Concept of Biblical Theology
James Barr's late, sprawling survey — subtitled An Old Testament Perspective — is the summation of a career spent testing the vocabulary theologians use when they read Scripture. Barr, a Church of Scotland minister who held the Regius chair of Hebrew at Oxford before moving to Vanderbilt, had spent decades puncturing the assumptions of the mid-century Biblical Theology Movement, beginning with The Semantics of Biblical Language in 1961. By the late 1990s that movement had collapsed, Brevard Childs had proposed a canonical replacement for it, Heikki Räisänen had proposed abolishing New Testament theology in favour of the history of early Christian religion, and a rising generation was reading the Bible through ideological and literary lenses that owed nothing to any of these programmes. Barr set out to ask a prior question that the participants had largely skipped: what has anyone actually meant by "biblical theology," and does the term name a discipline at all?
His central answer is deflationary. Biblical theology, Barr argues, has functioned almost entirely as a contrastive concept — defined not by positive content but by what its practitioners wanted to stand against. Against doctrinal theology, against purely historical study of Israelite and early Christian religion, against philosophy, against natural theology, against the history-of-religions school. Once those contrasts are examined individually, Barr contends, each of them fails or blurs. He is particularly unsparing toward the Hebrew-versus-Greek thought antithesis and the anti-Hellenism it fed, toward claims that the Bible speaks with a unified theological mind, and toward Childs's canonical approach, which he reads as smuggling dogmatic decisions into what presents itself as exegesis. He argues, extending his Gifford Lectures, that natural theology is present within the biblical texts rather than being an alien intrusion upon them. And he presses the question of whether biblical theology can be anything other than a Christian confessional enterprise, engaging Jewish scholars such as Jon Levenson who had reasons to think it could not.
The book endures as the most thorough critical map of the field available, and as a permanent check on loose usage. Anyone who says "biblical theology" as though the phrase were self-explanatory has to reckon with Barr, and constructive practitioners since have generally either answered him or conspicuously avoided doing so. It is not a gentle book; its tone is argumentative and its author is plainly settling accounts.
Who should read this: seminarians, pastors, and scholars who use the phrase "biblical theology" as a working category and want to know what they are committing to, and readers of Childs, von Rad, or Eichrodt who need the strongest case against them. It offers nothing devotional and will frustrate anyone seeking a constructive synthesis of Scripture rather than a critique of the attempts.