Our future is that we have been saved by [Jesus Christ] in his blood! And the prospect of the present is accordingly God in his love of his enemies, the blood of his Son shed for us sinners; that is our future, our hope. This God is coming, God in the form of this Man, the One who in his death has already suffered, borne and taken away all righteous wrath. In him everything that speaks against us has been refuted. In him all our evil enmity towards God has already been done away with! He has already gone through and got through all the misery, the darkness of death which is the result of that enmity! And moreover: he has done this entirely without us and in spite of us, so that we cannot and need not now ask how it is possible from our side to have peace with God, that we can be reconciled with God in spite of everything we are and do! In him it became true that in spite of ourselves we are reconciled!
—Karl Barth,
A Shorter Commentary on Romans (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1959), 60.
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