The name Austin Farrer invokes considerably different connotations depending on the context. For some, he is a refreshing alternative to various forms of nineteenth and twentieth-century Redaktionsgeschichte as applied to the study of the canonical Gospels. For others, he is a daring voice within contemporary theodicy, avoiding traditional dichotomies with an innovative philosophy of materiality. Still for others, he was the friend and sometime pastor to C.S. Lewis. In this final connection, Farrer was a masterful Anglican preacher adapted to the intellectual demands of an Oxford desperately trying to stay ahead of the shifts in global higher education during the 1960s. The genius of the present volume under review is that it brings together each of these facets into a whole rarely glimpsed. The Farrer who dared to read the text of the Gospel of Mark as a sophisticated literary construction is the same Farrer who conceived a philosophy of divine action based on double or cooperative agency. Indeed, as he put it in the preface of his 1948 Bampton lectures which would be published as The Glass of Vision, ‘Scripture and metaphysics are equally my study, and poetry is my pleasure’. This is not a banal self-reference to wide reading habits. It is an epistemological point, verging on a Romantic aesthetics, about the cooperation between rational and imaginative modes of perceiving the divine and its action in the world. Bockmuehl and Platten have put together a volume that serves as an ideal introduction to this remarkable thinker, which brings to light fresh explorations of his well-known positions.
The volume contains four essays by contemporary scholars covering the various disciplines where Farrer made his mark. They derive from a symposium commemorating Farrer at Keble college in January 2019. Following these essays are four hitherto unpublished lectures given by Farrer while on a lecture circuit at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. The four lectures in this volume are not the only lectures he gave on this North American visit (there is, for example, the LSU lecture ‘The Prior Actuality of God’, printed in Reflective Faith, 1972). As such they were given very close to his death and so may be viewed as mature products of the shift that occurred throughout his career under the influence of process theology. They are vintage Farrer: trenchant, digressive, acerbic, eye-to-the-main-chance. The titles reveal Farrer’s penchant for reducing complex theological problems to the form of simple questions: ‘Something Has Died on Us: Can it Be God?’ (pp. 103-18); ‘How Far Is Christian Doctrine Reformable? (pp. 119-33); ‘Bultmann and All That’ (pp. 134-50); ‘Does Social Structure Bow to Christian Morals, or Vice Versa?’ (pp. 151-67). The editors do not offer much by way of contextualizing these lectures, so it is difficult to imagine the situation in which they were delivered. Regardless of the precise academic context, readers will not have difficulty recognizing some of the unique features of his voice. Farrer’s sweeping style is unhindered by the now nearly obligatory gesture of providing a precise status quaestionis. In this regard, he will sweep a Bultmann or an Aquinas under the rug with a concise paragraph aimed at what he views is the very kernel of their thinking. He permits himself room for personal anecdotes, elaborate analogies, and gospel or credo paraphrases. The volume creates coherence between the introductory essays and the four Farrer lectures in some significant ways.
A detailed account of Farrer’s life as warden at Keble College Oxford sheds light on the hectic and demanding internal pressures of college life, from election committees to fundraising. The key of this era is the widening of participation in higher education (p. 26). Ian Archer’s introductory essay shows a remarkably consistent Farrer throughout this important shift. A nice compliment to the biographical section of this book is the introductory space of Judith Wolfe’s essay on Farrer and Lewis. There we are reminded of his close relationship to Lewis and his wife Joy, who died of cancer in 1960. Wolfe explores Lewis’s admiration for Farrer’s preaching. Most intriguing, however, is their common interest in the philosophy of language and myth, rooted in the belief that communication is fundamentally imaginative and analogical (p. 78). In this debate Wolfe highlights an important passage in Farrer’s ‘Can Myth Be Fact’ that opens up his philosophy of divine action: ‘God has what is really absolute freedom to shape historical events into an expression of his divine meaning’ (p. 80). The theme emerges again in his lecture from the present volume, ‘How Far Is Christian Doctrine Reformable?’ He opines, ‘Never mind [G.K. Chesterton] … let [myth] go … the Christian tradition has at various times picked up false stories’ (p. 129). Thus ‘the abandonment of parabolic or figurative expressions descriptive of the facts, which people no longer find meaningful’ is part of the Church’s constant engagement in ‘rethinking our tradition and winnowing out the chaff, and retesting it by its origins’ (p. 130). What is it that Farrer found essential in the traditional ways of describing God’s binding himself in special ways to human history and materiality?
