Austin Farrer on Revelation, Reason, Imagination, and Poetry

Austin Farrer was, according to Douglas Hedley in an essay in this collection, “arguably the greatest English theologian of the twentieth century.” Farrer was a fellow, chaplain, and lecturer in philosophical theology at Oxford, who had been educated in Greek and Latin and the history of philosophy at a time when logical positivism threatened to undermine the foundations of traditional Christian belief. When Farrer delivered the Bampton lectures at Oxford in 1948, he chose a subject that evidently went to the heart of his religious faith—namely divine and poetic inspiration. Farrer was provocative, modest, and inquiring. He displayed a willingness to consider views other than his own. His ideas, based on the contents of this book, continue to stimulate scholars as well as other readers with a wide variety of interests.

Farrer aspired, as he states at the beginning of his lectures, “not to make truth as narrow as the Church which professes it, but as high as the God who proclaims it.” He argues that a theology that equates the workings of human reason with supernatural revelation errs in one direction, while a theology that sees biblical texts alone as conveying divine revelation in an unmediated way errs in another. Neither reason nor the written word of God alone is sufficient. What is required, Farrer asserts, is that human reason and biblical revelation become indissolubly linked through the action of the Holy Spirit. Farrer’s own distinctive contribution to this formulation is his emphasis on the human imagination. He sees the employment of imagination as essential since God’s self-disclosure through the scriptures is often by means of images conveyed by words and phrases. These include kingdom of God, family of Israel, Son of Man, and Suffering Servant. Jesus used these images in an altered and enhanced way as recorded in the gospels of the New Testament. Such images thereby become the means of revelation as human beings contemplate them with divine assistance. The result is that, though God is still shrouded in mystery, human beings are enabled to apprehend something of Him in the universe: “Now we see through a glass darkly,” St. Paul wrote in I Corinthians 13:12, according to the King James Version. But the human imagination as assisted by the Holy Spirit is a powerful means of revelation. Farrer characterizes this means of apprehending God as “The Glass of Vision.”

Farrer’s stress on the role of imagination in discerning God leads him into the realm of poetry, particularly as found in the Bible. In ancient Israelite prophecy, those who spoke in God’s name to their contemporaries felt inwardly compelled to do so. Jeremiah attributed this overwhelming experience to God, who had kindled a burning fire within him. John, the author of the Book of Revelation, responded to a voice that commanded him to take up a book and devour it. In both cases, human beings are so imbued with a message expressed in images that they see it as imbued with divine authority. They are, suggests Farrer, inspired in a way that is analogous to the experience of post-Renaissance English poets. Farrer is not so much trying to describe the nature of English poetry as he is trying to illustrate a characteristic of biblical speech and writing when those who feel called to prophesy express a message that seems to come both from outside themselves and from their hearts and minds. We need to look to the example of romantic poetry, he suggests, to understand something of the mysterious energy and fecundity of images boiling up within the prophets, demanding expression.

Robert MacSwain, a theologian who has written extensively about Farrer, provides in this volume a scholarly commentary that includes very helpful footnotes. The footnotes are especially useful, since Farrer’s lectures were published without any indication of the writers he was drawing upon in his theological and literary analyses. MacSwain also adds a selection of essays about...