I have to give back this essay to sean at 5:43, so I'm going to type up parts of it now so that I'll remember what it says.

Witness to the word: On Barth's doctrine of Scripture by Mark D. Thompson
Hermann
- Christian faith must be freed from all worldy justifications
- self-authentication of the central religious experience
- focus on the person of Jesus Christ
- these are all part of barth's theology

Barmen declaration: "Jesus Christ as he is testified to us in the Holy Scripture is the one Word of God, whom we are to hear, whom we are to trust and obey in life and in death"
"Christianity has always been and only been a living religion when it is not ashamed to be actually and seriously a book religion" - Barth
Barth consciously separated himself from theological liberalism
Barth was convicted that Christian theology is both unified and coherent, with a singular focus on the person of Jesus Christ

Barth's leading concerns
- Barth wrote repeatedly about the nature of Scripture and its relation to the Word as the self-revelation of the triune God.
- the reasons for many of his statements on the nature of Scripture can be traced to the particular account of God and his self-revelation that provide their most important context.

The Lordship of God
Sovereign freedom of God
- he cannot be circumscribed, comprehensively analysed or mastered
- God reveals himself as the Lord... Revelation is the revelation of lordship and therewith it is the revelation of God
- Kirkegaard's infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity - having negative and positive significance "God is in heaven and thou art on earth"
- our certainty about God must always lie in God's hands

- insists that God remains subject in the act of revelation - revelation of God is not an object that gan be grasped by human ingenuity
- Revelation means knowledge of God through God and from God - always travelling in this direction
- God is the subject even when we hear his Word in the witness of prophets and apostles
Word of God cannot be separated from the God who speaks it
- Revelation does not arise out of human feeling or experience
- Bible tells us not how we should talk with God, but what he says to us, not how we find the way to him, but how he has sought and found the way to us

God's Absolute Freedom
- ontic and noetic autonomy
- God is free from constraint of any kind and he will not be controlled by his creatures
- God is also free to decide when and where he is known
- Revelation is simply the freedom of God's grace
- In Scripture - God always remains free in regards to scripture
Bible is God's Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word
- When Scripture is taught as the Word of God it must have reference to the sovereignly free decision of God that it should be so -- so God is a subject not an object
- God's sovereign freedom is not to be pitted against his faithfulness
- God cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and has bound himself to human beings by the blood of the new covenany (Mark 14:24)
Thompson's view - Barth does not appear to consider that God might bind himself to the word he speaks
Barth's view - the bible directs us to God, but God can and will direct us only to himself

The centrality of Christ
- unconditional priority must be given to thinking which is attentive to the existence of the living person of Jesus christ so that per definitionem christological thinking forms the unconditional basis for all other theological thinking
- focus of attention must always be Christ himself, not a christological principle
- "Jesus Christ, as He is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we have to hear and whom we have to obey in life and death" Barth
- insists that singularity of the Bible consists in and is established by the fact that it is the book of Christ

Barth spoke of the threefold form of the Word of God
-  one Word - one and the same whether we understand it as revelation, Bible, or proclamation
- no distinction of degree or value between the three forms
Barth and Luther saw a difference of kind between Jesus as the Word of God on the one hand and both Scripture and Christian preaching as the Word of God on the other.
- only one form of the Word of God is in substance God.
- Jesus is God with us - so we may speak of him as the Word of God or revelation without any reservation or qualification

"Underlying the Word of God not as proclamation and Scripture alone but as God's revelation in proclamation and Scripture, we must understand it in its identity with God Himself. God's revelation is Jesus christ, the Son of God"

Jesus is witness to nothing other than himself.
Proclamation and Scripture are only witnesses to revelation rather than revelation itself.
"The Bible is God's Word as it bears witness to revelation, and proclamation is God's Word as it really promises revelation"
"To the extent that the Bible really attests revelation it is no less the Word of God than revelation itself"

- there is one Word but three addresses (Jesus, Scripture, Proclamation)
- To fail to distinguish between the forms of the one Word of God, no less between revelation and the Bible than between the Bible and church proclamation, would be to dishonour the unique sense in which Christ is the Word of God.

"The Bible is not the Word of God on earth in the same way as Jesus Christ, very God and very man, is that Word in heaven."

Criticisms of Barth
John 5:39-40
Matt 4:1-11
Acts 1:8
Matt 28:20
1 Thess 2:13

------- I have to give Sean back his essay at 5:51... so I'm going to speed up my summarising
The personal and dynamic character of divine revelation
- God's self-expression in his Word is, by definition, irradicably personal. God intends to make himself known to men and women - not just truth about him but himself.
- divine revelation is both personal and dynamic
- word of God as an event the speech of God as the act of God - draws attention to the power of the word of God to shape all reality
- God's words have power... speech act of God
- Barth identifies revelation as the event of God's word addressing actual men and women throughout human history
- Barth strongly denied that Scripture is the word of God because we believe it so - it is not constituted as such by our faith. Bible becomes God's word because of God's sovereign decision that it be so.

