(We have to continue to witness to) the fact that God’s grace is as wide and as inclusive as man’s need, that the kingdom of heaven is given to the poor, to the beggars who bring nothing but their need to God, the fact that the Christ of God has come to call sinners and not the righteous to repentance, that the Son of God is revealed by the Father to the simple and not to the wise, that the grace of God comes to man in spontaneous, universal fullness; and, as the obverse of this, there is the brusque exclusiveness of the Gospel over against all earthly-human claims, conditions, and magnitudes, the fact that the grace of God which will refuse no petition will annihilate every demand of man; the fact that those who will not justify God and bow before Him when He calls their sin sin and offers them salvation on terms of forgiveness purely are setting aside the counsel of God for themselves.
Martin Franzmann
