In his series of lectures, Barr sets forth a biblical case for the legitimacy and reality of natural theology, which he defines as knowledge or understanding of truths about God available to humankind through the natural order. This, he asserts, contrasts with knowledge through ‘special’ revelation. In doing so, he confronts Barth and other modern theologians who maintain that there is no place for natural theology in a truly Christian revelational theology.
James Barr was born on 20 March 1924 in Glasgow, Scotland. An Old Testament scholar, he critiqued the idea that the Hebrew language reflected a particular theological mindset. After serving in the Royal Navy, he was ordained in 1951 and ministered in Israel. In 1953, he was appointed Professor of New Testament at The Presbyterian College, Montreal. Professor of Old Testament Literature at Edinburgh in 1955, he moved to Princeton Theological Seminary in 1961, followed by Manchester in 1964. His final posts were Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford until 1989 and Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt until 1998.
President of the Society for Old Testament Study in 1973 and of the British Association for Jewish Studies in 1978, he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science and Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1993. His 1977 book, Fundamentalism, confronted conservative evangelicalism. Other works include The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961), Old and New in Interpretation (1966), Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (1968), and The Concept of Biblical Theology (1999).
