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The theologian who labours without joy is not a theologian at all.

Karl Barth

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Karl Barth
Age: 82 †
Born: 1886
Born: May 10
Died: 1968
Died: December 10
Pastor
Theologian
University Teacher
Basle
Theologian
Labour
Joy
Without
Sulky
Morose
Labours

More quotes by Karl Barth

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This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.
Karl Barth
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The Christian Church does not exist in Heaven, but on earth and in time.
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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.
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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
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We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard.
Karl Barth
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Faith is never identical with piety even if it were the purest and finest.
Karl Barth
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The person who knows only his side of the argument knows little of that.
Karl Barth
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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
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When I come before these men I do not have to explain that we are all sinners. They have committed every sin there is. All I have to tell them is that I, too, am a sinner.
Karl Barth
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Mozart's music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it.
Karl Barth
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The statement that 'God is dead' comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.
Karl Barth
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Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure.
Karl Barth
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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
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Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.
Karl Barth
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True theology is an actual determination and claiming of man by the acting God.
Karl Barth
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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.
Karl Barth
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Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.
Karl Barth
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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
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Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.
Karl Barth
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Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so?
Karl Barth