In the second volume of his Church Dogmatics (1.2) Barth has a long and valuable note in which he gives us a concise summary of the views that have been held from the Fathers to the Reformers on this question of the nature of the inspiration of the Scriptures. He deals first with the Pauline passages 1 Cor. 2.6–16, and 2 Cor. 3.4–18, insisting in his exegesis on the fact that, whilst Paul no doubt knew the theories of the Talmud and the Alexandrian-Jewish school about the divine-human origin of the Torah, his assertion of a special inspiration of the Scripture is always and only in connexion with his view of the present confirmation of God of the Scripture through the work of the Holy Spirit. Barth continues:

According to 2 Cor. 3 everything depends for him (sc. Paul) on that; without this work of the Spirit the Scripture is and remains veiled, however great its glory and however it may have come about. This is the case in and through the veiling of the countenance of Moses (Ex. 34) which foreshadows the reading of Scripture to-day in the Synagogue: the divinely prescribed is there, the human beings reading it are there, but over their hearts is a veil; their thinking is hardened—the open book is for them in actual fact a closed book. Only their return to the Lord could remove the veil and open up to them the way into the Scripture (p. 571).