Karl Barth
Karl Barth
Karl BarthMay 10, 1886 – December 10, 1968) was a Swiss Reformed theologian who is often regarded as the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. Pope Pius XII called him the most important Christian theologian since St. Thomas Aquinas. His influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on April 20, 1962...
NationalitySwiss
ProfessionReligious Author
Date of Birth10 May 1886
CountrySwitzerland
I haven't even read everything I wrote.
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.
The person who knows only his side of the argument knows little of that.
God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.
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.
To be a Christian and to pray are one and the same thing; it is a matter that cannot be left to our caprice. It is a need, a kind of breathing necessary to life.
Jews have God's promise and if we Christians have it, too, then it is only as those chosen with them, as guests in their house, that we are new wood grafted onto their tree.
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.
Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.
Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it.
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.
Sin scorches us most after it comes under the scrutinizing light of God's forgiveness and not before
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.