The Handiwork of God: Austin Farrer’s Ascetical Theology of Divine Practical Agency

Rev. Dr. Stephen Lake

AT 208 Anglican Spiritual Tradition II

Fr. Arnold Klukas

18 September 2010

1. Introduction

The Christian life involves the experience, often quite profound, of the presence of Jesus Christ

and the activity of the Holy Spirit within the life of the individual believer. As the apostle Paul

proclaimed (in Galatians 2.20), “I am crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ

who lives in me.” The idea is that God, through the Holy Spirit, is alive and active in the lives of

those who follow Christ. Divine agency is personal and transformative—a living reality in the

believer’s life.

Behind the claims of divine agency, however, is a nest of crucial theological and philosophical

issues—bedrock matters in any ascetical theology. What does it mean to say that God is alive and

active in the world, let alone in our lives? God’s agency rarely leaves behind any perceptible

empirical traces, uniquely linked to the handiwork of God. Or what traces there are, are open to

vastly different interpretations. Is a natural disaster an act of God (insurance riders

notwithstanding)? Or cresting flood waters right at one’s front door an answer to prayer? If a great

political evil is thwarted in dramatic fashion, should we credit God’s intervention? Or should a

sudden and unexpected windfall of money at a time of need be mere chance or divine blessing instead?

What about a surge of hope amidst despair upon a priest’s word of blessing? Or a spontaneous

ability to kick an addictive habit after intense prayer and fasting? Believers claim to perceive God’s

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agency in the events of life—in events routine and extraordinary, physical and psychological—but in

many ways these perceptions are only available to the eyes of faith.

If God’s will is at work in the world, it is clearly not a force just like any other, yet the only world

we know (empirically) is the physical world of cause and effect. What’s more, if God’s will is at

work in the world to draw all creation back to Himself, what is the role of the human will and

especially believer’s will? How does God’s grace interact with His creation, and with human

freedom? Where and how does God’s agency mesh with the causal nexus of natural forces and

human willing?

The Anglican philosophical theologian Austin Farrer thought deeply and profoundly about these

and related questions. In numerous works over the course of a lifetime of Christian service in the

academy and the church, Farrer pondered the way that God’s gracious agency is at work in the

world. He never sought to diminish the philosophical difficulties in understanding the metaphysical

issues involved, especially delicate interplay of human and divine wills, but he himself embodied the

reality that theology is to strengthen and equip the saints for a life of holiness before God.

In this paper I want to examine Austin Farrer’s ascetical theology, especially its philosophical

and theological underpinnings in his theory of divine and human action. A dedicated churchman

with a pastoral heart, Farrer was an outstanding example of how the life of the mind can be lived as

a holy life, one consecrated for divine service. His philosophical theology did not feature theoretical

inquiry for its own sake (though it was often quite abstract), but rather always was offered by him in

service of Christ. He sought to connect philosophy and theology to authentic Christian spirituality

and service. In many ways, I believe he should be seen as a model for a Anglican scholar-priests

today.
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Rather than surveying the entirety of his extensive corpus, I wish to focus primarily on Farrer’s

last work, Faith and Speculation (1967).1 Originally delivered as the Deems Lectures at New York

University in 1964, it is the last of his works published in his lifetime, a work of philosophical

theology that appears to encapsulate his mature thinking about divine action. In particular, his

famous notion of ‘double agency’ receives extensive treatment in this text. It is now liberated from

all Aristotlean substance metaphysics.2 Double agency is not merely a philosophical theory about

natural and divine causality (though he has much to say about this as well). Rather, it is truly

ascetical theology—a deep meditation on the fact of God’s work as it is manifest chiefly as a

transformative power in the life of the believer. Richard Harries (1990, 22f.) points out how central

this theme is in Farrer’s later work. “We know on our knees,” Harries quotes Farrer from A

Celebration of Faith (45), a work dating from this period:

Since God has shown me a ray of his goodness, I cannot doubt him
on the ground that someone has made up some new logical puzzles
about him. It is too late in the day to tell me that God does not exist,
the God with whom I have so long conversed, and whom I have
seen active in several men of real sanctity, not to mention the
canonized saints (27).

