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‘An infallible Fact-Factory Going Full Blast’: Austin Farrer, Marian Doctrine, and the Travails of Anglo-Catholicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In 1960 the Anglican philosopher Austin Farrer preached a sermon ‘On being an Anglican’ in the chapel of Pusey House which must have amazed his hearers. It began gently enough; but halfway through, the tone changed. Human perversity had rent the unity of the Church with schisms and heresies. How could he, ‘truly and with a good conscience’, stay in the Church of God? ‘Only by remaining in the Church of England’.’ Farrer put down two markers for his Anglican identity. One was stated briefly and with restraint: ‘I dare not dissociate myself from the apostolic ministry.’ It was the other that must have startled his congregation:
I dare not profess belief in the great Papal error. Christ did not found a Papacy … Its infallibilist claim is a blasphemy, and never has been accepted by the oriental part of Christendom. Its authority has been employed to establish as dogmas of faith, propositions utterly lacking in historical foundation. Nor is this an old or faded scandal - the papal fact-factory has been going full blast in our own time, manufacturing sacred history after the event.
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References
1 Farrer, ‘On being an Anglican’, in idem, The End of Man (1973), 50.
2 Ibid., 50-1.
3 See, for example, Farrer’s participation in three of the most significant Anglo-Catholic publications of the mid-twentieth century: ‘Eucharist and Church in the New Testament’, in Hebert, G., ed., The Parish Communion. A Book of Essays (1954), 73–94 Google Scholar; ‘The ministry in the New Testament’, in Kirk, K.E., ed., The Apostolic Ministry. Essays on the History and the Doctrine of Episcopacy (1946), 113–82 Google Scholar; and co-authorship with Abbott, E.S.,Carpenter, H.J., Dix, Gregory,Ramsey, A.M. et al., Catholicity. A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West (Westminster, 1947)Google Scholar.
4 ‘If such an institution as the ‘universal Church’ is to exist as more than a sentiment and an ideal … then some such central institution [as the Papacy] would seem to be more than just a convenience’: Abbott et al., Catholicity, 36.
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8 A letter to J.T. Coleridge, dated 18 June 1845, cited in J.T. Coleridge, A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble (Oxford, 1869), 281 Google Scholar. It is Coleridge who published the poem in full, at 305-9.
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26 Farrer, A.M., ‘Infallibility and historical revelation’, repr. in idem, Interpretation and Belief (1976),164.Google Scholar.
27 Ibid., 15 8 [Farrer’s italics].
28 A.M. Farrer, ‘Mary, Scripture and tradition’, in Mascall and Box, Blessed Virgin Mary, 118.
29 Ibid., 122.
30 Ibid., 121-2.
31 Ibid., 116.
32 Ibid., 117.
33 Ibid., 112.
34 On Farrer’s studies in Germany and Switzerland, see P. Curtis, A Hawk among Sparrows. A Biography of Austin Farrer (1985), 75-80, 96-103.
35 Farrer did nevertheless see as established without question in the nineteenth century the view that scholarship is revisable, and that scholarship affects what we can conclude to be the teaching of scripture: ‘to admit primitivity as a judge or as a control is to submit to schol arship or historianship’: Farrer, ‘Infallibility’, 158.
36 Farrer, ‘Mary’, 113.
37 Farrer, ‘Infallibility’, 162.
38 Ibid., 163. This marks Farrer’s position out clearly from that implied in the recent ARCIC II report, The Gift of Authority (1999), in which the question ‘What kind of statement could be declared infallibly as fact?’ is not dealt with at all.
39 The dependence of this position on the Protestant tradition of ‘fundamentals of faith’ is evident: see, for example, Sykes, S.W., ‘ The fundamentals of Christianity’, in idem, Unashamed Anglicanism (1995), 64–80 Google Scholar. Though Sykes assumes here a general Tractarian hostility to the use of the term, the use of the concept itself was, as I have indicated, more widespread in Tractarian thought than he acknowledges.
40 Farrer, ‘Mary’, 123.
41 Ibid., 124.
42 Farrer, The End of Man, 155. This is in a sermon preached in Keble College chapel in 1966.
43 Farrer, A.M., Words for Life (1993), 13 Google Scholar. Though undated, the sermon The friendship of Jesus’ was probably preached in Trinity College chapel, Oxford, before Farrer left to go to Keble College as Warden in 1960: see Leslie Houlden’s introduction, in Farrer, Words for Life, xi-xiii.
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48 Ibid., 106.
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51 ARCIC I, The Final Report (1982), 93–4 Google ScholarPubMed.
52 Farrer, ‘Infallibility’, 162.