Quote by Karl Barth
“The creation of the world expressed nothing else than subjectivity, assuring itself of its own reality and infinity through the consciousness that the world is created, is a product of will, … When thou sayest the world was made out of nothing, thou conceivest the world the world itself as nothing, … for the world is the limitation of thy will, … ; the world alone obstructs thy soul; it alone is the wall of separation between thee and God, … ; thou thinkest God by himself, … the subjectivity or soul which enjoys itself alone, which needs not the world, which knows nothing of the painful bonds of matter. In the inmost depths of thy soul thou wouldest rather there were no world, for where the world is, there is matter, and where there is matter there is weight and resistance, space and time, limitation and necessity. … How dost thou expel the world from thy consciousness, that it may not disturb thee … ? [B]y making the world itself a product of will, … hovering between existence and non-existence, always awaiting its annihilation. … [H]ence its end is daily looked forward to with longing.”
topics: life-is-here
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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.