“God’s revealing is simultaneously an unveiling and a veiling. God conceals Godself under the opposite of what both religion and reason imagine God to be, namely the Almighty, the majestic transcendent, the absolutely other. In one sense, to be sure, we may say on Luther’s behalf that God really is other – even “wholly other”, to use Rudolf Otto’s well-known term. But God’s otherness, for Luther, is not to be found in God’s absolute distance from us but in God’s willed and costly proximity to us. In simpler language (which, however, is the most profound language of all), God is other than we because God loves – and loves, as Anders Nygren, insisted, without ulterior motive, spontaneously.”

– Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context, 20-21