Note here how it is spiritual devotion that forms the bedrock of his knowledge about God’s existence.

He would not speak so much in the generic terminology preferred by philosophers of religion—

namely of ‘religious experience’—where an experience can be neutral, ‘third party,’ free of

commitment. In fact, I would argue that Farrer’s epistemology, breaking with the dominant

philosophical schools of his day (especially the regnant logical positivism) presents a unique spiritual

way of knowing through prayer and philosophical reflection. It is way not unlike the one articulated

by Caroline Divine Jeremy Taylor in his enchanting sermon on John 7.17, “Via Intelligentiae” (1990,

355-88). Taylor insists that “Christ’s way of finding out of truth is by ‘doing the will of God’” (356),

1 Hereafter, abbreviated with FS and the respective page number.

2 Cf. Allen (1990, 197).
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for it is only then that we are in the proper perspective of submission, where we may perceive aright

and truly appreciate who God is. I shall show that in Faith and Speculation Farrer continues this line

of thought, developing it into a richly and tightly integrated theology—both ascetical and

philosophical—exploring God’s ways in the world—and with us.

In what follows, I first reflect on Farrer’s theory of knowledge as a spiritual form of action

(section 2). Then I focus on the metaphysical issues behind divine and human action, what Farrer

calls ‘double agency’ (section 3). In section 4, I offer some concluding reflections, drawing out some

further implications for ascetical theology.

2. From Speculation to Faith: Knowledge as Practical Action

Since (at least) the Enlightenment, there has been a tendency in Western philosophy to make the

theory of knowledge—epistemology—a gatekeeper discipline. Any belief whatsoever must pass a

certain epistemological muster before it can be considered a reliable piece of knowledge. All our

beliefs must be justified, have ‘warrant’ or the balance of objective evidence or reasons behind them.

Modern rationalists like René Descartes argued that if we could not provide rational grounding

for all our beliefs then we are not entitled to trust the perceptions of the senses or the deliverances

of our minds. For Descartes, the standard was very high, namely, proof on the basis of indubitable

foundational ideas, starting with the certainty of one’s own existence. Or as Kant put it in the

heyday of the continental Enlightenment, our cognitive apparatus itself must stand before the

“tribunal” of “pure reason” (1965, Preface to the 1781 edition) to vindicate the limits and

possibilities of our knowledge before we may even contemplate metaphysical ideas like the existence

of God or the immortality of the soul.

In the English-speaking world, the empiricists demanded unconditional empirical verification for

our beliefs. W.K. Clifford sums up the temperament well in his infamous essay, “The Ethics of

Belief” (1886): “To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything
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upon insufficient evidence” (4). For Clifford’s descendents in Farrer’s day—the English logical

positivists like A.J. Ayer—all our knowledge must be reducible to either empirical evidence or the

logical implications of empirical evidence. They took this to be the way that natural scientific

knowledge was acquired, and made it the model for all other forms of knowing. Thus, they

relegated every other belief—and that included most ethical and religious beliefs—to the realm of

mere subjective feeling. These were emotive claims, expressive only of the sentiments of an

individual or a community but enjoy no rational warrant as knowledge.

Though drawing criticism from more and more quarters (until its complete collapse in the

1970s3), logical positivism was still very much in the air during the majority of Farrer’s philosophical

career. Even today, it is still common to detect a certain positivist faith afoot in the contemporary

world, one that takes natural scientific knowledge as the model for all knowing.

Farrer sought not so much to critique this outlook in Faith and Speculation as to resituate it in a

bigger and truer context. First, he admits that

Theology cannot be put in the scale of science, or even of

knowledge. Nevertheless, to know God is to know, and not to know
anything fundamentally different; it is to accord to some real being a
conscious recognition. . .‘To know,’ or ‘to acknowledge as real,’
when used of finites and when use of God, cannot mean two utterly
different things (21; my emphasis).

