Those Incomprehensible British Fundamentalists: Part Three

Last of three parts.

The heresy label is no longer a ‘functionally useful instrument.’

What does modern criticism affirm about God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible? The updated theology proposed by Professor James Barr of Oxford ought to interest religious observers everywhere, for his claims have far-reaching implications.

Sweeping innovations in traditional theology are inevitable, says Barr, who in derision tacks the term “fundamentalism,” the title of his latest book, on the present evangelical upsurge. “Modern theology and the critical study of the Bible have initiated, and are initiating, massive changes in the way Christians understand the Bible, God and Jesus Christ,” Barr writes (p. 185). Major alterations may be in prospect concerning “belief in God, the understanding of Christ, the character of faith, the ethical demands of Christianity” (p. 186). According to Barr, the scope of impending theological revision is so extensive that the heresy label is no longer a “functionally useful instrument” for evaluating theological opinions.

Barr deplores the mainstream Christian tendency to take biblical texts “as a close transcript of divine reality” instead of only fallible approximations (p. 334). By emphasizing “veracity as significance” rather than as correspondence with reality, he can find truth in myth as readily as in historical fact.

What does Barr tell us about the new image of God? He repudiates the traditional view that God operates out of what he calls “a static perfection” and declares instead that God’s nature is imperfect, vacillating, changing (p. 277). (If that be so, it is difficult to tell by what standard of perfection Barr measures the deity and, moreover, just what God is or will be.) The Bible presents God, in Barr’s opinion, as one who “can change his mind,” “regret what he has done,” and be “argued out of positions he has already taken up” (p. 277). (Strange, then, that a twentieth-century scholar would think the ancient writings still give some significant clue to his nature.) Through their “historical approach to reality,” biblical criticism and modern theology have enabled us to escape from the Greek misrepresentations of an essentially perfect God, says Barr.

Barr rejects a God who works miracles only in some times and places (p. 253), although he does profess to believe in the resurrection “in some sense.” He thinks we best preserve biblical miracles by considering them highly unlikely (p. 236). (A reader might find that it takes a bigger miracle than the whale’s swallowing Jonah to digest Barr’s assurances that liberal critics don’t allow their assumptions about the supernatural to influence historical-literary judgments [p. 236].) Indeed, Barr openly states that all historical as well as literary questions “should be treated as a matter of normal human relations” (p. 237). Predictive prophecy is rejected on the ground that “exact knowledge of future events” implies “divine determinism” and “a dictation view of inspiration” (pp. 255 f.).

We therefore shouldn’t be surprised when Barr tells us that theology should not set out “from the idea of an antecedent ‘revelation,’ the communication of which is the essential function of scripture.” Revelation “would not … be the first and initiatory article in statements of Christian belief: in other words, authority is not the first thing to be stated nor the thing from which all else has to be derived” (p. 288). Barr’s new theology for contemporary man therefore clouds the priority of God in his’ revelation and God’s sovereign authority in his Word; it also forfeits, as we shall see, the cognitive validity of Jesus’ teaching and the doctrinal reliability of the Bible.

Barr does not stop with merely revising the historic Christian view of God. “Christological orthodoxy has to go too,” he declares (p. 172). He demands more emphasis on Jesus’ humanity and implies that a shared human nature requires fallibility (p. 214). “It may well be,” Barr writes, “that any formulation that would satisfy our present understanding” of the person of Christ “would be unorthodox or heretical in terms of the ancient discussions” (p. 172).

For barr, Jesus’ teaching has no permanent validity. Jesus, he says, did not teach “eternally correct information”; rather, his teaching is “time-bound and situation-bound” (p. 171). Jesus’ teaching is “functional” in character: “what he taught was not eternal truth valid for all times and situations, but personal address concerned with the situation of Jesus and his hearers at that time” (p. 171). Barr deplores the invocation of Jesus’ “personal and spiritual authority” in support of Moses’ or Daniel’s or Isaiah’s authorship of certain Old Testament books. If, as Barr insists, Jesus’ teaching is time-bound and culture-bound, none of his statements about anything is permanently valid.

