The scandal of particularity

"The Word did not simply become any "flesh," any man humbled and suffering.  It became Jewish flesh.  The Church's whole doctrine of the incarnation and the atonement becomes abstract and valueless and meaningless to the extent that this comes to be regarded as something accidental and incidental.  The New Testament witness to Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, stands on the soil of the Old Testament and cannot be separated from it...The Christian kerygma as it is addressed to the world has this statement about an Israelite at its very heart.  This means nothing more or less than the bringing of the world into the sphere of the divine dealings with the people Israel.  It does not speak generally of the existence of a Son of Man who became man for many (with many in view), but of the fact that the Jesus who has come as the Messiah of Israel has come into the world as the Saviour of the world...His universality is revealed in this particularity." (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1, 166-7)