Jim Packer on Austin Farrer

As part of remembering J. I. Packer, who recently went to be with the Lord, we are sharing his entries from the New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, and giving away the ebook of his classic Concise Theology.

FARRER, AUSTIN MARSDEN (1904–68)

A graduate in ‘Greats’ (classics and phil osophy) and theo logy, chaplain of St Edmund Hall, 1931–5, and of Trinity College, 1935–60, and warden of Keble 1960–68, Farrer was a brilliant Christian thinker of quintessential Oxford type.

His prolific writings on philosophy, theology, and NT exegesis show an inde pend ent, lucid, agile, argumentative and articu late mind, fastidiously whimsical, witty in the matter of a metaphysical poet, *Newmanesque in sensitivity, incantatory in expression, and committed to a rational credal orthodoxy. He embodied a devotionally robust Anglican catholicism comparable to that of his peers, Kenneth Kirk (1886–1954), E. L. Mascall (1905–93) and C. S. *Lewis. He is difficult to read, for his informality of style, alternately musing and leaping, gives an appearance of waywardness to his tightest arguments.

His philo sophical theology (Finite and Infinite, 1943; The Freedom of the Will, 1957; Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited, 1961; Faith and Speculation, 1964) has roots in both the substance­phil osophy of medieval *scho las ticism and the modern *meta physics of action and clarification, based on linguistic usage (see *Religious language). His exegesis of Matthew, Mark and Revelation is heavily (some would say, fantastically) typological. In The Glass of Vision, 1948, he argued for *images rather than sentences as bearers of God’s revealed truth.

Select Bibliography

C. C. Conti (ed.), Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology (London, 1972); P.  Curtis, A Hawk among Sparrows: A Biography of Austin Farrer (London, 1985); J. C. Eaton, The Logic of Theism: Analysis of the Thought of Austin Farrer (Lanham, 1983); J. C. Eaton and A. Loades (ed.), For God and Clarity: New Essays in Honor of Austin Farrer (Pittsburgh, 1983); D. Hein and E. H. Henderson
(eds.), Captured by the Crucified: The Practical Theology of Austin Farmer (London, 2004).

J. I. Packer