Fundamentalism clearly is some kind of literalism, especially in biblical interpretation, a literalism sustained (for what are taken to be religious reasons) in the face of liberal amd critical reconstructions and reinterpretations of the text. In fact, of course, the critical reconstructions are often undertaken for equally religious motives. Fundamentalism expresses and exploits the worries of believers; the residually Christian popular audience takes the passion-play literalism of Zefirelli’s television film with the same uncommitted tolerance as the modernist musicals “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Fundamentalism is widely influential among some theologians too. From the time of the Modernist crisis to the run-up to Vatican II, the Biblical Commission and the Holy Office imposed something very like fundamentalism on Catholic biblical studies. Professor Barr’s book does not study such phenomena in detail, he is concerned with a Protestant fundamentalism of a more systematic kind, self-designated as conservative evangelicalism. But there is enough of a family likeness between the fundamentalisms for Barr’s critique to be serviceable in coming to terms with the recent past of Catholic biblical work, dead but not yet entirely prone.

There are three marks of the fundamentalism Barr has between his sights: the inerrancy of Scripture as an article of faith and necessary test of the orthodoxy of otherwise acceptable Protestantisms; sharp hostility to modern theology and biblical criticism; and exclusion of those who fail the inerrancy test from the ranks of true Christians, (p 1) Rightly, one begins to suspect that Barr has little sympathy for his subject, regarding it as a mistake in theology and a resistance to known critical truths. Barr has no hope of persuading fundamentalists to change their minds, though he does hope to help students make theirs up in more intelligent and deliberate fashion.