467 - People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in Christianity

People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in Christianity
By John Barton
Louisville, Westminster /John Knox, 1988. 96 pp. $6.95,

Barton, University Lecturer at Oxford and author of the widelyesteemed Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study has produced another crisp essay distinguished by wit and remarkable lucidity. This time, however, there is a polemical agenda: Barton rejects fundamentalist doctrines of biblical authority, as well as all proposals that the shaping of the canon has normative hermeneutical status. Barton contends that such views are supported neither by the interpretive practices of the earliest Christians, nor by the church's subsequent tradition. Instead, the Bible's fundamental role in Christian theology is a witness-bearing function: "the Bible as evidence" for historical events which are the locus of God's saving activity. Such a view requires critical interrogation of the history behind the text rather than superstitious reverence for the text itself. (For Barton, Theissen is the hermeneutical hero, Childs the villain.) Such views are hardly novel, but they are set forth here with concision and force, and with a certain Anglican reverse spin that emphasizes the role of the Bible in liturgy as hermeneutically central. (How the liturgical and historical uses of Scripture are to be coordinated is not explained.) A splendid starting point for discussions in seminary and church.

Richard B. Hays
Yale Divinity School
New Haven, Conn.