Karl Barth Quotes
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God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality.
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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.
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Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.
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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.
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The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself.
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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.
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Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The goal of human life is not death but resurrection.