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Karl Barth

58 quotes

“For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the lack of passionate resistence to Nazi policies of persecution of Jews, even in the Confessing Church he helped found in opposition to Nazi influences on churches, in a letter written before leaving Germany in 193…
“What expressions we used – in part taken over and in part newly invented! — above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above,’ the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Humanity of God (1960), p. 42.
“Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Barth in Retirement" in TIME magazine, vol. LXXXI, no. 22 (May 31, 1963)
“Faith is never identical with "piety" even if it were the purest and finest.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, Vol. 1 (1968) edited by James M. Robinson
“Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in An Introduction to Protestant Theology (1982) by Helmut Gollwitzer, p. 174.
“Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in An Almanac of the Christian Church (1987) by William D. Blake.
“Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Harper Book of Quotations (1993) by Robert I. Fitzhenry, p. 223.
“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Finding the Magnificent in Lower Mundane : Extraordinary Stories About An Ordinary Place (1994) by Bob Stromberg, p. 69.
“The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Quotations from the Wayside (1998) by Brenda Wong, p. 78.
“Jesus is the movement for social justice, and the movement for social justice is Jesus in the present.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And now to my socialist friends who are here present: I have said that Jesus wanted what you want, that he wanted to help those who are least, that he wanted to establish the kingdom of God upon this earth, that he wanted to abolish self-seeking property, that he wanted to make persons into comrades. Your concerns are in line with the concerns of Jesus. Real socialism is real Christianity in our time.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even a child can see that an industrial enterprise would have neither net profits nor profits in general without the participation of the worker. Why does he receive only a wage from the entrepreneur instead of a share in the profits? There is no other reason other than the fact that the means of production are the private property of the entrepreneur. ... This inequality and dependence is precisely the injustice that we don't want.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In conclusion, a word about your tired expression that there is a difference between theory and praxis. ... Thereby you want to say that praxis should be as unencumbered as possible by theory. Coming from you, this wish is quite intelligible. What you mean by praxis is private profit; what I mean by theory is justice.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Gospel is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from men.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The known plane is God's creation, fallen out of its union with Him, and therefore the world of the flesh needing redemption, the world of men, and of time, and of things — our world. This known plane is intersected by another plane that is unknown — the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of the final Redemption. The relation between us and God, between this world and His world presses for recognition, but the line of intersection is not self-evident.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Resurrection is the revelation: the disclosing of Jesus as the Christ, the appearing of God, and the apprehending of God in Jesus. The Resurrection is the emergence of the necessity of giving glory to God: the reckoning with what is unknown and unobservable in Jesus, the recognition of Him as Paradox, Victor and Primal History. In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it. And, precisely because it does not touch it, it touches it as its frontier — as the new world.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men. It must not be confounded with any high, exalted, force, known or knowable.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know that God is He whom we do not know, and that our ignorance is precisely the problem and the source of our knowledge. The Epistle to the Romans is a revelation of the unknown God; God chooses to come to man, not man to God. Even after the revelation man cannot know God, for he is ever the unknown God. In manifesting himself to man he is farther away than before.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The revelation in Jesus, just because it is the revelation of the righteousness of God is at the same time the strongest conceivable veiling and unknowableness of God. In Jesus, God really becomes a mystery, makes himself known as the unknown, speaks as the eternally Silent One.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone. Piety is the possibility of the removal of the last traces of a firm foundation upon which we can erect a system of thought.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God, the pure limit and pure beginning of all that we are, have, and do, standing over in infinite qualitative difference to man and all that is human, nowhere and never identical with that which we call God, experience, surmise, and pray to as God, the unconditioned Halt as opposed to all human rest, the Yes in our No and the No in our Yes, the first and last and as such unknown, but nowhere and never a magnitude amongst others in the medium known to us, God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer . . . that is the living God.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is evident that the relation to God with which the Bible is concerned does not have its source in the purple depths of the subconscious, and cannot be identical with what the deep-sea psychical research of our day describes in the narrower or broader sense as libido fulfilment.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no way from us to God — not even via negativa not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way — even of this way — would not be God.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our Yes towards life from the very beginning carries within it the Divine No which breaks forth from the antithesis and points away from what now was the thesis to the original and final synthesis. The No is not the last and highest truth, but the call from home which comes in answer to our asking for God in the world.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While it is beyond our comprehension that eternity should meet us in time, yet it is true because in Jesus Christ eternity has become time.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eternity is here (in the stable at Bethlehem and on the cross of Calvary) in time.