On the one hand, there is, yes, an ineliminable difference between knowing finite things like the

structures and objects of nature and the infinite God who we take to be the creative, sustaining

agency behind them all. Whatever positive analogy there is between our ways of being and knowing

and God’s ways, it is limited and will never exhaust what being and knowing are for God. In that

3 Hanfling (2003, 193f.) quotes A. J. Ayer himself as saying, “I suppose the most important [defect]. . .was that nearly
all of it was false”! Ayer reflects the fact that logical positivism itself eventually foundered on a very simple but
devastating defect: what, pray tell, is the empirical evidence for or logical implication from empirical evidence for the abstract
principle that only such beliefs are epistemologically warranted? In short, there is no way to empirically justify the
positivist’s standard or find any inferential support for it from empirical evidence. What is amazing is that so many
otherwise intelligent people held the view at all! This episode in contemporary philosophy serves as a powerful case
study in mass academic delusion, driven mainly by anti-religious, anti-traditionalist sentiment.
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sense, theology never strives to be a natural science because, at some level, it is a category mistake.

God is not a thing amongst others in nature, thus knowable like them.

Nevertheless, Farrer also insists that there is a common effort of knowing in both science and

theology. We cannot so quickly dismiss the empiricist’s demand that something is going on within the

world itself when we claim knowledge of God and His ways. The question is, what is the common

effort?

Farrer goes on, then, to argue for the “inseparability of real knowledge from activity” (22).

Underlying any type of knowledge is a prior active engagement with the thing known—personal

knowledge acquired via personal interaction—that is more primordial than the abstract forms of

knowledge derived from scientific investigation or theoretical speculation.

I mean that to know real beings we must exercise our actual relation
with them. No physical science without personal intercourse; no
thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think. .
.Theology must be at least as empirical as this, if it is to mediate any
knowledge whatsoever. We can know nothing of God, unless do
something about him. So what, we must ask, can we do? (ibid.).

The objective empirical stance of science is in truth merely a stance of distance and abstraction

towards the object known. We might even say that it is an extracting—a taking out of nature—of

certain physical facts. That is the doing that is involved in such knowing. So what, then, is the

doing involved in knowing God?4

Worship—adoration—is Farrer’s response. Of course, worship is not a neutral mode of sense

experience or cognitive reflection, which would enjoy epistemological priority for the philosopher.

Rather, starting in chapter 1 of Faith and Speculation, Farrer argues that the believer’s justifiable mode

of knowing is internal to the practices of the faith. We do not begin our knowledge of God simply
4It might be useful to draw a connection here between Farrer and a contemporary of his, Michael Polanyi’s influential
work, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philsophy (1974). Stressing the “personal participation of the knower in all acts
of understanding” (vii), Polanyi wants to argue that we are embodied knowers whose personal commitment and activity
of knowing is as crucial as the knowledge won through the process. First published in 1957, Personal Knowledge is based
on his Gifford Lectures in 1951-2. Thus, we can assume Farrer might well have been familiar with Polanyi, though I
cannot confirm (as yet) what if any genuine influence there might have been.
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through ordinary sense experience or purely theoretical demonstration. Rather, it is only in and

through those practices embedded in religious traditions that we come to know what does and does

not count as authentic knowledge. That is the only way we actually come to know God. Of course,

this will not satisfy the skeptical philosopher, but Farrer insists that

the believer’s account of his faith is neither a philosophical

vindication of its correctness, nor a philosophical disclosure of its
groundlessness. He has motives for his belief; and the adequacy of
these motives. . .can be attacked and defended. . .[The
philosopher’s task] is to see whether believer’s experience of salvation
or fulfillment in his embracing of an apparent divine Good can
intelligibly justify his assumption that the blessings which accrue are
the work of actual deity (12f.).

