Quotes from Karl Barth

Religion possesses no solution of the problem of life; rather it makes of the problem a wholly insoluble enigma. Religion neither discovers the problem nor solves it: what it does is to disclose the truth that it cannot be solved.

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

The Word ought to be exposed in the words

If I ever get to heaven, I would first of all seek out Mozart, and only then inquire after Augustine, St. Thomas, Luther, Calvin, and Schleiermacher.

Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation

The righteousness of God in His election means, then, that as a righteous Judge God perceives and estimates as such the lost cause of the creature, and that in spite of its opposition He gives sentence in its favour, fashioning for it His own righteousness.

Everyone who must contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously; and if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, that suffices for the devil to have lost his game.

God does not have to dishonor himself, when he goes into the far country and conceals his glory.

UNSETTLED QUESTIONS FOR THEOLOGY TODAY (1920)

purely negative approach

the older and younger Blumhardt and their friends. There would have been something significant to learn—as later developments prove—from the books of Friedrich Zündel, for example.

But—we must ask today—why then did no one listen to Overbeck?

But be warned! The book is an inconceivably impressive sharpening of the commandment 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain'.

For it is a dangerous book, a book filled with the apocalyptic air of judgement.

the irreconcilable antitheses of death and life, the world and the kingdom of heaven, and then again to see them both as one, before he can evaluate the concealed power of this unique spirit. For 'this was a man and to be a man means to be a fighter'.

No one can come back and start over, but everybody can move forward and decide the ending.

Concerning the Investigation of Super-History' (Urgeschichte) (pp. 20–8)

Of Myself and of Death' (pp. 287–300).

Two points, which are at once gateways and ends, determine and characterize, according to Overbeck, the being of man and of humanity. With the term 'Super-History' (Urgeschichte) or 'creation-history'

Two points, which are at once gateways and ends, determine and characterize, according to Overbeck, the being of man and of humanity. With the term 'Super-History' (Urgeschichte) or 'creation-history', he designates the one; with the term 'death', the other.

Faith is rather a freedom, a permission. It is permitted to be so—that the believer in God's Word may hold on to this Word in everything, in spite of all that contradicts it.

The greatest hindrance to faith is again and again just the pride and anxiety of our human hearts.

What lies between these two ends, these 'last things', is the world, our world, the comprehensible world which has been given us.

For 'historical' means 'subject to time' (p. 242).