Barr calls in fact for a critical view of scriptural “truth and meaning” (p. 159) with a “quite different way of looking at the Bible, and at truth” (p. 160). He does not consider the Bible to be a unified theological corpus, and he disowns those who invoke it to establish doctrinal positions (p. 78). But he nonetheless appeals to the Bible without apology when decrying evangelical convictions and emphases (p. 107). According to Barr, the Bible is a collection of traditions; in it are legends, history, history-like matter, ethical reflection and guidance, and doctrine that originally was considered definitive of pure religion (p. 180).

In the past, Barr acknowledges, Christians believed the Bible in whole and part to be the “Word of God” (pp. 180 f.). But “historical and critical investigation” now requires a different view (p. 263).

Although he insists that most theologians would gladly agree that “scripture should be received as authoritative” (p. 163), Barr deplores the fact that evangelicals make scriptural authority the supreme theological concern. Just what he means by biblical authority deserves our attention. But first we should note that he thinks nonfundamentalists were wrong in attacking fundamentalists for interpreting the Bible literally and for insisting on verbal inspiration. Before we read too much into such “recantations,” however, we should be aware that, much as he reformulates the conception of scriptural authority, Barr restores these emphases in a quite nonevangelical way.

Barr concedes that modernist hostility to the fundamentalist emphasis on the literal meaning of the Bible resulted from a deliberate, ill-advised effort to embarrass fundamentalists (p. 54). Yet Barr disowns the literal truth of the Bible and sets the critics and himself up as the guardians of its literal meaning. Evangelicals he depicts, meanwhile, as more interested in inerrancy than in literal sense; he cites their acceptance of an age-theory of creation, for example, and of telescoped genealogies in the patriarchal era. (An evangelical observer finds it remarkable to hear that the literal interpretation of what Moses said is what J, P, or D really means.)

Barr thinks, moreover, that nonfundamentalists erred in rejecting conservative insistence on verbal inspiration, an emphasis he declares “not … unreasonable” (p. 287). (But evangelicals believe the doctrine, says Barr, only because the Bible presumably teaches it [pp. 260 f., 268]—as if logical consistency meant no more to evangelicals than it does to many recent nonevangelicals.) This renewed emphasis on inspiration differs decidedly from the historic evangelical view, however, and in two important ways: (1) Barr expressly repudiates the connection of divine inspiration with inerrancy (pp. 167, 188) and any insistence that inspiration is the source from which the Bible’s authority derives (p. 299); and (2) he extends inspiration far beyond the canonical scriptures.

Evangelicals, says Barr, will probably never find a stronger formulation of biblical inerrancy than B. B. Warfield’s view (p. 303). He predicts that mediating evangelicals who compromise one track or another of scriptural inerrancy will “have cause to worry about the integrity of their position and the chances of its future viability” (p. 303).

Barr says the Bible is errant in doctrinal as well as ethical, historical, and scientific matters (p. 313). He caricatures the evangelical concern for “objectivity” that places “the centre of authority … beyond the range of human opinion altogether” (p. 311). Second Timothy 3:16 and Second Peter 1:20–21, he contends, will not bear the weight of an inerrancy doctrine; they cannot be expressly coordinated with the present canon. What’s more, he assigns Second Timothy and Second Peter to postapostolic sources (pp. 78 f.). According to Barr, the evangelical argument for inerrancy is a philosophical one: God is perfect, and any scriptures he inspired would therefore be perfect (p. 277). Barr opts for the least worthy alternative, namely, that the God of the Bible is less than all-perfect and inspired an errant Bible (p. 277). He criticizes the clergy who imply that the Gospels give us “real incidents and actual words of Jesus” (p. 335). He resists the “craving for a Bible which at least in parts would be infallible and historically accurate” and deplores the evangelical notion that errorlessness means principally “correspondence with reality and events.”

