoplanets in the last few years, that number going up rapidly. Some have conditions conducive to the formation of life. Astronomers think there are millions of such planets with life, some of which have life similar to or identical with their own. A question not that uncommonly asked, sometimes ironically, sometimes seriously, is "Did Jesus save them?" or "Did God send other Jesuses to save them on their own planets?"

My best guess is that God may have God's own very different plans for each of those exospecies. God is creator of all and is ultimately in control of it all, the universe and so much more. God in God's own particularity sent Jesus for us. I trust God to have done as well with all the rest of the universe.

Faithfully,

Christian