Michael Floyd’s essay on theodicy offers further insight. Here the reader gains a sense of Farrer as a pioneering analytical theologian. Classical theodicy proposes that evil is either inimical or instrumental to the purposes of God. Farrer cut through this dichotomy by boldly suggesting that evil is inevitable given the divine processes of action in a material universe (p. 56). The brilliance of Farrer’s third way lies in his two-fold understanding of physicality and its constraints. First, Floyd’s essay shows, physical creatures strive to absolutize themselves, to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ as it were, within a complex web of corresponding rivalries and interferences. Second, precisely insofar as they are physical, creatures are ‘screened’ from the divine, the absolute vision of which would otherwise pull them in by its glory like a vortex. The clash of these systems, particularly the former system of creaturely absolutization, brings as its necessary corollary an inevitably destructive element. While none of the lectures address theodicy as their central theme, Farrer’s concepts of divine action and materiality are present.
‘Something Had Died on Us’ offers an intriguing perspective on the problem. The lecture asks how we can frame the action of God in a world in which man is now capable of transgressing the limits of the visible cosmos. He wishes to question the utility of cosmic rationalism as a model, whether it be that of Thomas Aquinas or more recently in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The biblical account suggests, in Farrer’s mind, a rather different picture: ‘God had made the world and seen it to be good, but he was going to smash it, that was the essential point’ (p. 115). This rather startling formulation is classic Farrer, and it serves an important purpose. In distinction from a model of divine action in which the material cosmos manifests a geometrical progressive development, Farrer insisted that New Testament eschatology implied the process of ‘realizing in human existence the life of Christ’ (p. 117). At this point his philosophy of materiality comes back into play: ‘so that he might associate us with Everlasting Deity, making us partakers hereafter of the Vision of God in an existence of infinite resource which could never pall’. With language evidently reminiscent of Thomistic metaphysics, Farrer masterfully interweaves his conception of what Conti has called ‘cosmic personalism’ as an answer to the problem of finite and infinite matter, conceived as the stage upon which the drama of salvation ensues. This book teems with such connections between introductory essay, Farrer’s lectures and the philosophical themes for which Farrer is more widely known.
Mark Goodacre shows a similarly penetrating Farrer at work in his contributions to Gospel studies. Form-criticism, at its best, sought to isolate the dogmatic priorities of the earliest traditions regarding the life of Jesus. Farrer saw problems with the designation of units of oral preaching, for this methodology tended to apply to Christian origins the ‘intellectual standards borrowed from our contemporary situation’ (p. 135), as he exposes in his ‘Bultmann’ lecture. The point had been made before Farrer and many times after. But few willing to point out this dilemma had the rigour to propose another approach. Farrer had such rigour. In fact rigour is precisely what Farrer attributed to the gospel writers. Instead of archivists embedding Sayings-traditions into sparsely connected narrative snippets, Farrer viewed the gospel writers, especially Mark and Luke, as careful authors (p. 40). His work on Matthew and Mark in the early 1950s thus culminates with his 1955 essay ‘On Dispensing with Q’. To assert Luke as a careful author is to open the possibility that Luke could have read, interpreted, and innovated upon Matthew and Mark without a source now lost to us (p. 45). Goodacre’s essay contextualizes the significance of this common-sense solution both in Farrer’s oeuvre and the climate of Gospel studies to which he belonged. Farrer’s ‘dispensing’ solution opens the way for a simplistic literary history of the fourfold gospels, and coheres with his wider beliefs about Scripture inspiring Scripture, a view harboured by much subsequent biblical scholarship and theological hermeneutics.
‘Have we always to fight the old battles over again?’ Farrer wonders this at one point in his work on Mark. But it is an epigram that may be applied to much of Farrer’s intellectual achievements, which abound in courage as much as in ingenuity. For Farrer was not only willing to cross disciplinary boundaries in ways that are almost inconceivable today. He possessed also the uncanny ability to strip ideas and doctrines of their external garb and present them in lucid form in order to improve upon them, restate their uncompromising simplicity, or recast them for our understanding today. With the lectures in this volume, Bockmuehl and Platten have placed in our hands a resource that makes ideal seminary and theological studies reading material, and for those specially interested in Farrer, indispensable new texts with which to think.
