Karl Barth Quotes

“God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality.”

This is paraphrased in "Karl Barth's Conception of God" (1952) http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol2/520102BarthsConceptionOfGod.pdf by Martin Luther King, Jr.: God is the one who stands above our highest and deepest feelings, strivings and intuitions. <br class="br">Dogmatics in Outline (1949) <br class="br">Context: He is the One who stands above us and also above our highest and deepest feelings, strivings, intuitions, above the products, even the most sublime, of the human spirit. God in the highest means first of all … He who is in no way established in us, in no way corresponds to a human disposition and possibility, but who is in every sense established simply in Himself and is real in that way; and who is manifest and made manifest to us men, not because of our seeking and finding, feeling and thinking, but again and again, only through Himself. It is this God in the highest who has turned as such to man, given Himself to man, made Himself knowable to him … God in the highest, in the sense of the Christian Confession, means He who from on high has condescended to us, has come to us, has become ours.<!-- p. 37

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

The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (1939), p. 31

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

“Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.”

Source: Evangelical Theology: An Introduction

“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.”

As quoted in The Harper Book of Quotations (1993) by Robert I. Fitzhenry, p. 223.

Karl Barth Quotes about God

“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.”

Source: The Humanity of God

“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.”

The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)

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

"Witness to an Ancient Truth" (1962)

“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.”

“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.”

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“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.”

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

Karl Barth: Trending quotes

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

The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)
Context: 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. <!-- p. 48

“Man can certainly keep on lying (and he does so); but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel (he does so); but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God.”

“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.”

2:2 
Paraphrased variant: 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.
Quoted in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1998) by James Beasley Simpson.
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)
Context: Man can certainly keep on lying (and he does so); but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel (he does so); but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God. He can certainly flee from God (he does so); but he cannot escape Him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God (he does and is so); but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in His hate. He can certainly give himself to isolation (he does so — he thinks, wills and behaves godlessly, and is godless); but even in his isolation he must demonstrate that which he wishes to controvert — the impossibility of playing the "individual" over against God. He may let go of God, but God does not let go of him.

Karl Barth Quotes

“Eternity is here (in the stable at Bethlehem and on the cross of Calvary) in time.”

The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)
Context: 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.<!-- p. 29

“The name Jesus defines an historical occurence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world . . . as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension.”

The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (1939), p. 78

“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 Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)
Context: The name Jesus defines an historical occurence 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. <!-- p. 29

“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.”

2:2 
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)
Context: 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.

“In Jesus, God really becomes a mystery, makes himself known as the unknown, speaks as the eternally Silent One.”

2:1 
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)
Context: 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.

“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.”

The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)
Context: 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.<!-- p. 73

“The relation between us and God, between this world and His world presses for recognition, but the line of intersection is not self-evident.”

The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)
Context: 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. <!-- p. 29

“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.”

“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.”

Source: The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921), p. 28

“He is the One who stands above us and also above our highest and deepest feelings, strivings, intuitions, above the products, even the most sublime, of the human spirit.”

4:4 
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)
Context: 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.

“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.”

“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.”

"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: "Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life."
Context: "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.

“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.”

The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928)
Context: 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.<!-- p. 312

“He may let go of God, but God does not let go of him.”

“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.”

“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.”

The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928), p. 72

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

Dogmatics in Outline (1949)
Context: 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. <!-- p. 46

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (1939)

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

Source: "Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice" (1911), p. 44

“The Holy Spirit is the coming of the man Jesus, who is the Son of God, to other men who are not this but with whom He still associates* And the witness of the Holy Spirit is the disclosure to these men, and therefore their discovery, of the fact that because they are associated with Him they can be called what they are certainly not called of themselves, and be what they can certainly never become or be of themselves children of God, children of light who in the midst of death are freed from the fear of death because as sinners they are freed from the curse of sin, and as such messengers to all those who, because they do not see the light, are still in darkness, but are not to remain in this darkness.”

1:2
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“The goal of human life is not death but resurrection.”

4:2
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“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.”

"Witness to an Ancient Truth" (1962)

“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.”

The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)

“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…”

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“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.”

1:2
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

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

The Humanity of God (1960), p. 42.

