Jesus is the movement for social justice, and the movement for social justice is Jesus in the present. - Karl Barth

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.

Religion possesses no solution of the problem of life; rather it makes of the problem a wholly insoluble enigma. Religion neither discovers the problem nor solves it: what it does is to disclose the truth that it cannot be solved.

"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."