Austin Farrer for Today

A Prophetic Agenda

Harries, Platten, Richard Harries, Stephen Platten

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780334059448
• eBook ISBN: 9780334059462
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Assessing his continuing importance and introducing him to a new generation of readers, Austin Farrer for Today brings together a stellar collection of writers to reflect on Farrer's contribution to biblical theology, philosophy, language, doctrine, prayer and preaching.

1. Austin Farrer and Typology

JOHN BARTON

We thank you, almighty God, for the gift of water

to sustain, refresh and cleanse all life.

Over water the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.

Through water you led the children of Israel

from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.

In water your Son Jesus received the baptism of John

and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ,

to lead us from the death of sin to newness of life.1

This prayer over the water of baptism in the Church of England’s 2000 liturgical collection Common Worship illustrates very simply what is meant by typology. It is the correspondence of a past event as described in an earlier text to a later event, in such a way that the later event can be seen as prefigured in the earlier one (not necessarily explicitly foretold). Here it works by linking together places in the Bible where creation or salvation comes through water, so as to create a background for the use of water in Christian baptism. It is a phenomenon to which Austin Farrer devoted a great deal of controversial attention in his biblical exegesis and, as we shall see, it was crucial to his theory of scriptural inspiration.

Farrer gives a clear example of how typology works in his reply to Helen Gardner’s criticism of The Glass of Vision:

St Paul writes thus: ‘I was alive once, without any law incumbent upon me. But when the commandment came, sin came to life, and I fell into death.’ … it is very generally supposed by interpreters that the choice of expressions is dictated by St Paul’s seeing himself in Adam, or in the type of Adam. … [After the Fall,] though he continued to drag his mortal body, it was dead to goodness; though he might now approve of God’s law in his mind, he found an anti-law in his body, preventing it from being alive to God. And so St Paul, as a child of Adam, exclaims, ‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ That is, of the death Adam died on the day he ate; and he replies, ‘I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord’ – through union, that is, with his death and resurrection, the ‘body of death’ is abolished, and true life regained.2

Rather than providing an analysis of his own psychology,3 Paul is here describing his theological state as a human being by analogy with Adam: he is the antitype to the type of Adam. Adam foreshadows the plight of humanity in general, and Christ, whom Paul elsewhere describes as ‘the last Adam’ (1 Cor. 15.45) restores the original state of humankind. More elaborate forms of this kind of typology are to be found all over the Fathers, as in this example from John Chrysostom, the fourth-century bishop of Constantinople (349–407 ce), in one of his homilies:

If you reflect upon the Scriptures and the story of our redemption, you will recall that a virgin, a tree and a death were the symbols of our defeat. The virgin’s name was Eve: she knew not a man. The tree was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The death was Adam’s penalty. But now those very symbols of our defeat – a virgin, a tree and a death – have become symbols of Christ’s victory. In place of Eve there is Mary; in place of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there is the tree of the cross; and in place of the death of Adam, there is the death of Christ.

Now there are two questions about this, which tended to get elided in the generally hostile reception Farrer experienced from other New Testament scholars when he argued that such typologies were common in the New Testament itself. One is a factual or empirical question: is typology as common in the New Testament as Farrer supposed? The other is an evaluative question: is such typology wholesome and important in understanding Scripture, and even in understanding the inspiration of Scripture and God’s providential guidance of it? Is typology a good thing? Most scholars saw the promotion of it as inimical to a historical-critical reading of the Bible and therefore as undesirable. But in the process they tended to reject the empirical evidence that the New Testament writers shared in many ways the same sort of mindset as their patristic successors, and thus they emptied out the baby with the bathwater.

On the empirical question Farrer surely had much more evidence on his side than many scholars of his day were prepared to allow, and the atmosphere in biblical studies is now much less hostile to acceptance of this claim. The use of the Old Testament in the New is a major area of research, which even has an annual conference, held at Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden in North Wales, and the detailed work of Richard B. Hays and others4 has demonstrated even more references to the Old Testament in the Gospels and Paul than Farrer himself ever proposed.

It is, in fact, not only the New Testament’s use of the Old that provides evidence for typology. There is typology already in the Old Testament itself, in what is now often referred to as inner-biblical exegesis. One of the clearest examples can be found in the text usually called Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55):

This is like the days of Noah to me:

Just as I swore that the waters of Noah

would never again go over the earth,

so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you

and will not rebuke you.

(Isaiah 54.9)

This is a prophecy to Judaeans suffering during the period of the Babylonian exile, and it promises God’s steadfast love by drawing an analogy with his promise after the Flood that there would never again be such a cataclysmic destruction. The promise after the Flood is the type; the restoration after the exile is the antitype. Any biblical scholar would accept this interpretation. It is thus not strange if the New Testament writers inherited such a way of thinking.

Farrer argued that prefiguration also occurred within the New Testament, and this was certainly more controversial. The mysterious young man in a linen garment (Greek sindon) in the garden of Gethsemane in Mark 14:51–52, who was captured but ‘left the linen cloth and ran off naked’ is an antitype of Joseph in Genesis 39.12 – and not all would accept that – but is in turn a type of the young man in a white robe (sindon) who greets the women at Jesus’ empty tomb in Mark 16.5. ‘Coming events cast their shadows before’ within the New Testament itself.