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

1:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“Nothing is more characteristic of the Hegelian system of knowledge than the fact that upon its highest pinnacle, where it becomes knowledge of knowledge, i. e. knowledge knowing of itself, it is impossible for it to have any other content but simply the history of philosophy, the account of its continuing self-exposition, in which all individual developments, coming full circle, can only be stages along the road to the absolute philosophy reached in Hegel himself. But that which knowledge is explicitly upon this topmost pinnacle as the history of philosophy, the philosophy completed in Hegel, it is implicitly all along the line: the knowledge of history and the history of knowledge, the history of truth, the history of God, as Hegel was able to say: the philosophy of History. History here has entered so thoroughly into reason, philosophy has so basically become the philosophy of history, that reason, the object of philosophy itself, has become history utterly and completely, that reason cannot understand itself other than a sits own history, and that, from the opposite point of view, it is in a position to recognize itself at once in all history in some stage of its life-process, and also in its entirety, so far as the study permits us to divine the whole. It is a matter of the production of self-movement of the thought-content in the consciousness of the thinking subject. It is not a matter of reproduction! The Hegelian way of looking is the looking of a spectator only in so far as it is in fact in principle and exclusively theory, thinking consciousness. Granting this premise, and setting aside Kierkegaard’s objection that with it the spectator might by chance have forgotten himself, that is the practical reality of his existence, then for Hegel it is also in order (only too much in order!) that the human subject, whilst looking in this manner, stands by no means apart as if it were not concerned. It is in this looking that the something seen is produced. And the thing seen actually has its reality in the fact that it is produced as the thing seen in the looking of the human subject. Man cannot participate more energetically (within the frame-work of theoretical possibility), he cannot be more forcefully transferred from the floor of the theatre on to the stage than in his theory.”

As quoted in An Introduction to Protestant Theology (1982) by Helmut Gollwitzer, p. 174.

“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 Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl, 1952, 1959 p. 284-285
Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl 1952, 1956

“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.”

The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)

“God Himself is the nearest to hand, as the absolutely simple must be, and at the same time the most distant, as the absolutely simple must also be. God Himself is the irresolvable and at the same time that which fills and embraces everything else. God Himself in His being for Himself is the one being which stands in need of nothing else and at the same time the one being by which every thing else came into being and exists. God Himself is the beginning in which everything begins, with which we must and can always begin with confidence and without need of excuse. And at the same time He is the end in which everything legitimately and necessarily ends, with which we must end with confidence and without need of excuse. God Himself is simple, so simple that in all His glory He can be near to the simplest perception and also laugh at the most profound or acute thinking so simple that He reduces everyone to silence, and then allows and requires everyone boldly to make Him the object of their thought and speech. He is so simple that to think and speak correctly of Him and to live correctly before Him does not in fact require any special human complexities or for that matter any special human simplicities, so that occasionally and according to our need He may permit and require both human complexity and human simplicity, and occasionally they may both be forbidden us…”

4:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

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

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“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.”

As quoted in Quotations from the Wayside (1998) by Brenda Wong, p. 78.

“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.”

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“Man as man can never know God: His wishing, seeking, and striving are all in vain.”

On his Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921).
"Witness to an Ancient Truth" (1962)

“Faith is never identical with "piety" even if it were the purest and finest.”

In "Karl Barth's Conception of God" (1952) http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol2/520102BarthsConceptionOfGod.pdf by Martin Luther King, Jr., King cites this as a statement of Barth's in The Epistle to the Romans, p. 91, but it does not actually appear in the 1933 translation of Edwin Hoskyns. It may be a paraphrase of some of Barth's ideas which were incorrectly cited. <br class="br">Disputed

“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.”

As quoted in The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, Vol. 1 (1968) edited by James M. Robinson

“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.”

The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928)

“The center is not something which is under our control, but something that controls us.”

p, 125
The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928)

“Knowledge of God is obedience to God. Observe that we do not say that knowledge of God may also be obedience, or that of necessity it has obedience attached to it, or that it is followed by obedience. No; knowledge of God as knowledge of faith is in itself and of essential necessity obedience. It is an act of human decision corresponding to the act of divine decision; corresponding to the act of the divine being as the living Lord; corresponding to the act of grace in which faith is grounded and continually grounded again in God. In this act God posits Himself as our object and ourselves as those who know Him. But the fact that He does so means that our knowing God can consist only in our following this act, in ourselves becoming a correspondence of this act, in ourselves and our whole existence and therefore our considering and conceiving becoming the human act corresponding to the divine act. This is obedience, the obedience of faith.”

This has been widely cited to Church Dogmatics, but without citations to volume or chapter, and has not been located in this form in existing translations of that work.
Disputed

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

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

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

As quoted in An Almanac of the Christian Church (1987) by William D. Blake.

“He exists, not only inconceivably as God, but also conceivably as a man; not only above the world, but also in the world, and of the world; not only in a heavenly and invisible, but in an earthly and visible form. He becomes and is, He exists—we cannot avoid this statement; to do so would be the worst kind of Docetism—with objective actuality. Does this mean, then, that He exists as one thing amongst others, and that as such He can be perceived and may be known like other things? Well, we cannot deny that He is a thing like this, and can be perceived and knovra as such, if He was and is a man in the world, with an earthly and visible form. But, of course, a man is not merely a thing or object. As a man among men he is a human Thou, and as such distinct from all mere things.”

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 1935, as quoted in Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1997) by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, p. 437.

“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.”

4:2
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.”

"Witness to an Ancient Truth" (1962)

“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 an 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.”

As quoted in Finding the Magnificent in Lower Mundane : Extraordinary Stories About An Ordinary Place (1994) by Bob Stromberg, p. 69.