I've been working on James Barr's criticisms of Childs this week. (If you lecture at St Mary's and just had The Concept of Biblical Theology recalled from you, now you know by whom. Sorry!)

No comments yet, apart from referring you to my earlier post on Jon Levenson's review. I'm happy, though, to be at the place in Barr's career where his books are available online! How convenient to run a search like this.

If your institution has access to Oxford Scholarship Online, you can search his titles here and here.

Update: After poking around online, I also found a brief biography for Barr (useful), and a 'fundamentalist' putting him to use (ironic).

Tags: Barr

I just discovered Jon Levenson's review of James Barr's The Concept of Biblical Theology. The full text of the review is online at First Things. Though I've not worked through all of Barr's book yet (its over 700 pages), the review picks up on aspects of tone that are almost immediately observable. Here are a few paragraphs on Barr on Childs:

But Barr is harshest on the scholar to whom he refers as "my friend Professor Brevard Childs," the distinguished Yale Old Testament theologian known for his advocacy and practice of the "canonical method" of biblical interpretation and his sympathies with Barthian theology. Time and again, Barr returns to Childs, almost always critically, devoting two whole chapters and two subsections of another chapter to his work.

Barr’s distaste for Childs’ work is not surprising. Childs is explicit that his labors are in the service of the Christian message (though, like Barr, he is also learned in and deeply respectful of Judaism) and that historical–critical study, though indispensable, can never be an adequate foundation upon which to build a theological affirmation. Some of Barr’s criticisms are quite plausible, such as his point that Childs uses the word "canon" in several discrete and not self–evidently compatible senses.

But Barr vitiates his own potentially formidable case against Childs by continually allowing himself to be diverted from the great hermeneutical issues to attack Childs for this or that comment, some of them mere obiter dicta. For example, in response to Childs’ claim that "feminist positions . . . imply modalism in place of sound trinitarian doctrine," Barr remarks, "No feminist will find this argument other than laughable." Even if this unlikely claim be so, how does it answer Childs’ criticism? And what point does James Barr score against the canonical method by telling us (in the text, not the notes) that Childs’ indices are so poor that "the name of Karl Barth (or, indeed, my own) is cited in the text at numerous places which have been overlooked in the index"?

It is odd that a scholar so sympathetic to the history of religion should lack a characteristic absolutely essential to the proper practice of that discipline—the characteristic of empathy for what is strange and foreign and the eagerness to present it as fairly as possible before attacking it. To read Barr on Childs, one would have great difficulty guessing the identity of the perceived weakness in the older liberal theology that accounted for the rise and rapid spread of the dialectical alternative.

Part of the explanation for Barr’s acute distaste for Childs’ work may be biographical. Since Barr tells us he once believed in dialectical theology himself, perhaps his relentless attacks on it, and on Childs as its foremost exemplar in the biblical field, derive from the convert’s scorn for his past orientation. But there is also a larger and more important difference in their respective confessional stances. Whereas Childs is a Presbyterian committed to reformulating the classical Calvinist doctrine of sola scriptura in response to the challenge of historical criticism, Barr’s more modernistic position, as we have seen, awards a much smaller role to the Bible in the ascertainment of truth and a large role to post–biblical tradition, which he often sees as a corrective and an improvement over the Bible. Their differences on matters of biblical theology go back to more fundamental differences of religious identity of which neither scholar seems sufficiently cognizant. Their debates over method are mostly the old religious arguments carried on in a new idiom. One wishes that Barr had addressed this more fundamental point head–on, and without all the captiousness.

I've read that Barr was once quite an active evangelical in his days at Edinburgh. I wonder how much this experience drives him to write books like Fundamentalism. (Donald Dayton asks this question with more precision.) If Levenson is right, Barr's acrimony for Childs might be of the same kind.

Barr is an instructive case for me. I too can get quite emotionally involved in arguments I'm working through (ask Kevin if you know him). Barr's writing, whether on Fundamentalism, or Childs, draws attention to the need to gain a little critical distance from your subject, and to leave room for a little charity. A lesson I hope I can put into practice sooner rather than later.

Tags: Childs, Barr