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348 - Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer |
Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer
Edited By Brian Hebblethwaite and Edward Henderson
Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1990. 281 Pp. $39.95.
The essays comprising this book were selected from papers read at the Fourth International Conference on the Thought of Austin Farrer held in 1986 at Louisiana State University. As a collection of studies inspired by Farrer's thought, it is terribly uneven. Talent aside, the reason is obvious: some of the authors seem not to have been inspired by Farrer's philosophical theology. Because one's interest in this volume is presumably rooted in a desire to know something of Farrer's mind, this review will concentrate on the essays that best seem to express it.
First, though, a comment on the editors' introductory summary. One senses that Edward Henderson let Professor Hebblethwaite call the shots. The result isn't good. In fact Diogenes Allen, in what is arguably the most important essay in the book, shows clearly that Hebblethwaite's grasp of Farrer's thinking is tenuous. Those who
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350 - Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer |
believe, as Hebblethwaite apparently does, that Farrer's philosophical theology has inspired a pseudo-Aristotelian concentric circle model of divine providence or, to change theological schools, a sort of Gnostic descendency of God's action through an interposing number of immediacies, haven't done their homework.
The begins book with " 'We Know on our Knees': Intellectual, Imaginative and Spiritual Unity in the Thought of Austin Farrer" by Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford. He tells how Farrer's genius combined three talents, "... the sheer brilliance of intellect,... the quality of his imagination and thirdly the depth of his spirituality." Bishop Harries shows us how Austin Farrer's life reaffirmed a truth, nowadays too often forgotten even in seminaries, that theologizing without praying leads to bizarre results.
In "How an Eternal God Acts in Time," David Burrell explains how God does that without undergoing alteration. The Church Fathers insisted on this because they had read the letter of James (1:17), so, of course, Burrell is not being inspired by Farrer. He is, rather, extrapolating a basic premise that Farrer grappled with theologically but never abandoned. Newcomers to his writing must keep this in mind, especially given the unfortunate fact that some of Farrer's devotees want to pass him off as a process thinker. I sat in on Farrer's tutorials on Aquinas one year at Oxford; Farrer is about as much a process theologian as was St. Athanasius.
Rodger Forsman's "'Double Agency' and Identifying Reference to God" is the kind of clearly written exposition of Farrer on double agency from which lay people as well as professionals can benefit. More subjectivist than Farrer would allow-as when Forsman analyzes the act of loving in predominantly egocentric terms-this essay is a faithful explanation of what Farrer meant by the statement that God acts within us when we act. Marring his treatise is his use in argumentation on the intellectually snooty "we," as in "The metaphysical vocabulary of Aquinas no longer has any connection with what we now ordinarily and correctly understand as the explanation of things or events in the world." "We"? "Correctly"? The ad hominem is transparent; and anyone who is tempted to employ it should read M. B. Foster's " 'We' in Modern Philosophy," a companion essay to Farrer's "Revelation" in Faith and Logic (1957).
If I were challenged on a money-back basis to pick one essay worth the price of this book, I would choose "Faith and the Recognition of God's Activity" by Professor Allen, whose 51-page index of Farrer's main works concludes the book. In his essay, Allen suggests why Burrell's essay is important for cluing in to Farrer's metaphysics, and he corrects Hebblethwaite's understanding of Farrer's views on the role of the religious believer's reasons for believing something about God and the project of defending Christian theism. He then distills for the reader what is essential about the relation between mind and heart in Farrer's theology. "If one's heart were open," Allen writes in
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352 - Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer |
discussing God's blessings as an aspect of religious belief, "one might experience the blessings of the gospel. Then one might be able to recognize and respond to the evidence provided by the natural world's existence and order for divine agency and by history for his providential benevolence. To speak of the heart may seem to be remote to a philosophical defence of theism and Christian theism, so let us consider what Farrer says about the heart."
Let us indeed. For anyone wanting to know how to go about reading Farrer, that just-quoted paragraph is the best lead in the book. How so? Imagine beginning a sermon with: "Since God has shown me a ray of his goodness, I cannot doubt him on the grounds that someone has made up some new logical puzzles about him." Only a great preacher would dare to start this way.
Now imagine that that preacher were a great theologian, and one who would say, "Unless our minds in fact function in these two ways: unless we sometimes see God as truth, and evasion of him as credulity, at other times the proved facts of the special sciences as truth, and the outrunning of them as credulity-unless this is so, we are not confronted with the specifically religious problem of truth." Only a philosophical theologian of Farrer's calibre could even articulate that problem. But once he has done that for us, Bishop Harries and Rodger Forsman, David Burrell and Diogenes Allen can help us understand Farrer's solutions to it.
Is there a better reason for reading a book?
JOHN UNDERWOOD LEWIS
The University of Windso
r Windsor, Ontario, Canada