Quotes from Karl Barth

It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.

Jews have God's promise and if we Christians have it, too, then it is only as those chosen with them, as guests in their house, that we are new wood grafted onto their tree.

Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.

It is always the case that when the Christian looks back, he is looking at the forgiveness of sins.

In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians.

The goal of human life is not death but resurrection.

Faith is never identical with piety.

Jews have God's promise and if we Christians have it, too, then it is only as those chosen with them, as guests in their house, that we are new wood grafted onto their tree.

The saving of anyone is something which is not in the power of man, but only of God. No one can be saved in virtue of what he can do. Everyone can be saved in virtue of what God can do. The divine claim takes the form that it puts both the obedient and the disobedient together and compels them to realise this, to recognise their common status in face of the commanding God.

God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality.

Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.

Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone. Piety is the possibility of the removal of the last traces of a firm foundation upon which we can erect a system of thought.

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.

The power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men. It must not be confounded with any high, exalted, force, known or knowable.

The Gospel is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from men.

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

Faith is never identical with "piety" even if it were the purest and finest.

We must be clear that whatever we say of God in such human concepts can never be more than an indication of Him; no such concept can really conceive the nature of God. God is inconceivable.

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.

The Resurrection is the emergence of the necessity of giving glory to God: the reckoning with what is unknown and unobservable in Jesus, the recognition of Him as Paradox, Victor and Primal History.

At bottom, knowledge of God in faith is always this indirect knowledge of God, knowledge of God in His works, and in these particular works in the determining and using of certain creaturely realities to bear witness to the divine objectivity. What distinguishes faith from unbelief, erroneous faith and superstition is that it is content with this indirect knowledge of God.

There is no way from us to God -- not even via negativa not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way -- even of this way -- would not be God.

Jesus is the movement for social justice, and the movement for social justice is Jesus in the present.