Karl Barth Quotes

#1. What is offered to man's apprehension in any specific revelation of Christ is the living God himself.

Karl Barth

#2. On observing 1963 America for the first time, the author says that organization and standardization to a certain degree compete with divine providence.

Karl Barth

#3. Humor is the opposite of all self-admiration and self-praise.

Karl Barth

#4. Sin scorches us most after it comes under the scrutinizing light of God's forgiveness and not before

Karl Barth

#5. We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard.

Karl Barth

#6. It is always the case that when the Christian looks back, he is looking at the forgiveness of sins.

Karl Barth

#7. God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.

Karl Barth

#8. The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been lamed and broken an half-blinded by the scandal of life, is as such the existentially godless man.

Karl Barth

#9. No one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself.

Karl Barth

#10. The church speaks finally in that it prays for the world.

Karl Barth

#11. With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live.

Karl Barth

#12. Agape is related to Eros, as Mozart to Beethoven. How could they possibly be confused?

Karl Barth

#13. When the frontier between God and man, the last inexorable barrier and obstacle, is not closed, the barrier between what is normal and what is perverse is opened.

Karl Barth

#14. Mozart's music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it.

Karl Barth

#15. I haven't even read everything I wrote.

Karl Barth

#16. Grace creates liberated laughter. The grace of God ... is beautiful, and it radiates joy and awakens humor.

Karl Barth

#17. When we are at our wits' end for an answer, then the Holy Spirit can give us an answer. But how can He give us an answer when we are still well supplied with all sorts of answers of our own?

Karl Barth

#18. For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.

Karl Barth

#19. Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously.

Karl Barth

#20. As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give glory to God

Karl Barth

#21. Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man; earth is the creation conceivable to him.

Karl Barth

#22. Mozart creates music from a mysterious center, and so knows the limits to the right and the left, above and below. He maintains moderation.

Karl Barth

#23. We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.

Karl Barth

#24. Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.

Karl Barth

#25. 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

#26. Faith is never identical with piety.

Karl Barth

#27. The statement that 'God is dead' comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.

Karl Barth

#28. Impossibility is more possible than everything which we hold to be possible.

Karl Barth

#29. Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is Himself the way

Karl Barth

#30. What God chooses for us children of men is always the best.

Karl Barth

#31. Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.

Karl Barth

#32. Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

Karl Barth

#33. Holy Communion is offered to all, as surely as the living Jesus Christ is for all, as surely as all of us are not divided in him, but belong together as brothers and sisters, all of us poor sinners, all of us rich through his mercy. Amen.

Karl Barth

#34. There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.

Karl Barth

#35. The cry of revolt against such a god [a god which just affirms the world as it is] is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him ...

Karl Barth

#36. In dogmatics our question is: What are we to think and say?

Karl Barth

#37. Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it.

Karl Barth

#38. Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.

Karl Barth

#39. Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.

Karl Barth

#40. The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself.

Karl Barth

#41. It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.

Karl Barth

#42. He [Jesus Christ] is the Master of all as the Servant of all.

Karl Barth

#43. The Spirit bears witness. Ecstasy and enlightenment, inspiration and intuition are not necessary. Happy is the man who is worthy of these; but woe unto us if we wait for such experiences; woe unto us if we do not perceive that these things are of secondary importance.

Karl Barth

#44. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so?

Karl Barth

#45. Jews have God's promise and if we Christians have it, too, then it is only as those chosen with them, as guests in their house, that we are new wood grafted onto their tree.

Karl Barth

#46. If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity

Karl Barth

#47. Exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis!

Karl Barth

#48. Men have never been good, they are not good and they never will be good.

Karl Barth

#49. This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.

Karl Barth

#50. Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.

Karl Barth

#51. Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.

Karl Barth

#52. The resurrection of Jesus was like a boulder crashing into the pool of history.

Karl Barth

#53. 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

#54. We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

Karl Barth

#55. The Devil may also make use of morality.

