Inspirational Quotes by Karl Barth
“The Christian Church does not exist in Heaven, but on earth and in time.”
― Karl Barth ,
from Dogmatics in Outline
“Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature – qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.”
topics: recognisingourselves
“[T]o a limited being its limited understanding is not felt to be a limitation; on the contrary, it is perfectly happy and contented with this understanding[.]”
topics: happyandcontented
“[S]o much worth … a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man, his God; the two are identical.”
“[T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.]”
topics: agnosticism , atheism , christianity , consumer-culture , food , nothing-changes , simulacra , theism , twas-ever-thus
“Wherever this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained mastery of faith.”
topics: religiondoesntbelieveinhumankind
“Whatever kind of object … we are at any time conscious of, we are always at the same time conscious of our own nature[.]”
“Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature. … [S]peculations and controversies concerning the personality or impersonality of God are therefore fruitless, idle, uncritical … ; … they in truth speculate only concerning themselves, only in the interest of their own instinct of self-preservation[.]”
topics: not-apart
“[M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.]”
topics: seeing-ourselves
“It is undoubtedly the case (and considerations advanced in the first sub-section have prepared us for this conclusion) that the election does in some sense denote the basis of all the relationships between God and man, between God in His very earliest movement towards man and man in his very earliest determination by this divine movement. it is in the decision in favour of this movement, in God’s self-determination and the resultant determination of man, in the basic relationship which is enclosed and fulfilled within Himself, that God is who He is.”
“Durch das Leid hindurch, nicht am Leid vorbei, geht der Weg zur Freude.”
“I regard anticommunism as a matter of principle an evil even greater than communism itself.”
“[W]e people the other planets, not that we may place there different beings from ourselves, but more beings of our own and similar nature.”
topics: onanotherplanet
“Öteki dünya inancı fantezinin hakikatine duyulan inançtan başka bir şey değildir, tıpkı tanrı inancının, insanın duygu dünyasının hakikatine ve sonsuzluğuna olan inanç olması gibi. Ya da: Tanrı inancının, sadece insanın soyut özüne duyulan inanç olması gibi, öteki dünya inancı da sadece soyut bu dünya inancıdır.”
“The course of religious development … consists … in … that man abstracts more and more from God, and attributes more and more to himself. … That which to a later age or a cultured people is given by nature or reason, is to an earlier age, or to a yet uncultured people, given by God.”
“[H]eaven … is inconceivable, … it can only be thought of by us according to the standard of this world, a standard not applicable to any other. … It is just so with God[:] what he is, or how he exists is inscrutable.”
topics: our-own-creation
“God … has no more significance for religion than a fundamental general principle has for … science[.]”
“[O]mnipotence is nothing else than subjectivity exempting itself from all objective conditions and limitations[.]”
topics: ourselves-projected
“The dogma presents to us two things – God and love. God is love: but what does that mean? ...[I]f I said of an affectionate human being, he is love itself [,] … I must give up the name God, which expressed a special personal being, a subject in distinction from the predicate.”
topics: a-part
“[M]an in religion – in his relation to God – is in relation to his own nature[.]”
topics: humancreation
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Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom critics hold to be among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century.
Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his training in the predominant liberal theology typical of 19th-century Protestantism. Instead he embarked on a new theological path initially called dialectical theology, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth (e.g., God's relationship to humanity embodies both grace and judgment). Other critics have referred to Barth as the father of neo-orthodoxy -- a term emphatically rejected by Barth himself. The most accurate description of his work might be "a theology of the Word." Barth's theological thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his innovative doctrine of election.
Barth tries to recover the Doctrine of the Trinity in theology from its putative loss in liberalism. His argument follows from the idea that God is the object of God's own self-knowledge, and revelation in the Bible means the self-unveiling to humanity of the God who cannot be discovered by humanity simply through its own efforts.