Holy Scripture
Delivered as the Sprunt Lectures at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia and published in 1983, this is James Barr's sustained account of what the Bible is, how it came to be regarded as Scripture, and what kind of authority it can honestly be said to carry. Barr, then Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford, wrote into a moment of unusual pressure on all sides: the resurgence of conservative inerrancy in Britain and America, which he had already attacked in his 1977 study of fundamentalism, and — from the opposite direction — the rise of Brevard Childs's canonical approach, which proposed that the final canonical shape of the text, rather than its reconstructed prehistory, should govern interpretation. Barr thought both were evasions, and this book is his attempt to say why.
His central move is historical and definitional. "Canon," he argues, is a late concept, secondary to the far older and looser reality of writings that functioned as authoritative within a believing community long before anyone drew a boundary around them. To make the closed list the theologically decisive fact is to read backward, granting normative weight to a fourth-century administrative decision that the biblical writers themselves knew nothing of. From this Barr presses further: Scripture does not stand over against tradition but arose within it and is itself a deposit of tradition, which means that appeals to the Bible alone as a court of final appeal misdescribe how the material actually came to be. He is equally unwilling to locate authority in a doctrine of inspiration, which he treats as a dogmatic construction imported to secure results the texts do not themselves supply. What remains is a defense of historical criticism not as a corrosive tool but as the ordinary honest reading of ancient documents — and a frank admission that this leaves the church with a more modest, more negotiated relation to its Scriptures than either fundamentalism or canonical theology wants to concede.
The book has remained a fixed point in the argument it entered. Anyone working on canonical criticism must reckon with Barr's objections, and his insistence that the Bible's authority is a question about the community's practice rather than a property of the text has shaped how the problem is posed even among those who reject his answers. He writes with clarity and a certain combative dryness; he does not soften.
Who should read this: students of hermeneutics, seminarians encountering Childs or the canonical approach for the first time, and pastors who suspect their working doctrine of Scripture has never been examined. Not for readers seeking devotional nourishment, and not for those wanting a constructive doctrine of Scripture — Barr is far better at dismantling than at building, and says so.