Quote

I have read many books, but the Bible reads me.

Karl Barth

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Karl Barth
Age: 82 †
Born: 1886
Born: May 10
Died: 1968
Died: December 10
Pastor
Theologian
University Teacher
Basle
Books
Read
Book
Many
Reads
Bible

More quotes by Karl Barth

Image
I take the Bible far too seriously to take it literally.
Karl Barth
Image
Faith is never identical with piety even if it were the purest and finest.
Karl Barth
Image
We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.
Karl Barth
Image
Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure.
Karl Barth
Image
The enterprise of Adolf Hitler, with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Karl Barth
Image
If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity
Karl Barth
Image
The theologian who labors without joy is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this field.
Karl Barth
Image
In dogmatics our question is: What are we to think and say?
Karl Barth
Image
Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way.
Karl Barth
Image
God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.
Karl Barth
Image
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.
Karl Barth
Image
What is offered to man's apprehension in any specific revelation of Christ is the living God himself.
Karl Barth
Image
Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it.
Karl Barth
Image
What expressions we used - in part taken over and in part newly invented! above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us 'perpendicularly from above,' the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet.
Karl Barth
Image
Abortion is 'the great modern sin.
Karl Barth
Image
A free theologian works in communication with other theologians...He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes.
Karl Barth
Image
Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.
Karl Barth
Image
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.
Karl Barth
Image
Grace creates liberated laughter. The grace of God...is beautiful, and it radiates joy and awakens humor.
Karl Barth
Image
Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.
Karl Barth