Karl Barth
A free theologian works in communication with other theologians...He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes.Collection: Communication
If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternityCollection: Recognition
Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it.Collection: Criticism
That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it... accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price... he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway.Collection: Christian
Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation.Collection: Church
True theology is an actual determination and claiming of man by the acting God.Collection: Determination
The Christian Church does not exist in Heaven, but on earth and in time.Collection: Christian
When the frontier between God and man, the last inexorable barrier and obstacle, is not closed, the barrier between what is normal and what is perverse is opened.Collection: Men
Mozart creates music from a mysterious center, and so knows the limits to the right and the left, above and below. He maintains moderation.Collection: Limits
In dogmatics our question is: What are we to think and say?Collection: Thinking
Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.Collection: Littles
What expressions we used - in part taken over and in part newly invented! above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us 'perpendicularly from above,' the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet.Collection: Taken
Exactly halfway between exegesis and practical theology stands dogmatics.Collection: Exegesis
Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure.Collection: Angel
Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.Collection: Church
Mozart's music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it.Collection: Crush
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.Collection: Business
Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.Collection: Light
The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths.Collection: Mark
The Devil may also make use of morality.Collection: Devil
The term 'laity' is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.Collection: Christian
Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are.Collection: Evil Within
There will be no song on our lips if there be no anguish in our hearts.Collection: Song
Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.Collection: Lying
The theologian who labors without joy is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this field.Collection: Joy
I don’t believe in universalism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the reconciler of allCollection: Jesus
Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it.Collection: Belief
To be a Christian and to pray are one and the same thing; it is a matter that cannot be left to our caprice. It is a need, a kind of breathing necessary to life.Collection: Christian
The resurrection of Jesus was like a boulder crashing into the pool of history.Collection: Jesus
Thus in this oneness Jesus Christ is the Mediator, the Reconciler, between God and man. Thus He comes forward to MAN on behalf of GOD calling for and awakening faith, love and hope, and to GOD on behalf of MAN, representing man, making satisfaction and interceding. Thus He attests and guarantees to God's free GRACE and at the same time attests and guarantees to God man's free GRATITUDE.Collection: Gratitude
Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.Collection: Jesus
Impossibility is more possible than everything which we hold to be possible.Collection: Impossibility
The enterprise of Adolf Hitler, with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.Collection: Jesus
This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.Collection: Jesus
Man can certainly keep on lying... but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel... but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God.Collection: Truth
We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.Collection: Hands
Grace and gratitude go together like heaven and earth.Collection: Gratitude
The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume, and each is thicker than the previous ones. As they laugh, they say to one another, ‘Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!’—and they laugh about the persons who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Men
Sin scorches us most after it comes under the scrutinizing light of God's forgiveness and not beforeCollection: Light
Society is now really ruled by its own logos; say rather by a whole pantheon of its own hypostases and powers... we are beginning to suspect that the idols are vain, but their demonic influence upon our lives is not thereby allayed. For it is one thing to entertain critical doubts regarding the god of this world, and another thing to perceive the dunamis, the meaning and might of the living God who is building a new world.Collection: Idols
To say revelation is to say, 'the Word became flesh...'Collection: Flesh
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.Collection: Lying
God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.Collection: Angel
The relation of this God with this man; the relation of this man with this God--this is the only theme of the Bible and of philosophy.Collection: Philosophy
As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give glory to GodCollection: Giving
We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.Collection: Facts
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.Collection: Men
The nativity mystery “conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary”, means, that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus , his “climbing down of God” is: Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary! Here is a human being, the Virgin Mary, and as he comes from God, Jesus comes also from this human being. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God, he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not only similar to us, he is like us.Collection: Jesus