than self-reflective understanding. Introduction served to distance rather than to mediate the text. The biblical theology movement for its part marked a massive defection from the objectivist paradigm. That it was unable completely to free itself from that paradigm is no judgment on its value. In every revolution the thesis lives on in the antithesis for a time. What Brevard Childs chronicles as the crisis of biblical theology7 is in fact its desperate opportunity to take the next step forward