standing before God is not so bad? Or should that possibly be true because Goethe[14] and Hölderlin[15] were of that opinion? “You have died,” says the apostle, and he certainly knows: If it is really true that our living and dying are nothing before God, then our thinking is also of no use. Then we could think a thousand times about how much nicer and simpler and more edifying it would be to have a God with whom we could not be lost—but these thousand thoughts would go astray. If it is true that