Inspirational Quotes by Karl Barth
“[T]he understanding … has its essence in itself, consequently it has nothing, together with or external to itself, which can be ranged beside it; it is incapable of being compared, because it is itself the source of all combinations and comparisons; … we measure all things by understanding alone; … it is … the principle of all generalising, of all classification, … [I]t circumscribes all things and beings. The definitions which the speculative philosophers and theologians give … , all these definitions are … ideas drawn solely from the nature of the understanding.”
topics: all-our-creations
“The Christians made mental phenomena into independent beings, their own feelings into qualities of things, the passions which governed them into powers which governed the world, in short, predicates of their own nature, whether recognised as such or not, into independent, subjective existences.”
topics: humancreation
“There may certainly be thinking beings besides men on the other planets of our solar system. But by the suppositions of such beings we do not change our standing point – we extend our conception quantitively not qualitatively.”
topics: imaginelife
“Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature. … [T]he essence of religion … is evident to the thinker … . [T]he antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory; … it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual.”
“The salvation of the soul is the fundamental idea, the main point in Christianity; … this salvation lies only in God … But God is absolute subjectivity, … separated from the world, … set free from matter, severed from … life … and … from the distinction of sex. Separation from the world, from matter, from the life of the species, is therefore the ultimate aim of Christianity. … [T]his aim had its visible, practical realisation in Monachism.”
“Miracle is agreeable because … it satisfies the wishes of man without labour[.]”
topics: wishful
“God … is nothing else than the nature of understanding made objective.”
topics: seeing-ourselves
“The personality of God is thus the means by which man converts the qualities of his own nature into the qualities of another being, - a being external to himself. The personality of God is nothing else than the projected personality of man.”
“[E]very religion which has any claim to the name presupposes that God is not indifferent to the beings who worship him, … [A]s an object of veneration, he is a human God. … God is not deaf to my complaints; he has compassion on me; hence he renounces his divine majesty[.]”
topics: talking-to-ourselves
“[T]he essence of man is one, but this essence is infinite; … Between me and another human being - … , even though he is only one, … he supplies to me the want of many others, has … a universal significance, is the deputy of mankind, … In another I … have the consciousness of humanity; … I … learn, I … feel, that I am a man: … community constitutes humanity.”
topics: of-self
“I by no means say … God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, the Word of God is nothing, … . I only show that they are not that which the illusions of theology make them[.]”
“[I]t is necessary to man to have a definite conception of God, … since he is man he can no more form other than a human conception of him. … [T]hese predicates are certainly without any objective validity; but … if he is to exist for me, he cannot appear otherwise than as he does appear to me, namely as a being with attributes analogous to human. … I cannot know whether God is something else in himself or for himself than he is for me; what he is to me is all that he is. For me, there lies in these predicates under which he exists for me, what he is in himself; his very nature; he is for me what he alone can ever be for me. The religious man finds perfect satisfaction in that which God is in relation to himself; of any other relation he knows nothing; for God is to him what he can alone be to man.”
topics: ourownperson
“Consciousness in the strictest sense is present … in a being whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought.”
“[M]arriage is not holy in Christianity; … an unholy thing … excluded from heaven. … Where his heaven is, there is his heart, - heaven is his heart laid open. Heaven is nothing but the idea of the true, the good, the valid, - of that which ought to be; earth, nothing but the idea of the untrue, the unlawful, of that which ought not to be. … [T]here [in heaven] dwell only pure sexless individuals: … the Christian excludes the life of the species from his conception of the true life[.]”
“Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought.”
“To suffer is the highest command of Christianity – the history of Christianity is the history of the passion … [T]he ancient Christians … rendered the highest honour to their God by … tears of repentance and yearning. … If God himself suffered for my sake, how can I be joyful, how can I allow myself any gladness, at least on this corrupt earth, which was the theatre of his suffering?”
“...the present age... prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence... truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is, in fact, held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.”
“The heavenly life is no other than that which is, already here below, distinguished from the merely natural life … That which the Christian excludes from himself now – for example, the sexual life – is excluded from the future: the only distinction is, that he is there free from that which he here wishes to be free from … Hence this life is, for the Christian, a life of torment and pain, because he is here still beset by a hostile power, and has to struggle with the lusts of the flesh and the assaults of the devil.”
topics: self-torment
“This [love] ought to be a furnace that should melt us all into one heart, and should create such a fervour in us … that we should heartily love each other.' But that which in the truth of religion is the essence of the fable, is to the religious consciousness only the moral of the fable, a collateral thing.”
topics: love
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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.