Karl Barth Quotes

Influential Christian Theologian (10/5/1886 – 10/12/1968).

Man as man can never know God: His wishing, seeking, and striving are all in vain.

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.

The Gospel is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from men.

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.

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.

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

It is evident that the relation to God with which the Bible is concerned does not have its source in the purple depths of the subconscious, and cannot be identical with what the deep-sea psychical research of our day describes in the narrower or broader sense as libido fulfilment.

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.

The Resurrection is the revelation: the disclosing of Jesus as the Christ, the appearing of God, and the apprehending of God in Jesus. The Resurrection is the emergence of the necessity of giving glory to God: the reckoning with what is unknown and unobservable in Jesus, the recognition of Him as Paradox, Victor and Primal History. In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it. And, precisely because it does not touch it, it touches it as its frontier — as the new world.

The goal of human life is not death but resurrection.

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

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.

The name Jesus defines an historical occurence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world . . . as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below.

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.

God is the one who stands above our highest and deepest feelings, strivings and intuitions.

The known plane is God’s creation, fallen out of its union with Him, and therefore the world of the flesh needing redemption, the world of men, and of time, and of things — our world. This known plane is intersected by another plane that is unknown — the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of the final Redemption. The relation between us and God, between this world and His world presses for recognition, but the line of intersection is not self-evident.

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.