Austin Farrer: Oxford Warden, Scholar, Preacher

Description

To mark the 150th anniversary of Keble College, this is a collection of essays from leading theologians reflecting on the work and impact of Austin Farrer.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Theology
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334058618
• Langue: English

Extrait

part one
Farrer at Keble – The Gospels, C. S. Lewis and Philosophical Theology


© Editors and Contributors 2020
Published in 2020 by SCM Press
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Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Sir Jonathan Phillips
Introduction by Markus Bockmuehl and Stephen Platten
Part One: Farrer at Keble – The Gospels, C. S. Lewis, and Philosophical Theology
Austin Farrer as Warden of Keble (1960–1968)
Ian W. Archer
Farrer and the Gospels
Mark Goodacre
Farrer on the Problem of Evil
Michael F. Lloyd
Austin Farrer and C. S. Lewis
Judith Wolfe
Austin Farrer as a Preacher
John Barton
Part Two: Farrer in America – Four Unpublished Lectures (1966)
1 Something Has Died on Us: Can it be God?
2 How Far is Christian Doctrine Reformable?
3 Bultmann and All That
4 Does Social Structure Bow to Christian Morals, or Vice Versa?
Epilogue
The Mark of Cain: A Sermon for Evening Prayer
Stephen Platten
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index of Scripture References
Index of Names and Subjects

Caroline Farrer In memoriam 4 April 1939 – 10 February 2018


Contributors
I an W. Archer is Associate Professor and Tutor in History at Keble College Oxford, and an Honorary Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. He has published widely on the social and cultural history of early modern London, including most recently The History of the Haberdashers’ Company (2017) and an edition of a Frenchman’s description of Elizabethan London, The Singularities of London, 1578 (ed. with Derek Keene, 2014). He co-authored a history of Keble College with Averil Cameron, Keble Past and Present (2008).
John Barton was Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford, 1991–2014, and is now a Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford. His recent books include Ethics in Ancient Israel (2014) and A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths (2019; US edition: A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book , 2019).
Markus Bockmuehl is Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Keble College. Among his authored books are Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study (2006), Simon Peter in Scripture and Memory (2012), and Ancient Apocryphal Gospels (2017).
Nevsky Everett has been the Chaplain of Keble College since 2016.
Mark Goodacre is Frances Hill Fox Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University. He has published widely on the New Testament and Christian origins, and his books include Thomas and the Gospels (2012) and The Case Against Q (2002).
Michael F. Lloyd is Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. His academic work is mainly on the Problem of Evil. He recently co-edited Finding Ourselves after Darwin (with Stanley P. Rosenberg, 2018), on the theological implications of evolutionary theory and modern genetics for our understanding of the Image of God, Original Sin and the Problem of Evil. He is the author of a popular-level systematic theology entitled Café Theology (3rd edn 2012). He has also written on the theology of G. F. Handel.
Sir Jonathan Phillips has been the Warden of Keble College since 2010.
Stephen Platten was formerly Bishop of Wakefield and is an Assistant Bishop in the Dioceses of London, Newcastle and Southwark. His publications include Augustine’s Legacy: Authority and Leadership in the Anglican Communion (1997); Rebuilding Jerusalem: The Church’s Hold on Hearts and Minds (2007); Animating Liturgy: The Dynamics of Worship and the Human Community (2017). He is at present co-editing a further collection of essays on Austin Farrer with Bishop Richard Harries.
Judith Wolfe is Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St Andrews. She writes widely on philosophical and systematic theology, as well as on theology and the arts, particularly C. S. Lewis. On the latter, she has co-edited C. S. Lewis and the Church (with Brendan Wolfe, 2011), C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra (with Brendan Wolfe, 2013) and C. S. Lewis and His Circle (with Roger White and Brendan Wolfe, 2015), and acts as General Editor of the Journal of Inklings Studies (Edinburgh University Press).

Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank the Warden and Fellows of Keble College for their support of this project, both the original conference in January 2019 and the production of this volume.
More particularly, we are grateful to the College for a Keble Small Research Grant awarded to Markus Bockmuehl for this purpose. This made it possible to invite and host external speakers, and for conference facilities and refreshments to be available free of charge (graciously supported by Keble’s catering and maintenance staff). The same grant also enabled the appointment of a graduate research assistant to help with the conference implementation and associated publicity, administration and support tasks, as well as with significant editorial work in the preparation of this volume.
We wish to pay tribute to the invaluable advice and assistance received from the Chaplain of Keble College, Nevsky Everett, who supported our work throughout the planning, conference and editorial stages of the project. Jennifer Strawbridge, a former Chaplain of Keble (now Associate Professor in New Testament Studies and a Fellow of Mansfield College), also provided wise and energetic counsel in the planning stages for the 2019 conference.
Jacob Rodriguez served most efficiently as our graduate assistant, recruiting and overseeing a team of additional student helpers on the day, and ably supporting all stages of the editorial process for the book.
The editors and contributors are grateful to Faye McLeod, the Keble College Archives and Record Manager, for her help in locating relevant material.
Kay Norman ably assisted in the task of editing the sometimes difficult and poorly preserved typescripts of Austin Farrer’s four unpublished lectures of 1966, formatting and typing successive drafts.
We are most grateful to an anonymous Keble alumnus for a donation to the College specifically to provide the necessary publisher’s print subvention to make this volume possible. We also thank the College’s Development Director Jenny Tudge, whose assistance was catalytic in facilitating this donation.
Last but by no means least, we would like to express our gratitude to Nick Newton, Austin Farrer’s nephew, for the Executors’ permission to publish Farrer’s four American lectures here for the first time.

Foreword
sir jonathan phillips
For any Warden of Keble to suggest that a particular predecessor is pre-eminent would be unwise. However, the assertion that Austin Farrer was one of the most academically distinguished holders of the office should not be challenged. The affidavits in support of the claim would cite Rowan Williams’s observation that he was ‘possibly the greatest Anglican mind of the twentieth century’ and the description of him by Basil Mitchell, his slightly younger contemporary, as being, ‘by common consent, one of the most remarkable men of his generation’.
He was born on 1 October 1904 as the second child and only son of Augustine and Evangeline Farrer. He came up to Oxford from St Paul’s School as a Scholar of Balliol. His results in Greats and, subsequently, in Theology were outstanding. With the exception of a brief period serving a curacy in Dewsbury, he spent the whole of his career at Oxford, holding Fellowships and the Chaplaincies at St Edmund Hall and then Trinity before becoming Warden of Keble in 1960.
During his first year as an undergraduate at Balliol he took the particularly important decision to be baptised an Anglican, disillusioned by the splits among the Baptists and attracted by the liturgy of the Church of England. The published correspondence between parents and son about that momentous decision is both touching and illuminating. Austin was under no illusion about the pain that would be caused to his father, a man who trained Baptist ministers, if his son were to leave the denomination. There was much agonising on both sides, but what is especially striking is the young Austin’s care and sensitivity in dealing with his parents.
Such sensitivity was a feature of his sermons, which are the way in which many who are not theologians or philosophers by profession have encountered Farrer’s thinking. How fitted he was to be a counsellor is well-illustrated by a sermon entitled ‘Responsibility for our Friends’. In it is revealed a person who had thought deeply about what we now call student welfare and mental health issues and who offers sensible, practical advice based on his own experience of the death of a college friend shortly after graduating.
This volume had its origins in