This contribution offers an exposition of the dialectics of grace in Karl Barth’s Der Römerbrief. What Paul Ricœur identifies as “an apocalyptic tone” in Paul is a fault line in philosophical and theological discourse on modernity which should guide an investigation into the dialectics of time and eternity in Der Römerbrief. The quarrel over the “tone” of philosophy that was invoked in Immanuel Kant and prominently resumed in Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida is applied to the predominantly neo-Kantian orientation of Der Römerbrief as an occasion to re-consider Karl Barth’s diagnosis of the crisis of theology as the crisis of modernity.