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St John, The Trinity, and The Language of the Spirit
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
It would be dishonest not to begin with Austin Farrer, for what follows has grown out of a long-held admiration for that sadly neglected writer. Throughout his life, Farrer was concerned with the role played in our lives by imagination, inspiration and creativity. He saw that creation was shot through with the imprint of its Maker, and in the classical Christian tradition understood the shaping of all life in the material world to be the work of the Holy Spirit. At all levels of creation, inspiration, creativity and spiritual indwelling are the hallmarks of God's activity. For Farrer, natural religion and divine revelation are but two sides of the same coin. The key to all is the point at which they coincide most clearly, namely Jesus. Of Farrer's Christology I have written elsewhere. Such technical discussions are not our present business. Our task is to take the supreme Christian claim about the nature of God, namely the scandalous doctrine of the Trinity, and through the words of St John (whose influence on Farrer's understanding of Jesus was central) try to describe a practical understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit which employs the doctrine of the Trinity as the key-stone of Christian theology and experience.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1988
References
page 471 note 1 Austin Marsden Farrer (1904–1968).
page 471 note 2 For example, the discussion in his essay ‘A Starting Point for the Examination of Theological Belief’ in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, , 1957.Google Scholar
page 471 note 3 ‘Austin Farrer and the Paradox of Christology’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 35, pp. 145–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 473 note 4 Finite and Infinite (Seabury ed.), p. 4. Behind the expression ‘the truth Jacob's ladder of living religion’ lies the distinction between Farrer's meaning and the idea of God as ‘an instance of a type of being already elsewhere directly experienced’.
page 473 note 5 A Celebration of Faith, p. 103, Here Farrer lays out the same activity of Spirit but in a slightly different order.
page 476 note 6 The expression comes from A Study of St Mark, p. 9. This book followed the extended example of commentary writing at the end of The Glass of Vision (GV). The Glass of Vision is largely concerned with the role of image and the relation between divine revelation and poetic inspiration. However, for our purposes it is a disappointment. Farrer's concern is to show how scripture conveys religious meaning through the inspired handling of potent images. The technique is that of poetry, but whereas in poetry the images rove subject only to the poet's fanciful manipulation of the real world, in revelation there is the added control of God-centredness. The evangelist's mind is spirit-filled, and he operates within an added discipline, ‘the traditional facts about Jesus Christ and … the interpreter Spirit who possessed his mind’.
Farrer says ‘The theologian may confuse the images, the metaphysician may speculate about them, but the Bible-reader will immerse himself in the single image on the page before him, and find life-giving power in it, as it stands’ (GV, p. 51). Our concern here is how we are to do that. Farrer's in The Glass of Vision is the nature of that image that makes it possible, given that there would seem to be no truth for us to discern and articulate behind the images of religious discourse.
page 477 note 7 This ‘mosaicking’ is not unique to Bible-reading. We explore the more general case in the next section. At best, ‘mosaicking’ is ‘a pretty violent metaphor’ (The Freedom of the Will, p. 153).
page 478 note 8 The issues at stake here underlie much of The Freedom of the Will, but Chapter 8, ‘Conduct as Understood and Predicted’ applies especially. We must not suppose the analogy to be between ‘my’ behaviour and ‘his’. Nor should we suppose that we understand by placing ourselves in ‘his’ shoes. Common experience tells us that we err disastrously when we impute our motives to others. The correct primary analogy is between myself as a free, rational and creative creature and one whom I judge to be another such as I. We enter into the sense of the intelligible actions of the other person, not into the sense of our hypothetical aping of what they do. In the language of this present essay, we do not understand another by compelling them to become us (a basic error of fundamentalism) but by submitting to become them.
page 482 note 9 There are three disciplines here:
(i) the ordinary business of trying to indwell a fellow human, allowing them to refashion our minds;
(ii) the particular business of submitting to the movement of the evangelist's mind;
(iii) the transforming discipline of entering into the Life of God, the top rung of Jacob's ladder.
We have not entered in this essay upon (iii) in the slightest, though some thought about what we might mean by the Divine Will and Divine Mind will quickly reveal how such a discussion might continue. Farrer's concern in The Glass of Vision is with (ii) and (iii). Our concern throughout has been with (i) and (ii), assuming (iii) to be in some way analogous.