Karl Barth quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Karl Barth

Karl Barth Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Karl Barth on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

The Word ought to be exposed in the words

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

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

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

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

A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought.

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

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

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

God has not the slightest need for our proofs.

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

Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.

Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven't even read everything I wrote.

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

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

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

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

God transcends even the undertakings of evangelical theologians.

Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.

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

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

No act of man can claim to be more than an attempt, not even science.

Evangelical theology is modest theology, because it is determined to be so by its object, that is, by him who is its subject.

Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.

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

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

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

Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are.

We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.

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

Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation,

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

The Church should be the place where a word reverberates right into the world.

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

Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure. I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart.

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

Exactly halfway between exegesis and practical theology stands dogmatics,

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

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

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

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't believe in universalism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the reconciler of all

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

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

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

Theology must have the character of a living procession.

Exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis!

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

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

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Abortion is 'the great modern sin.

The Devil may also make use of morality.

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

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

No one can be saved - in virtue of what he can do. Everyone can be saved - in virtue of what God can do.

The person who knows only his side of the argument knows little of that.

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

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

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

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

God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.

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

Grace and gratitude go together like heaven and earth.

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

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

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

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

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.

I have read many books, but the Bible reads me.

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.

Faith is never identical with piety.

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.

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.

Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.

Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo.

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.