Parenting & Family Quote by Karl Barth

Barth’s line lands like comfort, then quickly reveals itself as a provocation. “What God chooses” shifts agency away from the anxious modern self, the one trained to treat life as a project to be optimized. The sentence refuses that entire worldview. You don’t curate your destiny; you receive it. That’s the intent: to pull the reader out of a moral and emotional economy of control and into one of trust.

The subtext is tougher than the soothing cadence suggests. “Children of men” is not sentimental; it’s a demotion. Barth is insisting on creatureliness, on limits, on the fact that humans are not junior partners in providence. The phrase “always the best” isn’t a claim that events feel good or even look good from the ground. It’s a theological insistence that “best” is defined by God’s purpose, not by human preference, success narratives, or immediate outcomes. The line therefore asks for surrender, not positivity. It doesn’t promise an easy life; it redefines what counts as goodness in the first place.

Context matters: Barth wrote in the shadow of European catastrophe and the collapse of liberal Protestant confidence that history naturally bends toward progress. His theology is famous for pushing back against any attempt to domesticate God into human ideals. Read there, this isn’t pious wallpaper. It’s a rebuke to the era’s faith in systems, nations, and human reason - and a reminder that hope, for Barth, begins where human mastery ends.