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This claim has found its unequivocal and powerful expression in the fact of the canon. But this is much clearer in Barth: Even if the individual reader is able, in light of his own understanding, to distinguish between the center and the periphery of the Bible, between what he “experiences” and something else that he has not “experienced,” between what in his judgment “promotes Christ,” as Luther put it, and something else where he judges such to be missing, the distinctions that result from such considerations may in no way have the character of distinctions in principle.

The stance each of them took to these issues bore directly on his actual achievement, of course, and also (or thus) on his characterization of God. A third issue also bore heavily, though variously, on both of the prior two: (c) the Old Testament’s relation to the New. Because especially Eichrodt and von Rad have had such enduring influence, and since, together with Vriezen and Wright, their work reflects so many of the contested choices facing Old Testament theology into the present, this introduction offers more-extensive exposition than do the introductions to parts 3–5.

Vriezen, G. Ernest Wright, and Gerhard von Rad— represent different, often competing efforts to revitalize Old Testament theology. Animating each of them was a concern, not only for the field of biblical theology, but especially for the theological substance of the Old Testament and thus, as they believed, for Christian faith and theology. As we shall see in these introductory paragraphs, two interrelated issues were of particular interest: (a) history, including both the historical character of the Old Testament (or of Israel’s religion) and the properly historical approach to its theological interpretation; (b) what, if anything, best captured the essence, the unifying force, or the theological center of the Old Testament (or of Israel’s religion).