"All Christian living has its origin and existence in one single happening which the Reformation called 'justification by grace alone.'...All this happens with the encounter of Christ with the human soul...But not only 'by grace alone,' also 'by faith alone.' That is what both the Scriptures and the Reformation teach. Not love nor hope, but only faith justifies a life. Faith alone, indeed, sets life upon a new foundation and it is this new foundation alone that justifies it, so that I can live before God. The foundation, however, is the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Without this foundation a life cannot be justified before God...Faith means establishing one’s life upon a foundation outside one’s own self, upon an eternal and holy foundation, which is Christ..."
"We said at the beginning that the act of justification of a sinner is an ultimate or last thing. That was meant in the strongest sense. God’s compassion with a sinner, can and must be heard as God’s last word, or it will not be heard at all. The ultimacy of this word contains a double meaning: qualitatively, by its content, it is ultimate. There is no word of God which goes beyond his word of grace. There is nothing greater than a life justified before God...It is God’s free word, not the consequence of any other than God’s own will, and therefore it is God’s last word and the ultimate reality. It excludes any method of achieving justification in one’s own way." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 'The Last Things and the Things Before the Last,' a chapter in his unfinished work, "Ethics")
