Particularism

Particularism is Patrick Mason’s signature “third camp” in Restoration — God’s Call To The 21st Century — a position beyond the two camps religious truth-claims usually fall into. Exclusivism “recognizes only one legitimate path to one absolute truth”; relativism (captured by Huston Smith’s image of climbing life’s mountain from any side until the trails converge) “allows for many ways” but negates the real differences between religions. Mason argues each has a fatal flaw: exclusivism breeds contempt or condescending pity toward other faiths, while relativism erases the genuine distinctions that give a tradition its reason to exist.

His alternative: “Just as individuals are blessed with particular spiritual gifts, so too are groups. These gifts are given to particular communities to bless all of God’s children. The differences among the many gifts are intentional and real, and should be not only tolerated but celebrated.” Mason illustrates this with the farm/crops metaphor — God as the owner of a large farm with varied crops, each religious community given stewardship over a particular plot, all of them interdependent. Some crops (faith, hope, love, prayer, service, care for the poor) are planted in the commons at the center, open to all; others are divvied out — evangelicals cultivating grace, Buddhists meditation, Jains nonviolence. He names five crops Latter-day Saints are uniquely assigned to cultivate and share (Restoration scripture, modern prophets, priesthood, the new and everlasting covenant, and a distinctive view of the plan of salvation). The image closes with the body-of-Christ argument: “body parts can’t afford to be exclusivist or relativist — no single part has a fundamentally ‘true’ function while the others are all false, nor can the parts pretend that they all do essentially the same thing.”

Context: “Particularism” is a term used across philosophy and theology of religions for positions that affirm the distinctive, irreducible truth-claims of a specific tradition; Mason adapts it as a named middle path between exclusivism and pluralist relativism.

Where this appears

• Restoration — God’s Call To The 21st Century — Patrick Mason’s book, where particularism (and its farm/crops metaphor) is the core third-way thesis between exclusivism and relativism.