A Few Quotes on the Allness of Salvation

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Every week there are quotes and passages that never make it from my sermon notes into the pulpit. In preparing to preach on Romans 5.12-21, I scrawled these nuggets into my Moleskin. It’s too early to tell if they’ll be left on the cutting room floor, but they’re too good not to share:

“The judge judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days—and so now, no matter how far any soul may venture from God in all the ages, Christ has already gone further out into that far country, has borne all the consequences of anyone’s alienation from God and neighbor, and has eternally opened the way back into the sanctuary of the Presence. In this way, then, the risen Christ truly is himself already the Temple restored, as his words foretold.”

— David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved

“If a man be in Adam, he is an old, fall, imprisoned creature: if he be in Christ, he is a creature, new, reconciled, and redeemed. There he dies, here he enters into life. But these two worlds do not exist side by side, nor do the old and the new man compose two men. For the possibility of the one involves the impossibility of the other, and the impossibility of the one involves the possibility of the other. Regarded from the point of view of the first world, the second ceases to be a second. And from the point of view of the second world, the first ceases to be. The distinction between the two worlds exists therefore only when this world is dissolved by the dissolution whereby it is established. Where the two roads go apart, they also meet. But we cannot stop here: there is no falling from God in Adam, no judgment of death visible to us, except at the point where we are reconciled to God in Christ and assured of life.”

— Karl Barth, Romans

“As a consequence of the righteousness of Christ, there comes a justification of life unto all men and women. Here is the negation of all negation, the death of Death, the rending asunder of all fetters, the clothing of all with their habitation who is Christ. Fo all, Death is swallowed up in victory and mortality is swallowed by life…We can comprehend this only in terms of hope; we stand only at the threshold. Yes! But we do stand there!”

— Karl Barth, Romans

“Grace is not grace if he that receives it is not under judgment. Righteousness is not righteousness if it be not reckoned to the sinner. Life is not life if it be not life from death. And God is not God if he be not the End of men and women.”

— Karl Barth, Romans

“It is the soul, then, and not God that lights hell’s fires.”

— David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved

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