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Reflections On Thirty Years of Biblical Study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

W. D. Davies
W. D. Davies
Affiliation:
Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas 76109, U.S.A.
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Extract

For three decades I have lived in the United States. After the war-torn forties, there came the smug fifties, when Americans saw opportunities and the British difficulties; then the searing sixties, which, along with much that was very salutary, brought the tragic suffering of Vietnam and the horrendous human wreckage of the drug culture; followed by the sobering seventies and now the unpredictable eighties. It is tempting to ask how the developments in biblical and theological studies are related to the social, political and economic changes which those decades saw. But I must confine myself to my discipline.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 1986 , pp. 43 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1986

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References

page 48 note 1 Collingwood, R. G., Autobiography, Penguin Books, 1944, p. 77. See n. 3, p. 64.Google Scholar

page 55 note 2 Abridgements of vols. I–VI by D. C. Somervell, OUP., New York and London 1947.

page 64 note 3 The cultural relativism to which I refer above, but into the philosophical and metaphysical difficulties of which which I am not competent to enter, has best been expressed for biblical students by Nineham, D. E. in The Use and Abuse ofthe Bible (1976)Google Scholar, an honest, stimulating and provocative work to which I owe much, even though I cannot accept its main theses. The cultural relativism he describes has been much criticized. In the last resort his emphasis on this, even while he recognizes the radical changes since the Enlightenment, is paradoxical. On his view of culture, it is difficult to account for any radical change. See especially Barton, John, ‘Reflections on Cultural Relativism’, in Theology, March 1979, Vol. LXXXII, No. 686, pp. 103–109, and May 1979, Vol. LXXXII, No. 687, pp. 191–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar