Donald Wood, describing Barth’s exegesis in The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth (p. 266):

“The Bible is indeed a difficult book to understand; but this difficulty is not properly portrayed principally as a reflex of the historical distances and cultural differences that separate the contemporary reader from the ancient text. The fundamental interpretative challenge is to lay aside the presumption—one that is deeply embedded in both pietistic and modern academic readings of Scripturethat the Bible is best approached as a variegated reflex of, and testimony to, the human experience of God. The Bible, Barth insisted, must be understood in all its complexity as *a book about God*—as the unitary story of God’s ways with humanity (GA 48: 408), the literary threshold of the ‘new world of God’ (GA 48: 317).”