Inspirational Quotes by Karl Barth
“Apart from instinct, the brute has no other guardian spirit, no other Providence, than its senses or its organs in general. A bird which loses its eyes has lost its guardian angel; … a natural Providence is in the eyes of religion as good as none. Hence Providence has relation essentially to men, and even among men only to the religious. 'God is the saviour of all men, but especially of them that believe.' … [I]t is intended to express the essential distinction of man from the brute, to rescue man from the tyranny of Nature.”
topics: please-tell-me-im-special
“Religion has no physical conception of the world; it has no interest in a physical explanation, which can never be given but with a mode of origin. Origin is a theoretical, natural philosophical idea. The heathen philosophers busied themselves with the origin of things. But the religious consciousness abhorred this idea as heathen, irreligious, and substituted the practical or subjective idea of creation, which is nothing else than a prohibition to conceive things as having arisen in a natural way … The religious consciousness connects the world immediately with God; … The question, how did God create? is an indirect doubt that he did create the world. It was the question which brought man to atheism, materialism, naturalism.”
“The conception of the morally perfect being is no merely theoretical, inert conception, but a practical one, calling me to action, to imitation, throwing me into strife, into disunion with myself; for while it proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not. … [R]eligion renders this disunion all the more painful … [I]t sets man's own nature before him as a separate being.”
topics: institutional-self-interest
“I do not regard the limits of the past and present as the limits of humanity of the future”
“In order to banish from the mind the identity of the divine … recourse is had to the idea that God, as the absolute, real Being, has an infinite fulness of various predicates, of which we here know only a part, … those such as are analogous to our own; while the rest, by virtue of which God must have quite a different nature from the human … , we shall only know in the future – that is, after death.”
topics: humanparameters
“Religion … denies goodness as a quality of human nature; man is wicked, corrupt, incapable of good; … on the other hand, God is only good[.]”
topics: perversion
“Providence is a privilege of man. It expresses the value of man, in distinction from other natural beings … ; it exempts him from the connection of the universe. Providence is the conviction of man of the infinite value of his existence, - a conviction in which he renounces faith in the reality of external things; it is the idealism of religion.”
“[T]he religious expression is: Man is the image of God, or a being akin to God; - for according to religion man does not spring from Nature, but is of divine race, of divine origin. … According to this, God is the father of man, man the son, the child of God. Here is posited at once the self-subsistence of God and the dependence of man, … Nevertheless this distinction is only an appearance. The father is not a father without a child; both together form a correlated being.”
“Assim como Deus renunciou a si mesmo por amor, devemos também renunciar a Deus pelo; porque se não renunciarmos a Deus por amor, renunciaremos ao amor em nome de Deus e teremos, ao invés do predicado do amor, o Deus, a entidade cruel do fanatismo religioso.”
“In Christianity, man was concentrated only on himself, he unlinked himself from the chain of sequences in the system of the universe, he made himself a self-sufficing whole, … [H]e no longer regarded himself as being immanent in the world, because he severed himself from connection with it[.]”
“Pelagianism denies God, … It has only the creator, i.e. Nature as a basis, not the Saviour, … – in a word, it denies God; … as a consequence of this, it elevates man into God, … Augustinianism denies man[.]”
topics: pelagianism
“[This philosophy] does not … regard the pen as the only fit organ for the revelation of truth, but the eye and ear, the hand and foot”
“In breathing I am an object of the air, the air the subject; but when I make the air an object of thought, of investigation, when I analyse it, I reverse the relation - I make myself the subject, the air an object.”
topics: all-a-part
“How can the feeling man resist feeling, the loving one love? Who has not experienced the overwhelming power of melody? And what else is melody but the power of feeling? Music is the language of feeling; … feeling communicates itself. … Is it man that possesses love, or is it not … love that possesses man? When love impels a man to suffer death even joyfully for the beloved one, is this death-conquering power his own individual power, or is it not rather the power of love?”
“So long as love is not exalted into substance, … an essence, so long there lurks in the background of love a subject who even without love is something by himself, an unloving monster, a diabolical being, [who] … delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers, - the phantom of religious fanaticism.”
topics: our-creation
“[W]hen it is shown that what the subject is lies entirely in the attributes of the subject; … that the predicate is the true subject; it is also proved that if the divine predicates are attributes of the human nature, the subject of those predicates is also … human nature.”
topics: humancreation
“The idea of man as a species, and with it the significance of the life of the species, of humanity as a whole, vanished as Christianity became dominant. Herein we have … confirmation … that Christianity does not contain within itself the principle of culture. Where man immediately identifies the species with the individual, and posits this identity as his highest being, as God, where the idea of humanity is thus an object to him only as the idea of the Godhead, there the need of culture has vanished; man has all in himself, all in his God, consequently he has no need to supply his own deficiencies by others as the representatives of the species, or by the contemplation of the world generally; and this need alone is the spring of culture.”
“The revelation of God is a determinate revelation, given at a particular epoch: God revealed himself once and for all in the year so and so, … not to the universal man, … but to certain limited individuals. A revelation in a given time and place must be fixed in writing, that its blessings may be transmitted uninjured. … [T]he belief is revelation is … belief in a written revelation; but the necessary consequence of faith in which a historical book, necessarily subject to all the conditions of a temporal, finite production, is regarded as an eternal, absolute, universally authoritative word, is – superstition and sophistry.”
“The doctrine of immortality is the final doctrine of religion; … it speaks out what it has hitherto suppressed. If elsewhere the religious soul concerns itself with the existence of another being, here it openly considers only its own existence[.]”
topics: clinging-to-self
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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.