So Farrer examines the believer’s worshipful embrace of the divine. He seeks a philosophical

account of God’s self-revelation—divine action—in and through the believer’s worship—human

action.

Throughout this account Farrer’s love of analogy is evident. Like Aquinas and the medievals,

Farrer sees analogy as revelatory of insights about God that we might not otherwise grasp, due to

the limitations of our knowledge and nature. Moreover, analogy is the real bedrock of the

philosopher’s cherished models of knowledge. Understanding has historically been likened to

vision. For instance, Aquinas himself adapts Aristotle’s contemplatio as the model for the beatific

vision. However, “abuse of the analogy between sight and understanding is one of the great

philosophical delusions. I say, abuse; it would be stupid indeed to prohibit the use. We shall go on

saying ‘Now I see’ for ‘Now I understand.’ The metaphor is inevitable” (29). But if metaphor is

inevitable, ineliminable from our speech and our conceptualization, we ought to be careful to draw

upon the right analogies and metaphors.

Thus, Farrer offers instead the metaphor of friendship. “To know in depth the good of a

friendship we must enter into a community of action with our friend along a multiplicity of lines;

this will be knowledge, whether our resultant sense of the person is or is not more thrilling than the
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initial impression of infinite promise, the unearthly gleam of our first encounter” (27). The core to

the metaphor of friendship is that in friendship there is always a “promise of good” between friends.

There is always a seeking and striving for ever greater attainment of the promise that led two people

to become friends first of all. Such striving and action is characteristic of genuine worship as well.

In the case of worshipful activity, “the disproportion between ultimate promise and proximate

attainment must be infinitely greater; so that in our attitude to God an emphasis falls on the moment

of wondering contemplation which in our dealing with our fellows would be inappropriate” (ibid.).

Thus, worship involves adoration, the sheer sense of being lost in wonder and awe.

And Farrer’s analysis unfolds from there. He is ever sensitive to the way in which language

conditions our conceptualization. Analogy and metaphor present linguistic images which convey

their meaning in symbolic as much as conceptual registers. There are images of God as Father, as

the creator “calling us into existence. . .stamping us with the likeness of his Godhead,” as the Son

redeeming us, inviting us constitute His living body and so on. All of these and more have “divine

histories which echo to the naming of divine mercy” (32), handed down in the life of church and the

believer. There is a concreteness here that pure philosophical contemplation cannot tolerate or

comprehend. For our worship acts in response to these images. They promise us certain things

about God, and we step forth in faith and trust that He will make good on His being a Father, being

a creator, being the Son and so on. We trust the image and relate to God through it.

In this way, the believer gains a practical knowledge of God through action and comes to see

God at work in the world. We do not first seek theoretical consolations about His existence, His

nature and the like. Rather, we engage directly and relationally, in modes of trusting action, with the

language and symbols of our faith, passed down from one generation to the next. They are the

living testament of God’s self-revelatory action—the only kind of knowledge the believer is privy to

in the walk of faith.

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3. ‘Double Agency’: Divine and Human Action

The essence of Farrer’s thinking about divine and human action can perhaps be summed up best

in a quote from God is Not Dead (1966), another book dating from the time of Faith and Speculation.

Though FP is the more formal philosophical reflection, there is a lucidity and trenchancy to the way

he puts the matter in the companion work. I quote it here at length to introduce Farrer’s thinking

about double agency:

But God does not stand alongside us or on a level with us, nor do we
become aware of him through any external collision, mutual
impingement or interaction between his activity and ours. How
could we? He is related to us in quite another way: as the will which
underlies our existences, gives rise to our action and directs our aim.
To look for God by the methods we use for examining nature would
not be scientific, it would be silly. A microscope is a scientific
instrument, but it is not scientific to look for a note of music through
a microscope. How can we have experimental knowledge of the will
behind our will? Only by opening our will to it, or sinking our will in
it; there is no other conceivable way. We cannot touch God except
by willing the will of God. Then his will take effect in ours and we
know it; not that we manipulate him, but that he possesses us (Farrer
1966, 106f.).5

There are three elements worth noting here.

