Joseph Young

“In this world men find themselves to be imprisoned. In fact the more profoundly we become aware of the limited character of the possibilities which are open to us here and now, the more clear it is that we are farther from God than we had ever dreamed. Men are their own masters. Their union with God is shattered so completely that they cannot even conceive of its restoration. Their sin is their guilt; their death is their destiny; their world is formless and tumultuous chaos, a chaos of the forces of nature and of the human soul; their life is illusion. This is the situation in which we find ourselves. The question 'Is there then a God?' is therefore entirely relevant and indeed inevitable! But the answer to this question, that is to say, our desire to comprehend the world in its relation to God, must proceed either from the criminal arrogance of religion or from that final apprehension of truth which lies beyond birth and death -- the perception, in other words, which proceeds from God outwards. When the problem is formulated thus, it is evident that, just as genuine coins are open to suspicion so long as false coins are in circulation, so the perception which proceeds outwards from God cannot have free course until the arrogance of religion be done away. Now, it is the Gospel that opens up the possibility of this final perception, and, if this possibility is to be realized, all penultimate perceptions must be withdrawn from circulation. The Gospel speaks of God as He is: it is concerned with Him Himself and with Him only. It speaks of the Creator who shall be our Redeemer and of the Redeemer who is our Creator. It is pregnant with our complete conversion; for it announces the transformation of our creatureliness into freedom. It proclaims the forgiveness of our sins, the victory of life over death, in fact, the restoration of everything that has been lost.”
― Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans

“God's love toward us commends itself in this, that Christ died for us while we were still weak, still sinners, still godless, still enemies. It has therefore not waited for us, but has come to meet us and gone before us.”
― Karl Barth, Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5

“New covenant victory does not begin with doing but with seeing. God's presence is a gift. Therefore, God's nearness is something we perceive, not something we achieve. We overcome when we see that Jesus is in the darkest room in the house, too. The whole house belongs to Him.”
― Doug A. Reed, God is a Gift: Learning to Live in Grace

“I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If, then, anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. Happily, however, if the Christian story is true, that love cannot now end in failure or tragedy. The descent into those depths -- where we seek out and find those who are lost, and find our own salvation in so doing -- is not a lonely act of spiritual heroism, or a futile rebellion of our finite wills against a merciless eternity. For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already an decisively gone down into that abyss for us, to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair; and hence the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone. Thus all shall have their share in -- as Gregory [of Nyssa] says in his great mystical commentary On the Song of Songs -- "the redeemed unity of all, united one with another by their convergence upon the One Good." Only thus will humanity "according the the divine image" come into being, and only thus will God be truly all in all.”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation