Inspirational Quotes by Karl Barth
“[T]he contradiction in Catholicism, that at the same time marriage is holy and celibacy is holy. This simply realises as a practical contradiction, the dogmatic contradiction of the Virgin Mother. … [T]his wondrous union of virginity and maternity, contradicting Nature and reason, but in the highest degree accordant with the feelings and imagination, … The supranatural conception of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, … As death [was] repugnant to the Christians, and … set aside by them through the supposed agency of miraculous power; so, necessarily, they had an equal repugnance to the natural processes of generation, and superseded it by miracle. The Miraculous Conception is not less welcome than the Resurrection to all believers; for it was the first step towards the purification of mankind, polluted by sin and Nature.”
“[O]ne need only be attentive … to convince oneself that the true principle of creation is the self-affirmation of subjectivity in distinction from Nature. God produces the world outside himself; at first it is only an idea, a plan, a resolve; now it becomes an act, and therefore it steps forth out of God as a distinct and, relatively at least, a self-subsistent object. But just so subjectivity in general, which distinguishes itself from the world, which takes itself for an essence distinct from the world, posits the world out of itself as a separate existence, indeed, this positing out of self, and the distinguishing of self, is one act. When therefore the world is posited outside of God, God is posited by himself, is distinguished from the world. What else then is God but your subjective nature, when the world is separated from it?”
topics: simple-mathematics
“[R]eligion has the conviction that its conceptions, its predicates of God, are such as every man ought to have, and must have, if he would have the true ones – that they are conceptions necessary to human nature; nay, further, that they are objectively true, representing God as he is.”
“Religion annexes to its doctrines a curse and a blessing … Blessed is he that believeth, cursed is he that believeth not. Thus it appeals not to reason, but to feeling, … to the passions of hope and fear. … [T]he fear of hell urges me to believe. Even supposing my belief to be in its origin free, fear inevitably intermingles itself[.]”
topics: carrot-and-stick
“[M]an does not stand above this his necessary conception; on the contrary, it stands above him; it animates, determines, governs him.”
topics: servingourcreations
“Christianity has spiritualised the egoism of Judaism into subjectivity (though … this subjectivity is again expressed as pure egoism), has changed the desire for earthly happiness, the goal of the Israelite religion, into the longing for heavenly bliss, which is the goal of Christianity.”
topics: abrahamism
“[T]he religious man … believes in a real sympathy of a divine being in his sufferings and wants, believes that the will of God can be determined by … prayer, … The … religious man unhesitatingly assigns his own feelings to God; God is to him a heart susceptible to all that is human.”
topics: our-creation
“[This philosophy] … is antagonistic to minds perverted and crippled by a superhuman”
“Nature is precisely what separates man from God … [R]eligion believes that one day this wall of separation will fall away. One day there will be no Nature, no matter, no body, at least none such as to separate man from God: then there will be only God[.]”
“It is only in the mode in which faith embodies itself that Christians differ from the followers of other religions. … [T]he nature of faith … is everywhere the same. … All blessings … it accumulates on itself … ; all curses, all hardship and evil it casts on unbelief. … [F]or what God rejects man must not receive, must not indulge me; - that would be a criticism of the divine judgement. … as faith anathematises, it necessarily generates hostile dispositions, - the dispositions out of which the persecution of heretics arises. … God, it is true, loves all men; but only when and because they are Christians, or at least may be and desire to be such. … Love to man as man is only natural love. Christian love is supernatural, glorified, sanctified love … Faith abolishes the natural ties of humanity; to universal, natural unity, it substitutes a particular unity.”
“[I]f the Lord's Supper effects nothing, consequently is nothing, … without a certain state of mind, without faith, then in faith alone lies its reality; the entire event goes forward in the feelings alone. … [I]t produces devout sentiments because it is itself a devout idea. … [H]ere also the religious subject is acted on by himself as if by another being, through the conception of an imaginary object. Therefore the process of the Lord's Supper can quite well, … without any church ceremony, be accomplished in the imagination.”
“In reality, where everything passes on naturally, the copy follows the original, the image the thing which it represents, the thought its object, but on the supernatural, miraculous ground of theology, the original follows the copy, the thing its own likeness. "it is strange" says St. Augustine, "But nevertheless true, that this world could not exist if it was not known to God." That means the world is known and thought before it exists; nay it exists only because it was thought of. The existence is a consequence of the knowledge or of the act of thinking, the original a consequence of the copy, the object a consequence of its likeness.”
“Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thy thyself lovest; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; and thou believest that God exists, that therefore he is a subject … because thou thyself existest, art thyself a subject[.]”
topics: divinity
“Man … projects his being into objectivity. … [T]hen … makes himself an object to this projected image of himself[.]”
topics: ourselves-looking-back
“[E]very being is … by itself infinite, has … its highest conceivable being in itself. … The life of ephemera is extraordinarily short in comparison with that of longer-lived creatures; but … for the ephemera this short life is as long as a life of years to others. The leaf on which the caterpillar lives is for it a world, an infinite space.”
topics: lifeislifeso
“Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, … The divine being is … human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man, made objective … All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.”
“[I]f thou thinkest the infinite thou perceivest and affirmest the infinitude of the power of thought[.]”
“[P]rayer is the … certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of Nature, … Prayer is the absolute relation of the human heart to itself, to its own nature; in prayer, man forgets that there exists a limit to his wishes, and is happy in this forgetfulness.”
topics: a-prayer-to
“Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. … God is … infinite, man … finite … ; God … perfect, man imperfect; … God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful.”
topics: religion
“Pantheism identifies man with Nature. whether its visible appearance, or its abstract essence. Personalism isolates, separates him from Nature; converts him from a part into the whole, into an absolute essence by himself.”
topics: not-apart
Group of Brands
© 2026 Bibleportal.com All rights reserved.
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.