It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.

But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.

If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.

If one does away with the fact of the Resurrection, one also does away with the Cross, for both stand and fall together, and one would then have to find a new center for the whole message of the gospel.

Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable. But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrows, an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.

In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.