Biblical Faith and Natural Theology
Delivered as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1991 and published two years later, this is James Barr's sustained attack on one of the governing assumptions of twentieth-century Protestant theology: that natural theology is a foreign body, a Greek graft onto a Hebrew stock, and that biblical faith rests on revelation alone. The Gifford platform itself was pointed. Karl Barth had used the same lectureship in 1937–38 to announce that he was an avowed opponent of all natural theology, and then expounded the Scots Confession instead. Barr, a Hebrew Bible scholar with a long record of dismantling claims about distinctively "Hebrew" thought, took the podium to ask whether the Bible actually supports the position Barth built on it.
His answer is that it does not. Barr works through the texts most often invoked on both sides — Paul at Athens in Acts 17, the opening chapters of Romans, Psalm 19, the wisdom literature, Wisdom of Solomon 13 — and argues that Scripture repeatedly assumes some human knowledge of God available apart from Israel's special history. He widens the term deliberately: natural theology need not mean the classical proofs, but any recognition that God is known through creation, through moral awareness, through the ordinary operations of the mind. Read that way, the phenomenon is everywhere in the canon — in the gentiles who acknowledge the God of Israel, in creation traditions that address humanity as such, in wisdom's confidence that the world can be read. Barr further contends that Israel's own religion developed by absorbing and reworking materials from its environment, so that the sharp line between revealed and natural cannot be drawn even at the historical level. Along the way he presses hard on Barth's exegesis of Romans 1 and notes that Calvin, on the sense of divinity implanted in all people, was considerably more generous than his modern interpreters. The consequences reach into the doctrine of Scripture, the status of the Apocrypha, and the credibility of the biblical theology movement's whole program.
The book remains the most thorough biblical case against revelational exclusivism, and it has kept its force because Barr argues from the texts rather than from philosophical preference. Anyone who has absorbed the reflex that natural theology is a betrayal of the gospel will find that reflex examined at its source.
Who should read this: students of biblical theology, Reformed readers formed by Barth who want their inheritance tested by exegesis, and anyone working on the theology of religions or apologetics. Not for devotional reading, and not for those seeking a constructive natural theology in the Thomist or analytic mode — Barr clears ground rather than building on it, and his tone throughout is that of a scholar settling accounts.