Karl Barth Quotes

Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.

In dogmatics our question is: What are we to think and say?

Sin scorches us most after it comes under the scrutinizing light of God’s forgiveness and not before

Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.

When the frontier between God and man, the last inexorable barrier and obstacle, is not closed, the barrier between what is normal and what is perverse is opened.

Man can certainly flee from God… but he cannot escape him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God, but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate.

Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are.

There will be no song on our lips if there be no anguish in our hearts.

Society is now really ruled by its own logos; say rather by a whole pantheon of its own hypostases and powers… we are beginning to suspect that the idols are vain, but their demonic influence upon our lives is not thereby allayed. For it is one thing to entertain critical doubts regarding the god of this world, and another thing to perceive the dunamis, the meaning and might of the living God who is building a new world.

That the zeal for God’s honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it… accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price… he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway.

Mozart creates music from a mysterious center, and so knows the limits to the right and the left, above and below. He maintains moderation.

We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.