(a) First, Farrer distinguishes between the divine mode of interacting with us and the finite, human

mode according to which we interact with other finite (human) agents or (natural) forces. There is

indeed an essential difference between the creator and His creation. We must not confuse these

modes of interaction and in particular, expect that God relates to His creation in the same way that

His finite creation relates and interacts among its members.

(b) Second, God relates to His creation through His will and again, His willing is unlike finite

human willing. As creator and sustainer of the universe, Farrer contends that God is “the will which

5 Cited in Henderson (2004, 79).

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underlies our existences, gives rise to our action and directs our aim.”6 Our existence is thoroughly,

at each and every moment, dependent upon God’s creative, sustaining action. He sets the stage for

us and our wills and is at work in the world to bring all things—including us—back to Himself.

Divine and human causality interact in mysterious ways, but Farrer insists on the reality and freedom

of each.

(c) Finally, it is through God’s will as a personal agent that we come to know Him. As such, it is sort

of a category mistake to look for Him in the natural effects of His will—natural laws, physical events,

etc.—rather than in His personal willing and intentions towards us, His creatures capable of acting

according to will. Just as a microscope is not appropriate to studying music (or only in a very

derivative, indirect way), so too must we find the appropriate manner of relating ourselves to a being

who relates Himself to us primarily through His creative, sustaining and directive will. Our response

should rather be practical submission, not the manipulative techniques of theoretical inquiry.

We find these three elements reflected in the account of double agency in FP. Within the

context of that work, the issue is, again, not so much how to philosophically ground them in an

overarching account but rather how to make vivid what it is that the believer already experiences in the

practical, lived relationship with God. Farrer attempts, then, to give a reasoned account of that

living faith, especially to find rich imagery rather than prescriptive or theoretical modeling. The

result is a curious mix of abstract philosophy and pastoral spirituality.

In turning now to FP we find that the problem of divine and human causal interaction is the

core philosophical issue Farrer seeks to address with his theory of ‘double agency.’ His view is often

taken to be Thomistic because like Aquinas, Farrer claims that every event is, in some sense, under

6Of course, there is much that could be said about how, or in what sense God “underlies,” “gives rise to our action”
and “directs our aim.” To some extent, I shed some light on these questions in the body of the text above. On the
other hand, Farrer’s work is unlikely to satisfy some of the more stringent demands of contemporary analytical
philosophical theologians. Farrer is no Scholastic. He often resorts to a good metaphor or a poignant analogy instead of
offering a fully developed theoretical model with clearly defined concepts and rigorous logical analysis of their
implications.
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God’s providential control but also caused by the free human will. God creates and sustains the

universe. Everything is subject to His will and nothing takes place outside of His will. He is, in that

sense, the supreme cause of all that is. Yet we also experience ourselves as causal agents, who

through our will bring about effects in the world. How to make these two realities consistent is the

great philosophical conundrum. What role does God play and what role by us?

Farrer’s answer is that we both are agents: double agency. We may see God as the cause and we

ourselves as the cause. On the one hand, we must see God as an initiator and a persuader, one who

sometimes sternly provokes, sometimes gently woos and always draws, little by little, His creation

back to Himself. In this view, we are primarily in the position of being responsive to God’s will.

On the other hand, we also experience ourselves as causal agents, sharing in God’s creative activity

in bringing about events ourselves. We recognize an effort of turning within ourselves, directing our

soul back to God. In short, we see His handiwork in the responsiveness within us to His will; we

ourselves undeniably act in submitting our wills to His.

