Canter Bridge

When an emerging generation of biblical scholars found themselves increasingly squeezed by what they perceived as the theological claustrophobia of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), the Institute for Biblical Research (IBR) was born to offer an alternative. While many of the IBR’s members continue to hold membership in the ETS, it is also true that many members opt instead to throw in their lot with the much broader Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).

This assortment of alphabet soups gathers each November in a rotating venue anchored by the SBL and—until a recent divorce—the American Association of Religion (AAR). Not coincidentally, the IBR meets just after ETS adjourns and as SBL is ramping up. Chronology follows ideology.

What has all this to do with the Bulletin for Biblical Research (BBR)? Everything, in fact.

The BBR is the house organ of the IBR, a vehicle for moderate biblical critics of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faith to ventilate a satisfyingly elevated level of biblical criticism, much of which has probably been circulated first to more prestigious journals, rejected, and then handed on to the discriminating editors of the BBR.

No sarcasm or demoting here. Honestly.

The BBR need not apologize for its content, which is uniformly of a high caliber. More importantly, the journal allows the kind of theological reflection by biblical critics which is rigidly marginalized in the elite journals.

From the humblest beginning, the IBR and its publication have gone from strength to strength in the last two decades. This is no arbitrary phenomenon. Rather, it is an expression of the enormous strength that has accrued to the neo-evangelical movement as dividend on having sent its best young scholars to the world’s finest universities for doctoral studies. While this may seem a self-evident move, it was not so to the fathers (and the occasional mother) of the movement back when North American evangelicalism was just beginning to feel confident enough to step beyond defensive theology and its institutional barrio.

It is now commonplace to discover that the very best scholars in any given subspecialty of biblical studies adhere to historic biblical convictions. More often than not, those individuals are members of IBR and publishing (some of) their work in BBR.