Austin Farrer

Austin Marsden Farrer[a] FBA (1 October 1904 – 29 December 1968) was an English Anglican philosopher, theologian, and biblical scholar.

[2] Encouraged by his father to value scholarship,[citation needed] he nevertheless found the divisions within the Baptist church dispiriting,[15] and while at Oxford he became an Anglican.

After gaining a first in greats,[citation needed] he went up to Cuddesdon Theological College where he trained alongside the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey.

[17] He served a curacy in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, after which he was invited to become chaplain and tutor at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1931 (a post he held until 1935).

[22] The following year, Farrer was appointed as Warden of Keble College, Oxford, a post which he held until his death on 29 December 1968, aged 64.

His thinking was essentially Thomist, not only in his being heavily influenced by Thomas's thought but also in the dialogical way in which he presents his arguments, playing as he said, "out of dummy" (a term from the game of bridge) the views and objections of real or imaginary opponents of the thesis he was advancing at the time.

His major contribution to Christian thought is his notion of "double agency", that human actions are fully our own but also are the work of God, though perfectly hidden.

His making short work of such an established hypothesis infuriated many scholars and may have contributed to his not being made Regius Professor of Divinity.

His scepticism about much orthodox scholarship extended to a typically short but powerful critique of the German collection of essays Kerygma and Myth whose major contributor was Rudolf Bultmann.

He averred, against them, that without the concept of miracle, the Christian project was fatally flawed, preferring the forms of existential defence of the faith of such as Gabriel Marcel to that of the Germans.