Inspirational Quotes by Karl Barth
“[O]nly where man communicates with man, only in speech, a social act, awakes reason. … It is not until man has reached an advanced stage of culture that he can double himself, so as to play the part of another within himself.”
topics: talking-to-ourselves
“[I]n the history of dogma [w]orld-old usages, laws and institutions continue to drag out their existence long after they have lost their true meaning. … [R]eligious speculation deals with … dogmas torn from the connection in which alone they have any true meaning; … To it God is the first, man the second. Thus it inverts the natural order of things. In reality, the first is man, the second the nature of man made objective, namely God. … Man first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in his own image, and after this God consciously and voluntarily creates man in his own image.”
topics: our-image
“If all men were absolutely alike, … a single man would have achieved the end of the species.”
topics: life-in-diversity
“Faith in the future life is … faith in the truth of the imagination, as faith in God is faith in the truth and infinity of human feeling. … [F]aith in God is only faith in the abstract nature of man, so faith in the heavenly life is only faith in the abstract earthly life.”
“[T]he Christians abolished the distinction between soul and person, species and individual, and therefore placed immediately in self what belongs only to the totality of the species.”
“[W]hile you believe in and construct your supra- and extra-natural God, you believe in and construct nothing else than the supra- and extra-naturalism of your own self.”
topics: ourselves-abstracted
“If … the bread be the real body of God, the partaking of it must produce in me immediate, involuntary sanctifying effects; I need to make no special preparation, to bring with me no holy disposition. If I eat an apple, the apple itself gives rise to the taste of apple. At the utmost I need nothing more than a healthy stomach to perceive that the apple is an apple. … If it is my disposition, my faith, which alone makes the divine body a means of sanctification to me, which transubstantiates the dry bread into pneumatic animal substance, why do I still need an external object? It is I myself who give rise to the effect of the body on me … ; I am acted on by myself. Where is the objective truth and power? … The specific difference of this bread from common natural bread rests therefore only on the difference between the state of mind at the table of the Lord, and the state of mind at any other table. … In the significance attached to to it lies its effect.”
“I extend the horizon of the senses by the imagination; … this conception … exalts me above the limited standpoint of the senses, … affects me agreeably, I posit [it] as a divine reality. … [I]t would be impossible for me to predicate omniscience of an object or being external to myself, if this omniscience were essentially different from my own knowledge, if it were not a mode of perception of my own, if it had nothing in common with my power of cognition. … Imagination does away only with the limit of quantity, not of quality. … [W]e know only some things, a few things, not all.”
“[T]he creation out of nothing is no object of philosophy; … for it cuts away the root of all speculation, presents no grappling point to thought, … a baseless air-built doctrine, originated solely … to give warrant to … egoism, which … expresses nothing but the command to make Nature – not an object of thought, of contemplation, but – an object of utilisation.”
“Real, sensational existence is that which is not dependent on my own mental spontaneity or activity … But God is not seen, is not heard, not perceived by the senses. He does not exist for me, if I do not exist for him; if I do not believe in God, there is no God for me. … Thus he exists only in so far as he is felt, … His existence therefore is a real one, yet at the same time not a real one - a spiritual existence says the theologian. But spiritual existence is only an existence in thought, in feeling, in belief; … he is a sensational existence, to which however all the conditions of sensational existence are wanting: … at once sensational and not sensational[.]”
“It is not I, but religion that worships man, although religion, or rather theology, denies this; it is not I, an insignificant individual, but religion itself that says: God is man, man is God”
“[T]he object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject's own … objective nature.”
“[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.