It is important that prefiguration or typology is often signalled not only in the substance of the parallel incidents but in how they are described, that is, in the actual vocabulary or construction used. Farrer argued that the ending of Mark, with its abrupt ‘for they were afraid’ (ephobounto gar), also paralleled the story of Joseph, in which Genesis 45.1–3 tells how Joseph’s brothers could not answer him when he revealed his identity to them, ‘for they were dismayed’.5 This can easily become fanciful or exaggerated, and Farrer probably did his position no favours by emphasizing rather slight similarities of wording. Nevertheless we know that the New Testament writers were sensitive to the detailed words of the Old Testament, and there is nothing in principle unreasonable in Farrer’s approach.

But apart from the factual question of how far typology actually occurs in the New Testament, there remains the theoretical or theological question of whether or not it is a good thing. Traditional critical scholars of the Old Testament tend to be resistant to New Testament, let alone patristic, ‘rereadings’ of the text to bring out Christological or ecclesiastical meanings. It is quite clear that for Farrer on the contrary such readings were highly desirable. This was in part because he saw prefiguration as more than a merely literary feature. For him, the way historical people and events were described by the biblical writers really did prefigure the events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: that is, there was a divine providence in the fact that they were so described. It is not an accident that the story of Joseph parallels in significant ways the story of the passion of Jesus, for the scriptural writers were inspired by God to write in the ways they did.

At this point the patience of many biblical scholars runs out. Did God actually guide the pen of the author of Genesis and the pen of St Mark so that they produced texts that exhibit these parallels? Surely that is going too far.

Farrer’s theory of inspiration is, however, more subtle than that and deserves fuller elaboration. He does not think of the types and their antitypes as random images provided by God in a casual or unordered way, but as forming a coherent set, which took shape in the mind of Jesus Christ himself:

He spoke of the Kingdom of God, which is the image of God’s enthroned majesty … Again, he spoke of the Son of Man, thereby proposing the image of the dominion of a true Adam, begotten in the similitude of God, and made God’s regent over all the works of his hands. … He set forth the image of Israel, the human family of God, somehow mystically contained in the person of Jacob, its patriarch. He was himself Israel, and appointed 12 men to be his typical ‘sons’. He applied to himself the prophecies of a redemptive suffering for mankind attributed to Israel by Isaiah and Jewish tradition. He displayed, in the action of the supper, the infinitely complex and fertile image of sacrifice and communion, of expiation and covenant.6

Thus there are five ‘master’ types that together constitute an interpretative framework for grasping the nature and work of Christ: David and his kingdom; Adam, type of the Son of Man; Jacob and his sons, the foundation stones of Israel; the suffering servant; and the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. These types Farrer describes as ‘images’, and in his study of the book of Revelation, A Rebirth of Images,7 he seeks to show how they worked on the imagination of the seer of the Apocalypse. There are other types too, on which Farrer has less to say: Melchizedek, in Hebrews; Joshua, who as Farrer points out shares in Greek the name Jesus; the ram slaughtered in the place of Isaac; and the new heaven and earth foreseen in such passages as Isaiah 65.17–25, fulfilled in the city coming down from heaven in Revelation 21. Thus the Old Testament provides matrices through which the events of the New can be seen to have a meaning and to contribute to a coherent story.

That story begins with the creation of Adam in the image of God, and continues with the creation of Israel through Jacob and the patriarchs and its consolidation through the reign of David. The institution of the temple cult provides a setting in which the covenant with God can be reaffirmed, and the idea of the suffering servant emerges from reflection on atonement and expiation in that context. Thus the praeparatio evangelica in the Old Testament is not merely a matter of words, or images in a purely literary sense, but is instantiated in actions and institutions that actually existed, and in reflection on them by inspired minds. The type-antitype pattern is not adventitious or merely conventional, but reflects the actual development of ancient Israel.

Or so at least Farrer thought. How far the relation of Old Testament to New exists at a historical level, and how far only or principally at a literary one, remains the question that anyone who enjoys the typological imagination is bound to be confronted with. Was the kingdom of David, say, really a type of the kingdom to be exercised by Christ – and what does that mean anyway? Or was it that the descriptions of David’s kingdom attractively illustrate, in very human and this-worldly terms, the sublime kingship to be...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Biblical Theology
• 1. Austin Farrer and Typology
• 2. Farrer on Q
• 3. Farrer on Paul
• Philosophy
• 4. Farrer’s Relevance for Contemporary Philosophical Theology
• 5. Providence and the Problem of Evil in Farrer’s Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited
• 6. ‘The Evidence of Faith’: Austin Farrer, Diogenes Allen and Reformed Epistemology
• 7. Farrer’s Theism: Finite and Infinite
• Language and Symbolism
• 8. Through a Glass? Farrer, Coleridge and Revelation
• 9. Language and Symbolism: Austin Farrer Meets Gregory of Nazianzus
• Doctrine
• 10. ‘A Society of Two’? Austin Farrer on the Trinity1
• 11. Farrer on the Atonement
• 12. Theosis, Godmanhood and Double Agency: Berdyaev, Farrer and the Divine-Human Relationship
• Prayer and Preaching
• 13. Farrer, the Oxford Preacher
• 14. Until Their Hunger Is Their Mind: Farrer’s Theology of the Eucharist
• Farrer and the Future
• A Prophetic Influence: Concluding Reflections
• Bibliography of Works by or Related to Austin Farrer