The church speaks finally in that it prays for the world. - Karl Barth

A ghost world of objective truths and high moral laws will not assemble the church, nor will any of those combinations of things pleasing to God and things pleasing to men, and certainly no no more will any of those dream pictures with which men glorify themselves under the name of God.

The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom. It is grounded in the knowledge of Jesus Christ because He is both the electing God and elected man in One. It is part of the doctrine of God because originally God's election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of Himself. Its function is to bear basic testimony to eternal, free and unchanging grace as the beginning of all the ways and works of God.

Eternity is here (in the stable at Bethlehem and on the cross of Calvary) in time.