Barth Quotes

Religion may be a private affair, but the woik and word of God are the reconciliation of the world with God, as it was performed in Jesus Christ. ~ Karl Barth

Faith is not an art. Faith is not an achievement. Faith is not a good work of which some may boast while others can excuse themselves with a shrug of the shoulders for not being capable of it. It is a decisive insight of faith itself that all of us are incapable of faith in ourselves, whether we think of its preparation, beginning, continuation, or completion. In this respect believers understand unbelievers, skeptics, and atheists better than they understand themselves. Unlike unbelievers, they regard the impossibility of faith as necessary, not accidental ... ~ Karl Barth

I haven't even read everything I wrote. ~ Karl Barth

third understanding of the imago Dei also gained popularity in the twentieth century, though it too had historical predecessors. In the early part of the twentieth century, Karl Barth argued that the central defining feature of the imago Dei is human relationality. Hence, this view is called the relational view of the imago Dei. Humans are created in the image of the Triune God and thus are meant to find their essence and destiny in community with one another and with God The following three essays offer arguments in favor of each of these views. ~ Gregory A. Boyd

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. ~ Karl Barth

Grace and gratitude go together like heaven and earth. ~ Karl Barth

Political correctness jeopardizes more than it should the human capacity to speak the truth, ~ Karl Barth

I repeat that dogmatics is not a thing which has fallen from Heaven to earth. And if someone were to say that it would be wonderful if there were such an absolute dogmatics fallen from Heaven, the only possible answer would be: 'Yes, if we were angels.' But since by God's will we are not, it will be good for us to have just a human and earthly dogmatics. The Christian Church does not exist in Heaven, but on earth and in time. And although it is a gift of God, He has set it right amid earthly and human circumstances, and to that fact corresponds absolutely everything that happens in the Church. The Christian Church lives on earth and it lives in history, with the lofty good entrusted to it by God. In the possession and administration of this lofty good it passes on its way through history, in strength and in weakness, in faithfulness and in unfaithfulness, in obedience and in disobedience, in understanding and in misunderstanding of what is said to it. ~ Karl Barth

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist. ~ John Barth

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

Theology can be useful only when it does not retreat from the divine judgment that accompanies the work of all men, but, instead unreservedly exposes and submits itself to this judgment. Only by not rejecting or resisting the threat that encounters it, but, instead, acknowledging it propriety, reconciling itself to it, and enduring and bearing it, can theology become useful. ~ Karl Barth

If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it! ~ John Barth

My work never directly addresses the literal subject matter of the photograph, but attempts to ask questions about vision itself. ~ Uta Barth

The nativity mystery "conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary", means, that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus , his "climbing down of God" is: Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary! Here is a human being, the Virgin Mary, and as he comes from God, Jesus comes also from this human being. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God, he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not only similar to us, he is like us. ~ Karl Barth

Abortion is 'the great modern sin. ~ Karl Barth

That clever folk care less for what ye think than why ye think it. ~ John Barth

Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude. ~ Karl Barth

What is it with men," I said. "Always wanting to put things in my ass." They ~ Greg Barth

So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life. ~ John Barth

Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist, ~ John Barth

That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a detente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover. ~ John Barth

Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church. ~ Karl Barth

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse? ~ John Barth

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist. ~ John Barth

Am I boring you? I don't really care, I suppose, but I'll be more comfortable if I knew all this interested you. No doubt when I get the hang of storytelling, after a chapter or two, I'll go faster and digress less often. ~ John Barth

Drolls & dreamers that we are, we fancy that we can undo what we fancy we have done. ~ John Barth

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

people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not, go on, I'm going, and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world ~ John Barth

A man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet. ~ John Barth

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

In sum I'm not what either parent or I had in mind. One hoped I'd be astonishing, forceful, triumphant - heroical in other words. One dead. I myself conventional. I turn out I. ~ John Barth

Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching. ~ John Barth

On observing 1963 America for the first time, the author says that organization and standardization to a certain degree compete with divine providence. ~ Karl Barth

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

Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. ~ Karl Barth

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. ~ John Barth

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

True theology is an actual determination and claiming of man by the acting God. ~ Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth once wittily remarked, One can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice. ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

He has heard, and causes those with ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time - the whole context of Providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway ... Mozart causes us to hear that even on the latter side, and therefore in its totality creation praises its master and is therefore perfect. ~ Karl Barth

I moved to Philadelphia to go to school at Eastern partly because I wanted to study the Bible and I also went to study sociology. I like how Karl Barth said we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the world around us. ~ Shane Claiborne

Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German. ~ Karl Barth

Sin scorches us most after it comes under the scrutinizing light of God's forgiveness and not before ~ Karl Barth

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

News is only the first rough draft of history. ~ Alan Barth

Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it. ~ Karl Barth

The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion. ~ Donald M. MacKinnon

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

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude. ~ Karl Barth

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

We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard. ~ Karl Barth

Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion. ~ John Barth

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state. ~ John Barth

Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are. ~ Karl Barth

With the motto "do what you will," Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau's Alector, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda's Justina, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville's Fantastic Tales, Sorel's Francion, Burton's Anatomy, Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Amory's John Buncle, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann's Tomcat Murr, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey's Doctor, Melville's Moby-Dick, Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe's ornate novels, Bely's Petersburg, Joyce's Ulysses, Witkiewicz's Polish jokes, Flann O'Brien's Irish farces, Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren, Patchen's tender novels, Burroughs's and Kerouac's mad ones, Nabokov's later works, Schmidt's fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard's later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palin ~ Steven Moore

