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Michael S. Northcott, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment. By Margaret Barker., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 62, Issue 1, April 2011, Pages 253–255, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flr051
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Margaret Barker is a fascinating scholar who writes books that are a gift to the preacher. Her account of Temple theology is an original, insightful, and profoundly biblical and liturgical way of reading the Old Testament, and in this present work, the New Testament as well. She works as an independent scholar, outside the academy, for Patriarch Bartholomew, and she is a Methodist lay preacher. It may well be that this independent stance, combined with her experience as a preacher, have played crucial roles in the discoveries she has made into the meaning of the Old Testament when read through the rituals and practices of the Temple. But crucial also was her experience of Orthodox worship. After attending an Orthodox church Dr Barker had the revelation that the physical shape of the worship of the Orthodox bore remarkable analogies with Temple worship in the Old Testament. And thus she was set on her lifelong project to uncover the rich and often hidden layers of meaning in the texts of the Bible through a profound study of the Temple itself and its pattern of worship.
