Karl Barth Quotes

I'm against organised religion of any kind.

The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.

The universal Church of the faithful is one outside of which none is saved.

Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.

I'm fascinated by the business of belief, obviously, because it's so ever present with humanity anyway. And, you know, when you have science, which constantly talks of proofs, you have religion, which constantly talks of beliefs and faith and so on.

I never agreed with the message of the Catholic Church - and still don't to this day.

All theological lore is growing distasteful to me. All my recent excursions into such fields proves it to be a shifting, hypothetical, doubt-fostering, dusty, and unprofitable study.

All organized religions are basically the same.

I am not against it. But I am suspicious of all forms of New Age spirituality, and religion in general.

Scientology is completely irrelevant to any of the talks that have been given to me.

You can't go to church without praying ten or fifteen times for God to have mercy on you. You can't sing "Amazing Grace" without reminding yourself that the reason God's grace is amazing is it saves a wretch like you. This self-denigration stuff - Jesus died for my sins - is nothing but a guilt message. That's the thing we've got to get out from under. That's not Christianity. That's sort of fourth-century Christianity that got turned into doctrines and dogmas that we've never been able to escape.

Theology is ignorance with wings.

The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession-and take the credit of the correction.

The Christians were the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma of the church. What is the use in a Pope if there is no Devil ?

New revelations regarding faith or morals ... have always been abhorred and challenged in the Church ... Hence, the Sovereign Pontiffs, the Councils, and the Fathers have been most careful to reject all novelties or new doctrines on matters of faith which differed from those already received.

Don't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the statements of preachers. And you will understand that God is the most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction.

Theology, not morality, is the first business on the church's agenda of reform, and the church, not society, is the first target of divine criticism.

There is something very unhealthy about Christianity.

Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

Always the most revealing thing about the church is her idea of God.

Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.

The cliché, God hates the sin but love the sinner, is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and on the sinner (John 3:36).

Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.