His area of specialized scholarship was that of Ancient Near East Wisdom Literature, particularly the Psalms and the Book of Job, as well as a study of theological unity in the Bible.

[10] Elected as Secretary of the Faculty at UTS, Terrien shared in the lively intellectual atmosphere of the post-war period that put that institution at the forefront of liberal and neo-orthodox Protestantism.

His fellow faculty members included the prominent theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich as well as Raymond E. Brown, Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, Henry Sloane Coffin, James Muilenberg, Wilhelm Pauck, Cyril Richardson, Paul Scherer and Robert McAfee Brown.

[11] He participated in the open ecumenical atmosphere among many of the institutions in Morningside Heights which included frequent and lively interchanges with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

[14] Interested in the arts and their theological interpretations, from plays to modern paintings, poetry and music,[15] he published many articles, commentaries and critical reviews of a wide variety of books and scholarly articles as well as contemporary popular plays such as JB (Archibald MacLeish), Tiny Alice (Edward Albee) and Equus (Peter Shaffer).

Upon his retirement in 1975 he and his wife Sara moved to Washington, Connecticut, and later to West Newton, Massachusetts, where he died in 2002 just after completion of a 1000-page manuscript, posthumously published as Commentary on the Psalms.

[16] He "entered into the world of the Bible through probing ancient secularism; he now found in its theocentrism, and its persistent quest for the presence of God in his absence, a voice for the new age.

[19] As Walter Brueggemann explains, "Terrien's main effort is to show that the sapiential and hymnic materials must be centrally included in an Old Testament theology.

[22] Terrien began early to explore a biblical theology, in both Old and New Testaments, that was unique in the ancient world and gave women as well as men an equal and full standing as humans.