The life of Jesus is perfected obedience to the will of the faithful God. Jesus stands among sinners as a sinner; He sets Himself wholly under the judgment under which the world is set; He takes His place where God can be present only in questioning about Him; He takes the form of a slave; He moves to the cross and to death; His greatest achievement is a negative achievement. He is not a genius endowed with manifest or even occult powers; He is not a hero or leader of men; He is neither poet nor thinker:—My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Nevertheless, precisely in this negation, He is the fulfillment of every possibility of human progress, as the Prophets and the Law conceive of progress and evolution, because he sacrifices to the incomparably Greater cause there is no conceivable human possibility of which he did not rid Himself. Herein he is recognized as the Christ; for this reason God hath exalted Him; and consequently He is the light of the Last Things by which all men and things are illuminated.
Barth: The Epistle to the Romans.
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