Faith is not a private way to God; it leads into the people of God and its history.
God bound himself to a history which is now also his and one which we cannot cast off.
Christ remains man in eternity, he conserves his body in eternity. Being man and being body inevitably include however a history and culture, a quite particular history and culture, whether we like it or not. We cannot repeat the event of the incarnation to suit ourselves in the sense of taking away Christ’s flesh and offering him another. Christ remains himself, indeed according to his body. But he draws us to himself.
This means, since the people of God is not a particular cultural entity but rather has been drawn from all peoples, therefore even its first cultural identity, rising from the break, has its place. But not just that. This first identity is necessary to allow the incarnation of Christ, the incarnation of the Logos, to reach its fullness. The tension of the many subjects in the one subject belongs essentially to the uncompleted drama of the incarnation of the Son. This tension is the real inner dynamism of history; it stands to be sure always under the sign of the cross, that is to say, it always has to contend with the counter-stress of close-mindedness and refusal.