Journal: Bulletin for Biblical Research
Volume: BBR 14:1 (NA 2004)
Article: James Barr and the Future of Revelation in History in New Testament Theology
Author: Robert W. Yarbrough

---

BBR 14:1 (2004) p. 105

James Barr and the Future of Revelation in History in New Testament Theology

Robert W. Yarbrough

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

The thesis of James Barr’s magisterial study The Concept of Biblical Theology is that “biblical theology is a contested concept” (Barr’s emphasis). One of the reasons for this is the issue of revelation in history (RIH). The article compares Barr’s is outlook with the outlook of scholars who are favorable toward RIH such as Hofmann and Cullmann, toward whom Barr might be thought to be fundamentally negative. In fact Barr shares many of the RIH group’s convictions. At the same time, elements of a neologistic outlook inhere in Barr’s work, making it unclear how RIH will fare in future studies that may follow Barr’s lead. In any case both NT theology and RIH retain importance in current discussion.

Key Words: James Barr, revelation in history, salvation history, Heilsgeschichte, biblical theology, NT theology, J. C. K. von Hofmann, Theodor Zahn, Adolf Schlatter, Karl Barth, Oscar Cullmann

The ravages of World War II forced Western academic theologians to became aware of two things. First, as Karl Barth had already seen by the end of the so-called Great War (First World War), liberalism had in important respects failed to interpret the Bible as the Word of God.1 Second, human society and possibly even humans themselves were more depraved and bent on self-destruction than some theological anthropologies had it. Harnack’s and Fosdick’s grand brotherhood of man under the universal fatherhood of God was hard to stomach in breezes bearing the stench of Stalingrad, Berlin, and Buchenwald. As a result, the Bible as a whole came in for renewed scholarly attention not just as an object of antiquarian scrutiny but as a prophetic word

BBR 14:1 (2004) p. 106

for modern people. Its moral realism and apocalyptic assessment of the destiny of earthly history rang true in a world huddling in the shadow of mushroom clouds and stirred up for decades afterward by Communism’s saber rattling and the West’s reciprocal arms escalation. In this desperate climate, what came to be called the Biblical Theology Movement arose, having actually begun its existence in the sometimes bleak and tumultuous setting of the 1920s in Europe. The 1950s saw the movement’s high-water mark.

By the early 1960s, however, its legitimacy was being questioned, most of all in North America where, significantly, bastions of mainline liberal optimism had not seen major cities and university campuses bombed and overrun by totalitarian or occupation troops, as had their European counterparts. The Biblical Theology Mo...

visitor : : uid: ()