Quotes from Karl Barth

In Jesus, God wills to be true God not only in the height but also in the depth - in the depth of human creatureliness, sinfulness and mortality.

God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.

Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo.

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.

Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure.

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

Grace creates liberated laughter. The grace of God...is beautiful, and it radiates joy and awakens humor.

Humor is the opposite of all self-admiration and self-praise.

To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

The term 'laity' is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.

Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.

The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise.

With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live.

Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure. I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart.

To be a Christian and to pray are one and the same thing; it is a matter that cannot be left to our caprice. It is a need, a kind of breathing necessary to life.

Our position is such that we can be rescued from eternal death and translated into life only by total and unceasing substitution, the substitution which God Himself undertakes on our behalf.

We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.

The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself.

Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.

If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity

The Christian Church does not exist in Heaven, but on earth and in time.

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so?

Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Gratitude evokes grace like the voice and echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.

Let us hear what the Bible says and what we as Christians are called to hear together: By grace you have been saved.