Rav Breuer’s fundamental insight should be seen as highlighting the Torah's tendency to express the complexity of various concepts and narratives through repetition, ambiguity, and contradiction.
The "aspects approach" makes use of, and thereby recognizes in principle, the scholarly analysis of Wellhausen et al which exposed the contradictions and the independent ideas expressed in the various units, yet it explains the nature of the phenomenon in a radically different way. These contradictions are not the wondrous, unparalleled work of an anonymous editor, who joined together contradictory sources from different periods, managing to weave them into a reasonably coherent continuum, as well as succeeding in passing off his work to the Israelites as God's Torah. Instead of this improbable hypothesis, Rav Breuer presents a sober and logical explanation which views the contradictions as God's way of conveying the complexity that characterizes different realms in the Torah. This composition is indeed unparalleled and unprecedented – precisely because only God could have created it.
With regard to Sefer Devarim, there is no need to appeal to the aspects approach in order to resolve the abundant contradictions, since the great majority of the book is made up not of objective narration, but rather of Moshe's own lengthy speeches, thus the contradictions arise not between two textual units of the Torah, but rather between the words of the Torah and the words of Moshe as recorded in the Torah.
In light of this, there is no need to appeal to the "aspects approach" when discussing the contradictions between Devarim and other parts of the Torah, for it would be unwarranted to expect that a story told from an objective standpoint would be identical to a subjective account offered by someone who was part of that story.
Thus, the discrepancies between objective descriptions and subjective accounts in general should not be treated as contradictions. Rather, in each instance we need to examine the account and explain why the event is described from a subjective viewpoint, how it expresses the speaker's own perspective, and what is its role in the larger narrative.
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Edited by the HaTanakh Site team