The Bible in the Modern World

This book unplugged me from the matrix of conservative evangelicalism. Barr asks all the questions I didn't realize I wasn't allowed to ask, and confronts them directly and honestly. It really blew me away by its simplicity and sincerity.This was *the* book - along with McKim's book on biblical authority - that got evangelicals all in a tizzy in the 1980s in the "battle for the Bible," with Woodbridge and Carson responding in two vols. As a primary source by one of Oxford's most brilliant professors, I'm amazed this is out of print: highly recommended.

The author has a healthy objective look at the subject. Many angles are pursued but in a balanced manner. The erudition of the author is clearly visible and also his insight in the subject. He leaves the reader the difficult task of making a final conclusion (if such a conclusion is possibel).

Published in 1973, this was not James Barr's best book. Barr certainly knew about the Bible and biblical theology in its post-war form, but this book is supposed to be about theological engagement with the Bible, and it suffers from the bad defect that Barr does not really know, or at least include, much actual theology. His chapter on radicalism and relativism as undermining the post-war consensus on the authority of the Bible for theology seems to be based, apart from a few obligatory references to Dennis Nineham (who in any case did not publish his own main book on the subject, The Use and Abuse of the Bible, until 1976), entirely on hearsay rather than on detailed study; and even in the chapter on literary use of the Bible, the focus is on one or two rather dull contributions to the discussion.Having said that, Barr of course puts forward a good case for loosening the relationship between 'events' and the biblical text, for a community or tradition-derived concept of inspiration and revelation, for seeing the authority of the Bible as justified by the results of theological construction rather than as a datum for it, for being less worried about the limits of the canon, and so on—all themes to be developed in his later work against fundamentalism.But Barr was no postmodernist. He did not like allegory, and remained firm that the interpretation of the Bible should be based on the idea of reference within the text—if not to the events allegedly described or, directly, to theological realities, then at least to the thought and world of the authors. The Bible in the modern world does not just provide a text for discussion but puts us in touch with the world of faith of the men (Barr's language is pre-inclusive) who gave Christian and Jewish faith its classical shape. And faith can only continue to be recognizably Jewish or Christian by interacting positively with the tradition which they founded, and through it with the God of Israel and the historical person of Jesus, however much it must also be faith for our world, based not just on the Bible but on the things we know and experience.