Karl Barth Quotes

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

Faith is not an art. Faith is not an achievement. Faith is not a good work of which some may boast while others can excuse themselves with a shrug of the shoulders for not being capable of it. It is a decisive insight of faith itself that all of us are incapable of faith in ourselves, whether we think of its preparation, beginning, continuation, or completion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened on that day (of Easter) became, was and remained the centre around which everything else moves. For everything lasts its time, but the love of God - which was at work and was expressed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead - lasts forever. Because this event took place, there is no reason to despair, and even when we read the newspaper with all its confusing and frightening news, there is every reason to hope.

Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Gratitude evokes grace like the voice and echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.

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

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

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?

Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church.

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

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

On the basis of the eternal will of God we have to think of EVERY HUMAN BEING, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one to whom Jesus Christ is Brother and God is Father; and we have to deal with him on this assumption. If the other person knows that already, then we have to strengthen him in the knowledge. If he does no know it yet or no longer knows it, our business is to transmit this knowledge to him.

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

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

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.

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

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

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

Thus in this oneness Jesus Christ is the Mediator, the Reconciler, between God and man. Thus He comes forward to MAN on behalf of GOD calling for and awakening faith, love and hope, and to GOD on behalf of MAN, representing man, making satisfaction and interceding. Thus He attests and guarantees to God's free GRACE and at the same time attests and guarantees to God man's free GRATITUDE.

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.

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

One drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things.

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.

The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume, and each is thicker than the previous ones. As they laugh, they say to one another, ‘Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!’—and they laugh about the persons who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

To say revelation is to say, 'the Word became flesh...'

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.

The nativity mystery “conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary”, means, that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus , his “climbing down of God” is: Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary! Here is a human being, the Virgin Mary, and as he comes from God, Jesus comes also from this human being. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God, he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not only similar to us, he is like us.

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.

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.

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

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.

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