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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2011
This article explores Austin Farrer's contribution to trinitarian theology, arguing that he grounds understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity in the life of prayer. While Farrer nowhere offers a systematic presentation of the believer's experience of the Trinity, an investigation of his writings, particularly his sermons and devotional works, reveals that it is precisely in prayer that he thinks the force of the doctrine is revealed to the believer. Beginning with Farrer's ‘empirical principle’, the idea that to know anything one must exercise one's relation to it, the article attempts to show how the act of praying constitutes a living out of the doctrine of the Trinity. Living in the Son entails an adoption of an attitude of sonship towards the Father, which Farrer describes most succinctly as an ‘active openness of heart’. This filial attitude, which Christ expressed humanly throughout his life, is adopted by believers through the Holy Spirit who, according to Farrer, is not an object of direct experience. In this, his trinitarian understanding of prayer differs from Sarah Coakley's, whose reflection on this topic serves as a point of comparison at various places throughout the article. Through Coakley's work, the trinitarian nature of prayer has become a theme in contemporary theology. Thus, this article is aimed at more than simply illuminating a somewhat neglected aspect of Farrer's thought; it is also an attempt to contribute to an ongoing, constructive conversation about the Trinity in the life of faith.
1 The idea has been particularly emphasised by Tanner, Kathryn in God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar and Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001).
2 Saving Belief (New York: Morehouse-Barlow Co, 1964), p. 128.
3 Ibid., p. 129.
4 Oliver, Simon, ‘The Theodicy of Austin Farrer’, Heythrop Journal 39/3 (1998), pp. 280–97, 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Faith and Speculation (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1967), p. 22.
6 The Triple Victory: Christ's Temptations According to Matthew (London: Faith Press, 1965), p. 11.
7 Faith and Speculation, p. 54.
8 Triple Victory, p. 10.
9 For a discussion of this topic, see Hebblethwaite, Brian, ‘The Experiential Verification of Religious Belief in the Theology of Austin Farrer’, in Eaton, Jeffrey C. and Loades, Ann (eds), For God and Clarity: New Essays in Honor of Austin Farrer (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1983), pp. 163–76Google Scholar. Hebblethwaite says that ‘it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the place of experiential verification in the justification of Christian belief provides the lynchpin of his [Farrer's] whole position as a philosophical theologian’ (p. 164).
10 Saving Belief, p. 67.
11 Lord I Believe: Suggestions for Turning the Creed into Prayer (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1989), p. 9.
12 For Coakley's position, see especially ‘Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, pp. 29–55, in Coakley, Sarah and Pailin, David (eds), The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles (Oxford: OUP, 1993)Google Scholar. For von Speyr's account, see The World of Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985).
13 Saving Belief, p. 14.
14 Faith and Speculation, p. 35. My thanks to Charles Hefling for directing my attention to this passage.
15 Said or Sung (London: Faith Press, 1960), p. 29.
16 The End of Man (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 71–2.
17 Ibid., p. 22. Mark A. McIntosh has also remarked Farrer's similarity to von Balthasar on this point. See his Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von Balthasar (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 6.
18 The Brink of Mystery (London: SPCK, 1976), p. 20.
19 Said or Sung, p. 91; see also, Lord I Believe, p. 39, and Saving Belief, p. 126.
20 A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 29.
21 Triple Victory, p. 91.
22 Ibid., p. 62.
23 Ibid., p. 73.
24 Ibid., p. 32.
25 Saving Belief, p. 120.
26 ‘“Batter my heart. . .”? On Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity’, pp. 49–68, in The Papers of the Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology, ed. Gary Gilbert (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), p. 51.
27 ‘Why Three?’, p. 37.
28 Ibid.
29 See her interview with Shortt, Rupert in God's Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), esp. pp. 71–2Google Scholar.
30 ‘God as Trinity: An Approach through Prayer’, pp. 104–21, in We Believe in God (London: Church House Publishing, 1987), p. 109.
31 ‘Why Three?’, p. 37.
32 ‘God as Trinity’, p. 109.
33 ‘The Trinity, Prayer and Sexuality: A Neglected Nexus in the Fathers and Beyond’, Bulletin/Centro Pro Unione 58 (Fall 2000), pp. 13–17, 14.
34 See, for example, Lord I Believe, ch. 9.
35 The Brink of Mystery, p. 4.
36 The Crown of the Year (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1954), p. 53.
37 Lord I Believe, p. 94.
38 The End of Man, p. 64.
39 Saving Belief, pp. 129–30.
40 Ibid., p. 122.
41 Said or Sung, p. 105.
42 Interior Castle, tr. and ed. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 2004), p. 71.
43 Simone Weil is particularly attentive to the problem of the role of the will in self-denial: ‘One cannot come out of oneself by willing to do so. The harder one wills, the more one is oneself. One can only desire and supplicate’ (First and Last Notebooks, tr. Richard Rees (New York: OUP, 1970), p. 260.
44 Said or Sung, p. 88.
45 Lord I Believe, p. 19.
46 Ibid., p. 17.
47 The Glass of Vision, p. 50.
48 Ibid., p. 46.
49 Ibid., p. 56.
50 Saving Belief, p. 106.