Inspirational Quotes by Karl Barth
“The Jewish people trusted themself to do nothing except that what was commanded by God; they were without will even in external things; the authority of religion extended itself even to their food. The Christian religion, on the other hand, in all external things made humankind dependent on itself, i.e. placed in it what Judaism placed out of itself. … Thus do things change. What yesterday was still religion is no longer such to-day; and what to-day is atheism, to-morrow will be religion.”
topics: atheism
“Existence is one with self-consciousness; existence with self-consciousness is existence simply. If I do not know that I exist, it is all one whether I exist or not.”
“[H]eavenly personality, or the perpetuation of human personality in heaven is nothing else than personality released from all earthly encumbrances and limitations[.] [H]ere we are men, there gods[.]”
“[T]he Christians of former days … rejected the real life of the family, the intimate bond of love which is naturally moral as … undivine, unheavenly, … [I]n compensation they had a Father and Son in God, who embraced each other with heartfelt love, with that intense love which natural relationship alone inspires. … [H]ere the satisfaction of those profoundest human wants which, in reality, in life, they denied, became to them an object of contemplation in God.”
topics: sacrificing-life
“The essential act of religion … is prayer. Prayer is all-powerful. … God is to [the pious soul] … the immediate, efficient cause of all natural effects. … He has recourse to prayer in the certainty that he can do more, infinitely more, by prayer, than by all the efforts of reason and all the agencies of Nature, - in the conviction that prayer possesses superhuman and supernatural powers. … [A]n immediate act of God is a miracle; hence miracle is essential to the religious view. … [I]n miracle man subjugates Nature … to his own ends[.] … [I]n miracle all things are at the service of necessitous man.”
“The belief in the immortality of man is the belief in the divinity of man[.]”
topics: self-worship
“[A] being to whom his own species … is an object of thought can [also] make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought. Hence … man [has] a twofold life: … an inner and outer life. … Man thinks – that is, he converses with himself. Man is himself at once I and thou; he can put himself in place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality is an object of thought.”
“If thy predicates are anthropomorphisms, the subject is an anthropomorphism too.”
topics: humanitythecreator
“Faith discriminates thus: This is true, that is false. And it claims truth to itself alone. Faith has for its object a definite, specific truth … One thing alone is truth, … God … ; all other gods are vain idols.”
“Everything that exists has value, is a being of distinction … [H]ence it asserts, maintains itself.”
“Faith in Providence is faith in one's own worth, … [H]ence also false humility, religious arrogance, which, it is true, does not rely on itself, but only because it commits the care of itself to the blessed God. God … wills that I shall be blest; but that is my will also: … God's love for me [is] nothing else than my own self-love deified.”
topics: self-love
“[F]aith separates God from man, consequently it separates man from man, for God is nothing else than the idea of the species invested with a mystical form, - the separation of God from man is therefore the separation of man from man, the unloosening of the social bond. … Faith isolates God, it makes him a particular, distinct being: love universalises; it makes God a common being, the love of whom is one with the love of man. Faith produces in man an inward disunion, a disunion with himself, and by consequence an outward disunion also; … Faith makes belief in its God a law: love is freedom, - it condemns not even the atheist, because it is itself atheistic[.]”
“In the perception of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; … in religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. … The object of the sense is … indifferent … ; … the object of religion is a selected object; … it essentially presupposes a critical judgement, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy.”
topics: discriminationorillumination
“The notion that the fulfilment of prayer has been determined from eternity, that it was originally included in the plan of creation, is the empty, absurd fiction of a mechanical mode of thought, which is in absolute contradiction with the nature of religion. Whether God decides on the fulfilment of my prayer now, on the immediate occasion of my offering it, or whether he did decide on it long ago, is the same thing.”
topics: prayer
“Faith left to itself … exalts itself above the laws of natural morality. … [B]y so much higher are duties to God than duties towards man[.]”
“In place of [the classic spirit] … entered with Christianity the principle of unlimited, extravagant, fanatical, supranaturalistic subjectivity; a principle intrinsically opposed to that of science, of culture. With Christianity man lost the capability of conceiving himself as a part of Nature.”
“God is love:' this, … supreme dictum of Christianity, … expresses the certainty which human feeling has of itself, … that the inmost wishes of the heart have objective validity and reality, that there are no limits, no positive obstacles to human feeling, that the whole world, with all its pomp and glory, is nothing weighed against human feeling.”
“A word is an abstract image, the imaginary thing, or, in so far as everything is ultimately an object of the thinking power, it is the imagined thought: hence men, when they know the word, the name for a thing, fancy that they know the thing also.”
topics: concepts-are-not-reality
“The unwedded and ascetic life is the direct way to the heavenly, immortal life, for heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural, sexless, absolutely subjective life.”
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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.