In fear and trembling he learnt to respect God's justice. As Saul he had been dissolved; he was blinded; the course of his life was broken. Only then did he begin to love God; only then did he know Him as the Creator and Redeemer of men; only then did zeal for God begin to flare up within him. When the destructive holiness of God had become vividly real to him, the mercy of God embraced him in its power. When the relation to God became to him a relation of expectancy, he became one who possessed: he possessed peace and hastened with God. In his weakness and insignificance, God had directed His attention towards him, and had laid upon him the burden of an ever insistent divine employment. Pressed onwards irrevocably by the power of God, he became what he is—the messenger of Him before whom every man is dust and ashes. He is what he is not; he knows what he does not know; he does what he cannot do— / live, yet not I. This is the grace in which Paul stands. Since the message cannot be separated from the man who utters it, and since his exaltation is crossed by humiliation, Paul has nothing to say concerning the peace of God, nothing even concerning his own existence, which is not spoken in a paradox.

— The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth