Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. - Karl Barth

"In this history of which we have spoken, man is rescued by grace alone by the intervention of God for him. What does this history say to us? It says: "Set your mind not on high things, but condescend to the lowly." Christian ethics repeats to itself and to others this summon to sobriety. Christian ethics is not optimistic. It sees man as he is: gone astray, condemned, and lost. It sees him as a being who can only stumble deeper and deeper into corruption, weighed down with illusions and all sorts of reflections. Christian ethics knows that man lives alone by the fact of God's waiting upon man, God's patience and forgiveness. It knows that man cannot live except by also waiting, having patience, receiving forgiveness, and in turn forgiving others."

He wants in His freedom actually not to be without man but WITH him and in the same freedom not against him but FOR him, and that apart from or even counter to what man deserves. He wants in fact to be man's partner, his almighty and compassionate Saviour. He chooses to give man the benefit of His power, which encompasses not only the high and the distant but also the deep and the near, in order to maintain communion with him in the realm guaranteed by His deity. He determines to love him, to be his God, his Lord, his compassionate Preserver and Saviour to eternal life, and to desire his praise and service.

What expressions we used – in part taken over and in part newly invented! — above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above,’ the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet.