Quote by Karl Barth
“If I know not now what and how I shall be; if there is an essential, absolute difference between my future and my present; neither shall I then know what and how I was before, the unity of consciousness is at an end, personal identity is abolished, another being will appear in my place; and thus my future existence is not in fact distinguished from non-existence. If, on the other hand, there is no essential difference, the future is to me an object that may be defined and known[:] … I am the substance which connects the present and the future into a unity. How then can the future be obscure to me? That which irreligious-religious reflection converts into a known image of an unknown yet certain thing, is … in the primitive, true sense of religion, not an image, but the thing itself. … The future life is nothing else than life in unison with the feeling, with the idea, which the present life contradicts. … [T]he other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish; it is only the removal of limits which here oppose themselves to the realisation of the idea. … [A]n image, a conception; still it is not the image of a remote, unknown thing, but a portrait of that which man loves and prefers before all else[:] … his soul.”
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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.