Karl Barth Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Karl Barth
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.

Karl Barth
The revelation of God, in which man's fulfilment of the true knowledge of God takes place, is the disposition of God in which He acts towards us as the same triune God that He is in Himself, and in such a way that, although we are men and not God, we receive a share in the truth of His knowledge of Himself. Certainly it is the share which He thinks proper and which is therefore suitable for us. But in this share we have the reality of the true knowledge of Himself.

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

Karl Barth
We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.

Karl Barth
God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality.

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

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

Karl Barth
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.

Karl Barth