Karl Barth

#56. Christian worship is the most momentous, most urgent, most glorious action that can take place in human life.

Karl Barth

#57. The author says that theologian operates with windows open to the interest of the world, but also with a skylight that allows full awareness of prayer.

Karl Barth

#58. Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

Karl Barth

#59. The Word ought to be exposed in the words

Karl Barth

#60. Grace and gratitude go together like heaven and earth.

Karl Barth

#61. Creation is grace: a statement at which we should like best to pause in reverence, fear and gratitude. God does not grudge the existence of the reality distinct from Himself; He does not grudge it its own reality, nature and freedom.

Karl Barth

#62. 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

#63. To wish to withstand the Holy Spirit would be the one unforgivable sin.

Karl Barth

#64. Let us hear what the Bible says and what we as Christians are called to hear together: By grace you have been saved.

Karl Barth

#65. Our position is such that we can be rescued from eternal death and translated into life only by total and unceasing substitution, the substitution which God Himself undertakes on our behalf.

Karl Barth

#66. The theologian who labours without joy is not a theologian at all.

Karl Barth

#67. Theology must have the character of a living procession.

Karl Barth

#68. In the Credo the Church bows before that God Whom we did not seek and find - Who rather has sought and found us. Now

Karl Barth

#69. Man can certainly keep on lying ... but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel ... but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God.

Karl Barth

#70. When we speak of our virtues we are competitors, when we confess our sins we become brothers.

Karl Barth

#71. Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.

Karl Barth

#72. The term 'laity' is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.

Karl Barth

#73. In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians.

Karl Barth

#74. All sin has its being and origin in the fact that man wants to be his own judge. And in wanting to be that, and thinking and acting accordingly, he and his whole world is in conflict with God. It is an unreconciled world, and therefore a suffering world, a world given up to destruction.

Karl Barth

#75. I take the Bible far too seriously to take it literally.

Karl Barth

#76. Prayer without study would be empty. Study without prayer would be blind.

Karl Barth

#77. But, even in this concrete relationship to the Son of God become man, this is really something new only in so far as it expresses the revelation of what began to be true with the Incarnation and has never since ceased to be true.

Karl Barth

#78. A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.

Karl Barth

#79. Religion may be a private affair, but the woik and word of God are the reconciliation of the world with God, as it was performed in Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth

#80. Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it.

Karl Barth

#81. To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

Karl Barth

#82. Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.

Karl Barth

#83. There will be no song on our lips if there be no anguish in our hearts.

Karl Barth

#84. Man can certainly flee from God ... but he cannot escape him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God, but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate.

Karl Barth

#85. The Christian Church does not exist in Heaven, but on earth and in time.

Karl Barth

#86. The theologian who labors without joy is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this field.

Karl Barth

#87. Political correctness jeopardizes more than it should the human capacity to speak the truth,

Karl Barth

#88. For if God Himself became man, this man, what else can this mean but that He declared himself guilty of the contradiction against Himself

Karl Barth

#89. To be a Christian and to pray are one and the same thing; it is a matter that cannot be left to our caprice. It is a need, a kind of breathing necessary to life.

Karl Barth

#90. Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.

Karl Barth

#91. When theology recognizes one thing properly, it mis-recognizes something else all the more thoroughly.

Karl Barth

#92. Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation,

Karl Barth

#93. True theology is an actual determination and claiming of man by the acting God.

Karl Barth

#94. Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth

#95. The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths.

Karl Barth

#96. Abortion is 'the great modern sin.

Karl Barth

#97. 'joy' in Phillippians is a defiant 'Nevertheless!' that Paul sets like a full stop against the Philippians' anxiety ...

Karl Barth

#98. 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

#99. In Jesus, God wills to be true God not only in the height but also in the depth - in the depth of human creatureliness, sinfulness and mortality.

Karl Barth

#100. The relation of this God with this man; the relation of this man with this God
this is the only theme of the Bible and of philosophy.

Karl Barth