Inspiration, albeit errant, Barr extends to include oral tradition—its recording, copying, addition of exegetical comments, editing by redactors, and translation as one total complex (p. 297). In this broader context he quite willingly speaks of the Bible as “inspired,” even as “verbally inspired” (vowel pointings also). Since inspiration here extends to supposed late redactors, why exclude biblical critics who have uncovered J, D, P, and E (and those who now have doubts about E)? Why not include interpreters of the Koran or of the Book of Mormon no less than interpreters of the Bible? It is not surprising that Barr should declare inspiration “in the end … not very important” (p. 209); the essential thing is “that the fundamentalist concept of verbal inspiration be totally dismantled” (p. 289).

Whatever else Barr says about the Bible, he clearly does not make the church answerable to Scripture; rather he considers “the doctrine of Scripture … a special part of the doctrine of the church” (p. 288). He criticizes even Roman Catholic theology for defending traditional authorships and historical and scientific aspects of the Bible instead of viewing the Bible as “only one part of the total tradition of the church,” the totality of which, he says, is only a theological “witness to God and Jesus Christ” (p. 106). This approach, adds Barr, would give “substantial freedom to biblical criticism”; any alteration it requires in the church’s dogmatic structure would be considered “legitimate and necessary” (p. 107). To evaluate Scripture is a prerogative Barr assigns to “the community of the church,” and, in his view, no segment of that community is more competent to make this evaluation than modern biblical critics like himself.

Barr wavers between emphasizing critical consensus (when this consensus coincides with his own views) and emphasizing the necessary tentativeness of critical investigation (when this deflates evangelical claims). Not the slightest doubt tinges his certainty (except regarding E) over late editorial redaction of the Pentateuch; evangelicals who dispute the theory (nonevangelical dissenters like Umberto Cassuto and Cyrus Gordon are ignored) he deplores as threats to the critical enterprise. Barr stresses that whether we deal with the simpler Marcan narratives or the more developed Johannine theology, what the Gospels put before us is “the interpretation of Jesus given by such and such a current within the early church” (p. 335); the implication is that the historical factuality of the Gospel record is in doubt. In his disdain for conservative views Barr debunks the authority even of William F. Albright, who more significantly than Barr has influenced the recent current of biblical thought. Barr insists that while critical scholarship may from time to time veer in more conservative directions, “it is probable that the main trend in both theology and biblical study has long passed a point of no return, where arguments arising from traditional conservatism cease to have relevance or interest …” (p. 338). The link he insists upon between historical criticism and modern theology depends on a biased formulation that apparently commits him to reject certain conclusions.

Barr proposes to reconstruct the ecumenical community in such a way that evangelicals who link the Christian faith with “a certain kind of intellectual apologetic” are excluded (p. 339). He deplores an “apparatus or argument” that replaces faith with a “dependence on rational use of evidence” and that takes inerrancy—especially of the historical details of the Bible—as the primary guarantee of scriptural authority, instead of associating faith with “the religious functioning of the Bible.” He would slam the ecumenical door on those who will not “compromise with other currents of theology,” especially contemporary biblical criticism (p. 339).

Pervading this mood is an antifundamentalist dogmatism that reflects the very arrogance Barr scorns among fundamentalists. While he lashes out against evangelicals who brashly write off theological opponents (pp. 162 f., 308, 324), he boldly declares fundamentalist doctrine and apologetic “completely wrong” (p. 8). He questions whether fundamentalists belong in the church, disapproves their appointment to educational faculties, and laments the increasing evangelical impact on professional biblical circles. Such declarations may be but the tip of an emerging iceberg of antifundamentalist animus and antievangelical hostility in contemporary ecumenism.

Evangelicals do not, of course, reject “the religious functioning of the Bible.” What they reject is the practice of reducing the Bible’s authoritative function to its life-transforming impact alone and, of pushing aside its role as the bearer of divinely revealed ideas (propositional truths guaranteed by God). In Barr’s view, the Bible functions authoritatively, not as a channel of objective revelatory information, but only in the dynamic trust of the church. However, there is one significant rider: In Barr’s personal response, Scripture apparently does function cognitively to stigmatize fundamentalists as outcasts. This introduces into the ecumenical community an intolerance that automatically excludes innumerable Christians since apostolic times and that gives neoprotestant theologians the keys to the kingdom. Heresy is no longer considered a significant concept except under one circumstance, that is, where it “Barrs” a consistent evangelical alternative. Surely an ecumenical inclusivism that welcomes evangelical Christianity only if it subscribes to neoprotestant theology and to modern critical dogmas loses the right to call itself either ecumenical or Christian.

