This book is descended from the Cadbury Lectures, delivered in the University of Birmingham as long ago as 1968. My early volume Old and New in Interpretation (1966) remains the basis of the vision now presented. The work in its present form is written as a sort of textbook, though the book has been expanded to contain much more material than one could cover in a single course of the normal kind. The work is a discussion of the whole idea of biblical theology, its possibilities and its prospects. It is neither a survey nor a history, though it includes some elements of both of these. If there is any one theme that runs through this work, it is the contested character of biblical theology, as it has been in this century. - Preface.