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. ~ Karl Barth

Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is Himself the way ~ Karl Barth

Theology must have the character of a living procession. ~ Karl Barth

I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me's no joke. ~ John Barth

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the 'moved' character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it's communication. ~ William L. Stull

The enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself ~ John Barth

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

There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology. ~ Karl Barth

There was some simple, radical difference about him. He hoped it was genius, feared it was madness, devoted himself to amiability and inconspicuousness. ~ John Barth

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think ... I know what I'm talking about. ~ John Barth

One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody's felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak. ~ John Barth

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

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

Barth observes that the seventh day does not come at the end of a week of toil and labor for human beings as though its primary purpose is to offer a measure of respite after days of toil. Rather, since "God's seventh day was man's first,"54 the seventh day sets life's priority for human beings in the most tangible way. Better yet - and much closer to the point - the seventh day brings to view God's priorities. Seeing that human time "begins with a day of rest and not a day of work,"55 the spiritual pursuit, living life in a relationship with the Creator that is mutually meaningful, stands out as the primary meaning in life. ~ Sigve K. Tonstad

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

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

The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world. ~ John Barth

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

He [Jesus Christ] is the Master of all as the Servant of all. ~ Karl Barth

Now many crises in people's lives occur because the hero role that they've assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or–the same thing in effect–because they haven't the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situation is too overpowering to ignore, and they can't find a mask to meet it with, they may become schizophrenic–a last-resort mask–or simply shattered. All questions of integrity involve this consideration, because a man's integrity consists in being faithful to the script he's written for himself.
"I've said you're too unstable to play any one part all the time–you're also too unimaginative–so for you these crises had better be met by changing scripts as often as necessary. This should come naturally to you; the important thing for you is to realize what you're doing so you won't get caught without a script, or with the wrong script in a given situation. You did quite well, for example, for a beginner, to walk in here so confidently and almost arrogantly a while ago, and assign me the role of a quack. But you must be able to change masks at once if by some means or other I'm able to make the one you walked in with untenable. Perhaps–I'm just suggesting an offhand possibility–you could change to thinking of me as The Sagacious Old Mentor, a ~ John Barth

Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims. ~ Alan Barth

... you don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings ... serendipitously.
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor ~ John Barth

Let your repentance salt my shoe leather," I said presently, "and then, as I lately sheathed my blade of anger, so sheath you my blade of love. ~ John Barth

The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man. ~ John Barth

Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation, ~ Karl Barth

Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions. ~ Alan Barth

He wants in His freedom actually not to be without man but WITH him and in the same freedom not against him but FOR him, and that apart from or even counter to what man deserves. He wants in fact to be man's partner, his almighty and compassionate Saviour. He chooses to give man the benefit of His power, which encompasses not only the high and the distant but also the deep and the near, in order to maintain communion with him in the realm guaranteed by His deity. He determines to love him, to be his God, his Lord, his compassionate Preserver and Saviour to eternal life, and to desire his praise and service. ~ Karl Barth

I am interested in the conventions of picture-making, in the desire to picture the world and in our relationship, our continual love for and fascination with pictures. ~ Uta Barth

We all expect photographs to be a picture of something. We assume that the photographer observed a place, a person, an event in the world, and wants to record it, point at it ... The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense, they register only that which is incidental and peripheral to the implied it. ~ Uta Barth

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

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. ~ Karl Barth

Not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero. ~ John Barth

Karl Barth said it well: "We have to read the Bible in one hand ... and the newspaper in the other." Our faith should not cause us to escape this world but to engage it. ~ Shane Claiborne

Faith is never identical with piety. ~ Karl Barth

Society is now really ruled by its own logos; say rather by a whole pantheon of its own hypostases and powers ... we are beginning to suspect that the idols are vain, but their demonic influence upon our lives is not thereby allayed. For it is one thing to entertain critical doubts regarding the god of this world, and another thing to perceive the dunamis, the meaning and might of the living God who is building a new world. ~ Karl Barth

By a fatal law, a genius is always an idiot. ~ Charles Baudelaire

[Plot is] the gradual perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium. ~ John Barth

I was a huge fan of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. ~ Jessica Barth

We don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. ~ John Barth

You take ordinary things and turn them rainbow bright. It's what makes you so special. ~ Christi Barth

The Bible itself has a hundred theologies.

(Karl Barth, January 27, 1959 to English Colloquia in Basel) ~ Raymond Kemp Anderson

When we speak of our virtues we are competitors, when we confess our sins we become brothers. ~ Karl Barth

Some theologians claim that all God's desires culminate in a single desire: to assert and to maintain God's own glory. On its own, the idea of a glory-seeking God seems to say that God, far from being only a giver, is the ultimate receiver. As the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth disapprovingly put it, such a God would be "in holy self-seeking ... preoccupied with Himself"10. In creating and redeeming, such a God would give, but only in order to get glory; the whole creation would be a means to this end. In Luther's terms, here we would have a God demonstrating human rather than divine love. ~ Miroslav Volf

A reporter asked Barth what was the single most important theological discovery he'd made. After stopping to consider his answer carefully, Barth said, "Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so." Indeed, we can never outgrow that one great, majestic, and simple transforming truth. ~ Mark Driscoll