It is true that free people will also strive for independence, as far as that makes sense. But free people are not compelled to want independence by every external compulsion. They can also find all kinds of undesired discipline to be acceptable and pleasing.
We are now assuming that we have here the centre and goal of all God's works, and therefore the hidden beginning of them all. We are also assuming that the prominent place occupied by this divine work has something corresponding to it in the essence of God, that the Son forms the centre of the Trinity, and that the essence of the divine being has, so to speak, its locus... in His work, in the name and person of Jesus Christ.
The statement that "God is dead" comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.
God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality.
God, the pure limit and pure beginning of all that we are, have, and do, standing over in infinite qualitative difference to man and all that is human, nowhere and never identical with that which we call God, experience, surmise, and pray to as God, the unconditioned Halt as opposed to all human rest, the Yes in our No and the No in our Yes, the first and last and as such unknown, but nowhere and never a magnitude amongst others in the medium known to us, God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer ... that is the living God.
I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God — a union of two totally different kinds of beings.
The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise.
What happened on that day (of Easter) became, was and remained the centre around which everything else moves. For everything lasts its time, but the love of God, which was at work and was expressed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, lasts forever. Because this event took place, there is no reason to despair, and even when we read the newspaper with all its confusing and frightening news, there is every reason to hope.
Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way.
What should we do, then so that the nations will really want peace? First of all, we should not have so much fear – namely about the evil intentions of others.