Disclosed are a method and a control system for applying defined clamping forces in a brake that is electrically operable by an actuator and includes a first friction surface (friction lining) and a second friction surface (brake disc). In the method, a correlation exists between the actuator position and the clamping force, and values of the clamping force as well as of the actuator position are determined. In order to improve the control quality when implementing the method, the nominal value (Fnominal) and the actual value (Fmeas) of the clamping force are filtered in each one low-pass filter (9, 10) of nth order, whose limit frequency is determined from a correlation between the actual value (nactual) of the actuator speed and the filtered value (FnominalFilt) of the clamping force, and that the filtered values (FnominalFilt, FmeasFilt) of the clamping force are transformed by means of a predefined characteristic curve into a nominal value (φnominal) and an actual value (φactual) of the actuator position.