The genuine humanity of the biblical text
- evangelical doctrine cannot be construed as docetic
- must hold the paradox - scripture God's Word is given to us in the concealment of true and authentic human words
- Barth insisted that by God's gracious act, a miracle occurs: entirely human words that share the frgility and even the distorted nature of their environment become the word of God. Their secularity cannot and should not be avoided.
- Barth rejected any suggestion of biblical infallibility or inerrancy while at the same time strongly maintaining the authority of Scripture over church and reason
- bible has capacity for error
- At every point it is the vulnerable word of man

Criticisms:
- human words are not themselves God, but however God is the first and last speaker of human words according to the biblical account and it is God himself who initiates the transition from the spoken to the written form of those words (Exod 24:12 31:18
- capacity for error does not always lead to actual error even in our everyday dealings with each other
- it is not clear why the miracle of God using fallible and faulty human words as his own word is preferable to the miracle of the Spirit so superintending the entire process of a human writer's development, experience and literary expression that he or she freely writes the words that god intended. We need not suggest that everything the prophets or apostles said in their lives was the authoritative word of God. We can acknowledge their fallibility and sinfulness as men.

Remember Me by Mark Schultz
Remember Me
In a Bible cracked and faded by the years.
Remember Me
In a sanctuary filled with silent prayer

Remember Me
When the color of the sunset fills the sky
Remember Me
When you pray and tears fall from your eyes.

Remember Me
When the children leave their Sunday school with smiles
Remember Me
When they're old enough to teach,
Old enough to preach
Old enough to leave.

And age to age
And heart to heart,
Bound by grace and peace.
Child of wonder
Child of God,
I've remembered you,
Remember Me

"Those who have this right faith consent to the law, and see that it is righteous and good. They declare God (who made the law) to be just, and have delight in the law (notwithstanding that they cannot fulfil it as they wish, because of their weakness). They abhor whatever the law forbids, though they cannot always avoid it. And their great sorrow is that they cannot fulfil the will of God in the law; and the spirit that is in them cries to God night and day for strength and help, with tears (as Paul says) that cannot be expressed with the tongue." - Tyndale

"Therefore at the beginning of the day let all distraction and empty talk be silenced and let the first thought and the first word belong to him to whom our whole life belongs "awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light...

Prayer should not be hindered by work but neither should work be hindered by prayer... Prayer is entitled to its time. But the bulk of the day belongs to work. And only where each receives its own specific due will it become clear that both belong inseparably together. Without the burden and labour of the day, prayer is not prayer, and without prayer work is not work. This only the Christian knows. Thus, it is preciselythe clear distinction between them that their oneness becomes manifest.

Work plunges men into the world of things. The Christian steps out of the world of brotherly encounter into the world of impersonal things, the 'it'; and this new encounter frees him for objectivity; for the 'it'world is only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centredness and self-seeking. The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause..." - Bonhoeffer
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I chose this song and these passages because I was thinking about something Tozer wrote in his book The pursuit of God, which was that faith is keeping your eyes continually on God. While I really liked that definition, I guess what I've always thought about is how do you keep your eyes continually on God. Mark Schultz says, "Remember me", to remember God. Tyndale says that the Holy Spirit within you is constantly crying out to God day and night, which is part of the idea of having the right faith. I think Tyndale is interesting because his understanding of faith is very much intertwined with what you believe in, so he believes that you must have the right faith.Then Bonhoeffer brings all these theoretical accounts of our faith, and tries to describe how we are to live out our faith, how we are to live out continually focussing our eyes on God in a world that is primarily creation. I guess Evangelicals have mostly answered this question by turning creation into things that are of God, that's why so many people feeling listless and unfulfilled in their work jobs have chosen to become MTS workers.

I like Bonhoeffer's understanding of work, which incorporates the I-It and I-Thou relationships described by Martin Buber, a philosopher,

"Ich und Du, usually translated as I and Thou, is a book by Martin Buber, published in 1923, and first translated to English in 1937. Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways: that of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience; and that of the 'I' towards 'Thou', in which we move into existence in a relationship without bounds. One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. All of our relationships, Buber contends, bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou." --Wikipedia

but basically he says that through creation, which is creation and nothing else, you can come to understand your relationship with God more. So instead of transforming the creation, you let the creation, that takes you away from God, bring you closer to God. The contradiction is better explained by him in parts that I couldn't be bothered typing out, but I think that Bonhoeffer's conception of it is better than the contemporary understanding of letting your life centre on God, because God has made creation.

By that I mean, work takes us away from God. We cannot keep our eyes continually on him. Does that mean we have no more faith? No, our faith is not dependent upon our conscious thought, or our conscious decisions, it is who you are in your inner being. You can try to consciously think about God as much as you want, but that's not going to give you faith.

Sometimes I wonder how encouraging it is to meet together and talk about how you are going with God. It seems very fake, considering how you are going with God is beyond your own comprehension. I think its not that our relationship with God that is fluctuating, it is the grief you feel when you "cannot fulfil the will of God in the law;" that you must continually be fighting. Faith is not a form of works.

 If you fall away and lose your faith, you are not losing your salvation, you are not losing your relationship with God, you never had a relationship with God in the first place. If you have a relationship with God, you have a relationship with God, if you don't, you don't. There is no in between. Relationship is just the fancy word we use for talking with God and walking alongside Him, if you're not a christian, God is not walking beside you anyway, because Jesus is not mediating your relationship.

Once Jesus mediates your relationship, you have it all, you don't need to keep your faith, because your faith is what God has given you. You don't need to keep your faith any more than you need to daily take your dose of "salvation" from God. You are not taking your daily "faith" tablets.

Your relationship does not fluctuate. Your thoughts fluctuate, your feelings fluctuate, your sin fluctuates. If you think God doesn't exist one day, that is your problem with sin not your problem with God. God has already rid you of your problems with God.