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Diogenes allen sin12/19/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() In a passage from a sermon that becomes central to MacSwain’s work, Farrer claims the “paradox” of faith and reason is solvitur immolando (“solved by sacrifice”). As Farrer says in “Faith and Evidence,” “We shall not achieve full intellectual belief unless we live by it” (quoted on 235). What is particularly striking about MacSwain’s analysis is his observation that Farrer’s “sort of fideism” moves us beyond faith-as-epistemic to something like faith-as-lived (or, in Farrer’s words, “life-in-grace”). MacSwain makes the compelling case that Farrer should receive at least as much attention as figures such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne who have otherwise “set the agenda” for so much recent Anglo-American philosophical theology (149). He argues that Allen, shaped by the later Wittgenstein, eventually helped Farrer “move to the possibility of a non-metaphysical foundation for philosophical theology, indeed perhaps to a non-foundational position altogether” (8, cf. While they focus on the influence of Charles Hartshorne via John Glasse, MacSwain is concerned to show the profound impact of Farrer’s hitherto unexamined relationships with Princeton Theological Seminary Professor Diogenes Allen. On the way to his conclusion, MacSwain interacts at length with Farrer’s interpreters, namely Charles Conti and Jeremy Morris. By this, he means “faith is not contrary to reason but precedes it” (88). According to MacSwain, Farrer’s “great insight was that some things can only be known in this way, from within a commitment to them, a commitment which may be called ‘faith’” (234).Ĭarefully tracing the evolution in Farrer’s understanding of “the evidence of faith,” MacSwain argues for what he calls “moderate methodological fideism”-not only as an apt description of Farrer’s epistemology but also, constructively, as a position that he takes up in the end as his own. While he maintains “the possibility of the rational truth of theism,” he thinks being “rational” involves “appreciating reason’s limited function and powers” (91) and he tests his beliefs “not merely by rigorous conceptual analysis but by living them” (234). As an Oxford chaplain writing in not only academic but also homiletic, devotional, and epistolary modes, Farrer engages metaphysical and epistemological claims with a view to their rootedness in faith practice and especially the experience of grace. ![]() MacSwain commends Farrer as a thinker who “never avoided ‘the empirical demand’” and yet did not simply “fit his religious beliefs into a predetermined philosophical system” (234). Robert MacSwain’s Solved By Sacrifice: Austin Farrer, Fideism, and the Evidence of Faith is a meticulous account of the twentieth-century British philosopher’s religious epistemology, but it deserves the attention of anyone more broadly interested in the relationship between faith and reason. ![]()
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