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When attempts were later made to speak systematically about God and to describe His nature, men became more talkative. They spoke of God's aseity , His being grounded in Himself; they spoke of God's infinity in space and time, and therefore of God's eternity. And men spoke on the other hand of God's holiness and righteousness, mercifulness and patience. We must be clear that whatever we say of God in such human concepts can never be more than an indication of Him; no such concept can really conceive the nature of God. God is inconceivable.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We begin by stating that religion is unbelief. It is a concern, indeed, we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man...”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At bottom, knowledge of God in faith is always this indirect knowledge of God, knowledge of God in His works, and in these particular works in the determining and using of certain creaturely realities to bear witness to the divine objectivity. What distinguishes faith from unbelief, erroneous faith and superstition is that it is content with this indirect knowledge of God.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The revelation of God, in which man's fulfilment of the true knowledge of God takes place, is the disposition of God in which He acts towards us as the same triune God that He is in Himself, and in such a way that, although we are men and not God, we receive a share in the truth of His knowledge of Himself. Certainly it is the share which He thinks proper and which is therefore suitable for us. But in this share we have the reality of the true knowledge of Himself.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He unveils Himself as the One He is by veiling Himself in a form which He Himself is not. He uses this form distinct from Himself, He uses its work and sign, in order to be objective in, with and under this form, and therefore to give Himself to us to be known. Revelation means the giving of signs. We can say quite simply that revelation means sacrament, i.e., the self-witness of God, the representation of His truth, and therefore of the truth in which He knows Himself, in the form of creaturely objectivity and therefore in a form which is adapted to our creaturely knowledge.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever we may think of its character as reality or illusion, this sphere arises and exists in the fact that man depends on himself over against God. But this means that in actual fact God becomes unknowable to him and he makes himself equal to God. For the man who refuses his grace God becomes the substance of the highest that he himself can see, choose, create and be. It is of this that he gives an account in natural theology He must do it, because this is the self-exposition and self-justification of the being of man in this sphere.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are now assuming that we have here the centre and goal of all God's works, and therefore the hidden beginning of them all. We are also assuming that the prominent place occupied by this divine work has something corresponding to it in the essence of God, that the Son forms the centre of the Trinity, and that the essence of the divine being has, so to speak, its locus … in His work, in the name and person of Jesus Christ.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom. It is grounded in the knowledge of Jesus Christ because He is both the electing God and elected man in One. It is part of the doctrine of God because originally God's election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of Himself. Its function is to bear basic testimony to eternal, free and unchanging grace as the beginning of all the ways and works of God.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The saving of anyone is something which is not in the power of man, but only of God. No one can be saved — in virtue of what he can do. Everyone can be saved — in virtue of what God can do. The divine claim takes the form that it puts both the obedient and the disobedient together and compels them to realise this, to recognise their common status in face of the commanding God.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since Jesus Christ is a servant, looking to Him cannot mean looking away from the world, from men, from life, or, as is often said, from oneself. It cannot mean looking away into some distance or height. To look to Him is to see Him at the very centre, to see Him and the history which, accomplished in Him, heals everything and all things, as the mystery, reality, origin and goal of the whole world, all men, all life. To look to Him is to cleave to Him as the One who bears away the sin of the world. It is to be bound and liberated, claimed, consoled, cheered and ruled by Him.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The goal of human life is not death but resurrection.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The enterprise of Adolf Hitler, with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God — a union of two totally different kinds of beings.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921).
“I do not preach universal salvation, what I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the angels praise God in Heaven I am sure they play Bach. However, en famille they play Mozart, and then God the Lord is especially delighted to listen to them.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I come before these men I do not have to explain that we are all sinners. They have committed every sin there is. All I have to tell them is that I, too, am a sinner.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed!" This is the voice of our conscience, telling us of the righteousness of God. And since conscience is the perfect interpreter of life, what it tells us is no question, no riddle, no problem, but a fact — the deepest, innermost, surest fact of life: God is righteous. Our only question is what attitude toward the fact we ought to take. We shall hardly approach the fact with our critical reason. The reason sees the small and the larger but not the large. It sees the preliminary, but not the final, the derived but not the original, the complex but not the simple. It sees what is human but not what is divine. We shall hardly be taught this fact by men.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Righteousness of God" (1916) in The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928) as translated by Douglas Horton; this passage begins with a quote of Isaiah 40:3-5; often quoted alone has been the phrase following it: "Co…
“The name Jesus defines an historical occurrence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world . . . as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source