Farrer, however, prefers to remain agnostic about the “causal joint” (66) between divine and

human action. We may not say where God’s effort leaves off and ours begins, or vice versa. “We

may say of the Hebrews that they commonly saw divine effects as having creaturely agents, but

found it needles to enquire how the divine hand wielded its instruments; they were content to use

the simplest pictures” (62). For, he concludes, “the causal joint (could there be said to be one)

between God’s action and ours is of no concern in the activity of religion; the very idea of it arises

simply as a by-product of the analogical imagination. . .Surely it is nothing new that imagination

should fall over its own feet, or symbolism tangle into knots” (66). What Farrer means here is that

we only understand God’s action on analogy with our own; but if—stretching that analogy to the

limit—we see Him and His action as the supreme causal agency in the world, it inevitably leads to a

conflict with our own agency. We only know human agency that operates within a finite framework
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of one finite, limited will squaring off against another in a finite, limited space. But is God’s agency

like our own, vying for the same ‘causal space’ in the universe alongside our own? Farrer’s answer is

a resounding ‘No,’ but he fails to inquire very deeply as to precisely how God’s agency works. He

denies the view that God is only the prime mover who began the universe and works in particular

event only as a remote initial causal agent. But what, then, does it mean for Him to work in the

particulars and not be in conflict with our agency? Here Farrer thinks theology must fall silent.7

Similarly, Farrer insists upon but does not work out the precise nature of human freedom. Here

endorses a certain compatibilism between human and divine wills:8

The position which we have outlined, if it is accepted, carries some

significant corollaries. First, the vanishing of the problem of freewill and
divine predestination in the achievement of salvation. We know that the
action of a man can be the action of God in him; our religious existence is
an experimenting with this relation. Both the divine and the human actions remain
real and therefore free in the union between them; not knowing the modality of the divine
action we cannot pose the problem of their mutual relation. All a spiritual guide need
do is append anathema to any proposition which denies the personal reality
of either the human action or the divine, or which, admitting both, inverts
the hierarchy and makes the divine action consequent upon the human
rather than vice versa (FP 66, emphasis mine).

This carries the further implication that there is no need to theorize an additional, special act of

supernatural grace at work in the creature. “Grace is an action of the Creator in the creature. He

acts in the creature everywhere; when he acts in the rational creature he is pleased to act in that

creature’s mental and voluntary life, bringing them into his own” (67). Divine grace is therefore a

creative force, ‘naturally’ at the disposal of all creatures, not merely of the elect. So divine

predestination and human free will are not mutually exclusive because (i) on the one hand, Farrer

maintains I am free to choose for or against God but (ii) on the other, I am most free when I am

7 For an insightful critique and counterproposal for the theory of double agency in Farrer and Maurice Wiles, see
Brümmer (1992).
8 For more on his philosophical investigation into freedom of the will, see his Gifford Lectures published as, fittingly

enough, The Freedom of the Will (1958). In brief, his theory there seems to be that for anything that might plausibly count
as a free act of the will we cannot analytically find its causal correlate in nature. Freedom seems to be the irreducible
factor in any responsible choice of human agents. His philosophical theory, then, does not seem so much to be
compatibilist as it is libertarian.
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most in conformity with what God actually wills in and through my life. My freedom is only

enhanced by cooperating with the divine initiative in my own life.9

Nevertheless, we may perceive God working in the world. In FP, Farrer uses the intriguing

analogy of aesthetic appreciation for detecting the handiwork of God (63f.). A Rembrandt is

unmistakenly a Rembrandt simply by perceiving the artistic product. We the viewer do not have

direct access to the process or the person of the artist, but we rightly assume there is some such

artist behind the production—Rembrandt—by the kinds of works he produces. In a similar way, we

know God is a personal agent not so much by perceiving precisely how He works in the world but by

what He does, His products—namely, the changed lives of those who follow Him as Lord. He

works individually, persuasively yet gently to bring His people to maturity in Him. That mature

product is unmistakably a divine product, when we see the sinner saved by grace live a transformed

life. Note, here, how Farrer is not thinking primarily in cosmic terms about divine agency, about

God establishing causal laws and His influence working then along merely natural, causal lines.