For barr, Scripture is a witness to “what happened” when its writers came into personal “contact with God” (p. 299). Its authority is only functional, and this it wields by correlating its witness with the inner transformation of the believer; the cognitive role of the Bible as a bearer of trustworthy objective information and of revealed doctrines is stripped away. As a result, error in the Bible is for Barr a matter of indifference.

To limit the Bible to this merely functional impact raises great, staggering problems. The functionalists can proffer no objective reasons why the Bible ought to sustain a redemptive experience of God in Christ, or why such an experience ought to be found in Christ alone; they cannot even insist that God or Christ objectively exists. Their theory can provide no logical basis for challenging contradictory responses in different lives. Nor can it validate any objective authority for Scripture; according to this theory only those portions of the Bible that function transformingly are considered authoritative, and they only when they function in this way, while whatever literature that may similarly function transformingly may equally well be considered Scripture.

In Barr’s projection of the new theology as an alternative to fundamentalism, what if anything remains of the apostolically proclaimed faith? The emphasis on transformed creaturehood surely is central to the New Testament (cf. John 3:3; 2 Cor. 5:17). Certainly the Bible functions with life-renewing power in the lives of believers. But in the historical Christian view, Scripture operates in this way because of certain antecedent realities: the existence of the sovereign Creator-Redeemer authoritatively disclosed in his revelation; the incarnation, atonement, and bodily resurrection of Christ Jesus; the cognitively reliable witness to the Messiah borne by the uniquely inspired prophets and apostles; and the Spirit’s use of this witness to persuade and convict human beings. The scriptures are the objective propositional disclosure of the truth of God, and their universal and continuing function cannot be sustained apart from an acceptance of their divine inspiration and authority.

In the absence of revelatory doctrine, Barr’s theological perspective is understandably askew, except for the first article in his confession of faith, his whole-souled devotion to liberal criticism. For the rest of his confession, the most we get from Barr is, “We believe in the resurrection and in some degree in other miracles also” (p. 236); not even the content of these beliefs is clearly defined, as indeed it cannot be if Scripture functions noncognitively. Barr’s slim credo may commend itself to a small circle of critical scholars, but it is not likely to challenge a secular age or to provide a great commission for an already confused church. To win out over fundamentalist faith, Barr’s alternative would require more credulity than even many critical minds can muster. A world long deprived of ultimate truth may, to Barr’s surprise, show itself again—as in the apostolic age—more open to classic evangelical orthodoxy than are professional religionists.

Barr would like each generation to welcome the emergence of the new as a manifestation of God’s kingdom. This would suggest that future generations may view contemporary theology with much the same derision that neoprotestant theology now reserves for evangelical orthodoxy. But Barr is convinced that current critical thought somehow has a transcendent basis. Although extensive changes may be demanded of traditional theism, he thinks that “the rise of liberal theology or the rise of biblical criticism at the least may be positive elements in the movement of the world process towards its consummation” (p. 340). Barr believes that although the Bible, in view of its supposed theological disharmony and noncognitive function, cannot accredit evangelical views, it nonetheless can somehow confer cognitive dignity on his alternative: “The liberal quest is in principle a fully legitimate form of Christian obedience in the church, and one that has deep roots … even within the Bible itself” (p. 344).

It must be exasperating to those who hold this view of historical progress that in recent decades many radically novel critical theories have fallen by the wayside while the growing evangelical movement is putting the remaining nonevangelical alternatives increasingly on the defensive. Barr may see in these developments a resurgence of fundamentalism, as he derisively calls it. In reality, modern man is clearly turning aside from the obscure and ever-shifting caprices of liberal criticism and grasping once again for at least a few basic fundamentals of biblical faith.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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