Karl Barth Quotes - Page 4

Abortion is 'the great modern sin.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I haven't even read everything I wrote.

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

A free theologian works in communication with other theologians...He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes.

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

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

That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it... accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price... he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway.

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.

Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation.

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

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.

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

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

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