Rather, “if God acts in the world, he acts particularly” (61) and personally, like a friendship (55f.).

His interaction is personal. That is not to say that God has no role in the general order of the

cosmos, but rather that His action is most manifest in personal influence and transformation.

4. Concluding Reflections

As contribution to ascetical theology, Farrer’s work emphasizes strongly God’s immanence to

His creation through His work. However unlike some forms of pantheistic or panentheistic

philosophy (which emphasize (too much) God’s identity with creation as a law-like, natural causal

9 In Farrer’s Gifford Lectures, he speaks appreciatively of Calvinism for keeping the mystery of God’s initiative and our
own alive for our theology (309f.), though he does not seem to endorse the Calvinist view. It is probably indicative of
the difference between a Thomist and a Calvinist view on divine foreknowledge. Nevertheless, it seems possible to hold
to the Farrer’s general theistic metaphysic without necessarily drawing the anti-Reformed implications he does (e.g., that
no special application of divine grace is needed in the life of the believer).
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force), God’s immanence is rather more personal and practical for Farrer. He relates to us

personally, as the one whose will it is to see us conformed to the image of His son, and works

through our lives to bring this about. He is something of a divine artist, accomplishing a great work

in our lives, His masterpiece. There is a deep and undeniable beauty to this aesthetic image of God’s

intimate handiwork in our lives. He is neither far removed nor even close at hand. That is to

conceive of God as mere presence. Rather, He is at work. We enjoy a practical intimacy with God as

we cooperate with Him and His purposes in us and the world. When we walk with Him in humble,

submissive obedience we shall experience the power of God at work in us.

Farrer’s world is also a grace suffused world, one in which God’s work is everywhere taking

place, nowhere outside His reach. There is much to affirm in this view, I believe, though I would

perhaps stress more the need of God’s special initiative in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, to

move the human heart and mind to the true knowledge and love of Him. Not all people embrace

God’s grace at work in their lives. Even though it is there, they either cannot see it or actively refuse

to acknowledge it, when given the chance. There is, then, a theological need, I believe, to

understand this recalcitrance in the human spirit as the thorough-going taint of sin on God’s grace-

embraced world. Those who do draw near in faith do so because He has worked in them to quicken

their hearts and minds to Him. Then they can truly see—and truly cooperate—with God’s

handiwork in their lives.

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Works Cited & Consulted

Allen, Diogenes (2004). “Farrer’s Spirituality.” In Hein & Henderson (2004). Ch 2. 47-65.

(1990). “Faith and the Recognition of God’s Activity.” In Hebblethwaite & Henderson

(1990). Ch 10. 197-210.

Brümmer, Vincent (1992). “Farrer, Wiles and the Causal Joint.” Modem Theology 8:1 (January 1992):

1-14.

Clifford, W.K. (1886). “The Ethics of Belief.” Last accessed on line on 18 September 2010 at:

http://people.brandeis.edu/~rind/bentley/Clifford_ethics.pdf

Farrer, Austin (1958). The Freedom of the Will. London: A & C Black.

(1966). God is Not Dead. New York: Morehouse-Barlow.

(1967). Faith and Speculation: An Essay in Philosophical Theology. New York: NYU Press.

(1970). A Celebration of Faith. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Hanfling, Oswald (2003). “Logical Positivism.” Routledge History of Philosophy. New York: Routledge.

Harries, Richard (1990). “‘We Know on Our Knees’: Intellectual, Imaginative and Spiritual Unity in

the Theology of Austin Farrer.” In Hebblethwaite & Henderson (1990). Ch 1. 21-

33.

Hebblethwaite, Brian & Edward Henderson, eds. (1990). Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the

Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

Hein, David & Edward Hugh Henderson, eds. (2004). Captured by the Crucified: The Practical Theology of

Austin Farrer. New York: T & T Clark.

Henderson, Edward Hugh (2004). “The God Who Undertakes Us.” In Hein & Henderson (2004).

Ch 3. 66-99.
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