Karl Barth Quotes

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

Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.

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.

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

Exactly halfway between exegesis and practical theology stands dogmatics.

Grace and gratitude go together like heaven and earth.

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.

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

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

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

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

Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation.

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.

Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.

Abortion is 'the great modern sin.

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.

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

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

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

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

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.

We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.

Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it.

Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis!

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

Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are.

Mozart's music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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