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Methods of Theological Discovery · Theological and Canonical Approaches

Biblical Theology as Historical Description

This position, argued by James Barr, holds that biblical theology should be a descriptive, historical account of what the biblical writers and communities believed, rather than a normative synthesis constructed for the church.

Also called: Barr's descriptive biblical theology, Historical-descriptive model.

The Core Assumption

Meaning lives in the historical settings of the texts, so biblical theology is first of all an accurate description of many ancient theologies.

The Four Assumptions

Where meaning lives
Meaning lives in what the ancient texts meant in their own historical settings, and any theological use today is a second, separate step that must not be confused with the first.
What the text is
The text is a library of historically conditioned religious documents containing many theologies, not one theology awaiting synthesis.
Who may interpret
The authorized interpreter of the descriptive task is the historically trained scholar, whatever his or her personal faith, using publicly checkable methods.
What counts as a good reading
A reading is adequate when it describes accurately what the text's authors and communities believed, in their own terms, without importing later doctrine.

Genealogy

This method arose in the 20th c period (Developed across Barr's career, stated fully in 1999).

Key proponents: James Barr, Krister Stendahl, Heikki Räisänen.

Key texts: The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective by James Barr; The Bible and the Future by Anthony C. Thiselton, engaging Barr; Meanings and Parts of the Bible summarized in Stendahl's encyclopedia article on biblical theology.

The Procedure

These are the same steps The Workshop will walk you through.

  1. Describe before evaluating

    Write out what the text meant for its own community before asking what it should mean now, and keep the two accounts visibly separate.

    Why this step matters: Stendahl's distinction between what the text meant and what it means, which Barr endorsed, is the method's founding discipline.

    How to do it: Use two headings, meant and means, and refuse to let vocabulary from the second column leak into the first.

    What goes wrong here: Smuggling modern doctrinal categories into the description while claiming neutrality.

    You record: A description of the text's original theology. Done well when: A reader from another faith, or none, could accept the description as historically fair.

  2. Map the diversity of theologies

    Compare the text's theology with other biblical theologies and mark agreements, developments, and outright tensions.

    Why this step matters: Description on this model expects plurality and treats it as data, not as a problem to be harmonized.

    How to do it: Chart the positions of the relevant sources or books on the topic and resist ranking them by later orthodoxy.

    What goes wrong here: Quietly privileging the theology that later became normative and describing the others as immature versions of it.

    You record: A map of the theologies in view. Done well when: At least one genuine tension between biblical theologies is recorded without harmonization.

  3. Check the linguistic evidence

    Examine the key words and concepts in their original languages and historical usage before building theological claims on them.

    Why this step matters: Barr's earlier work on biblical semantics destroyed the habit of deriving theology from word roots, and description must honor that lesson.

    How to do it: Use lexica and concordances to establish how terms actually function in sentences, and distrust etymological arguments.

    What goes wrong here: Building a theology of a concept from a word study that confuses words with concepts.

    You record: A linguistic check on key terms. Done well when: Claims rest on usage in context, not on roots or on the history of a word.

  4. Hand over to constructive theology explicitly

    If you move from description to present-day theology, mark the move and own the judgments involved as yours or your church's.

    Why this step matters: The model does not forbid normative theology; it forbids disguising it as description.

    How to do it: State plainly which described theologies you are appropriating, which you are setting aside, and on what grounds.

    What goes wrong here: Presenting a confessional choice as though the historical evidence compelled it.

    You record: An explicit account of the move from meant to means. Done well when: The grounds for appropriation are stated as judgments, not as discoveries.

Inputs Required

  • Texts read in their historical and linguistic contexts
  • Knowledge of the range of theologies across the biblical corpus
  • Willingness to report tensions without resolving them

Outputs Produced

  • A descriptive account of what biblical communities believed
  • A map of the plurality of biblical theologies on a topic
  • A clear separation between historical description and present theological construction

Quality Criteria

Under this method, a good reading is one that meets these tests:

  • The description is recognizable as fair by scholars who do not share the interpreter's faith
  • Diversity and tension within the Bible are reported without harmonization
  • Linguistic claims rest on usage in context rather than etymology

Common Errors

  • Claiming descriptive neutrality while selecting evidence confessionally
  • Treating description as though it were the whole theological task
  • Deriving concepts from word histories against Barr's semantic critique

Strengths

  • It enforces honesty about the Bible's internal diversity
  • It protects historical scholarship from confessional control of its conclusions
  • Its semantic discipline permanently improved the field's handling of biblical language

Weaknesses and Critics

  • Pure description cannot tell the church what to preach, so the method needs supplementing by its own admission
  • The meant and means distinction is cleaner in theory than in practice, since description itself involves selection
  • It can leave readers with an archive of ancient beliefs and no account of why they should matter

Brevard S. Childs: Childs argued that a merely descriptive biblical theology abandons the church's actual Bible, the canon, and that Barr's alternative leaves theology with historical fragments instead of Scripture. (Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (1992))

Francis Watson: Watson contended that the fact and value, or meant and means, separation Barr relies on cannot be sustained, because all interpretation already involves the interpreter's constructive interests. (Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (1997))

Internal Schools

Stendahl's encyclopedic model: This school frames descriptive biblical theology as a public, encyclopedic enterprise whose results any reader can use, whatever their subsequent theological moves.

Räisänen's history-of-religions development: This school extends description into a full history of early Christian thought, including trajectories beyond the canon, and questions whether biblical theology should exist as a separate discipline at all.

Exemplar Readings

Describing Paul's Theology without a Center (The Pauline letters read comparatively): The reading describes justification, participation in Christ, and apocalyptic themes as they actually appear letter by letter, refuses to elect one as the center, and records the tensions among them as the descriptive result.

Old Testament Theologies in the Plural (Deuteronomy, Priestly material, and Wisdom literature compared): The reading sets out three distinct theological configurations, covenantal, cultic, and creational, shows where they conflict, and declines to synthesize them into a single Old Testament theology.

What This Method Cannot Do

This method cannot generate the church's normative teaching, because by design it stops at describing what was believed and hands every question of present obligation to a different discipline. It also cannot deliver a value-free description, since selecting what to describe is itself an interpretive act, a point its own practitioners concede in practice.

Site Stance

The site has not yet assigned its stance on this method. The stance assignments wait on the named reviewers, the same naming the Christian Assessment verdicts wait on. The method stands here in full in the meantime: a stance discloses the site's judgment, and it never filters what a reader may read or run. The stance values and their criteria stand on the criteria page.

Run This Method in the Workshop

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Across the Site

This method belongs to the Theological and Canonical Approaches family. Its sources stand in the References register; its family stands among the site's tools; the positions it produces can be compared in the Diptych.

Primary Sources

  • The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective by James Barr (1999)
  • The Semantics of Biblical Language by James Barr (1961)

Secondary Sources

  • Biblical Theology in Crisis by Brevard S. Childs (1970), as the position Barr opposed
  • Beyond New Testament Theology by Heikki Räisänen (1990)

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