The scandal of Christianity is that our claim to universal truths is grounded in particular realities. This is, of course, a reality lived out by the Church. We are RomanCatholics. We are Roman in the sense that we define ourselves as Catholic by being in communion with the Church of Rome, the ancient center of an empire that died out more than a millennium ago and now lives on as a great city, but only one among numerous—ranking a distant 92nd place in terms of population size. Talk about being particular. Of course, we are also still catholic, which is taken from the Greek word foruniversal.
And nowhere is this scandal of particularity more acute than in the person of Jesus Christ. It is, after all, the scandal of the Incarnation—the historical reality that the Second Person of the triune God assumed a fully human nature while retaining the fullness of divinity
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