It is by the lives of His genuine disciples that Jesus even now makes His defence. —Origen, Contra Celsum1

Let me begin by saying how grateful I am to Syndicate Theology for hosting this symposium on my book: I have learned a great deal from my commentators, both those whom I already know and those whom I have met through this exchange. Unlike Vainio and Griffiths, but as with Kennedy, I have not yet met Leigh Vicens in person. I am grateful for her insightful contribution, and in particular for bringing her philosophical expertise to bear on a work that attempts to bring (analytic) philosophy and (Christian) theology together.2 I especially appreciate her keen concern for what she describes as “the role of argumentation the life of faith.” However, Vicens thinks that my interpretation of Farrer’s religious epistemology misunderstands this role, and hence I misunderstand it as well, at least to the extent that I subscribe to Farrer’s religious epistemology. Both exegetical and conceptual issues are at stake here, so let me see if I can clarify them in this brief response.

First, the exegetical issue. Vicens rightly zeros in on a genuine ambiguity in my presentation of Farrer’s position on the evidential value of saints as what I call “incarnate arguments” for God, and I will come back to that ambiguity in a moment. But, having identified this ambiguity, Vicens is then faced with the natural dilemma of what Farrer’s position actually is. She says: “My best guess is that [MacSwain, following Farrer] intends the evidence of the saints to replace rational argumentation as the basis of our faith” (emphasis in the original). In other words, this exegetical issue is about how “fideistic” Farrer was and I am. Are all “logical demonstrations” and “rational arguments” for God useless, and are we thus indeed left with nothing other than the witness of holy yet fallible human lives to point us to divine reality?

I take responsibility for the ambiguity in my presentation, and I appreciate Vicens pushing me for clarity here, but my intention was not that such “conspicuous sanctity” should replace rational argumentation but rather that it should augment it, and I think this was Farrer’s considered view as well. In the concluding chapter of the book (the focus of Vicens’s commentary) I intended to remain agnostic vis-à-vis other possible theistic arguments or evidential appeals and to point readers instead toward an intriguing and underexplored proposal, one that I first identified in Farrer but then later realized was shared by a number of other theologians and philosophers, namely, in the words of Sarah Coakley, “Can the lives of the saints . . . provide, at the end of the day, the best argument for God’s existence?”3

Coakley’s own tentative interrogation of this proposal clearly sees it as a potential contribution to a “cumulative case” for Christian theism—so whence the ambiguity in my own presentation of the idea? Two reasons. The first is that in presenting the proposal I drew on a number of figures who interpreted it somewhat differently, and the anti-argument position that Vicens attributes to me and Farrer is, I think, more accurately Rowan Williams’s rather more extreme view, drawing on Etty Hillesum.4 Whereas both Coakley and I see saints as “arguments,” Williams sets “lives” and “arguments” in oppositional terms, as Vicens notes. Williams does, however, see such holy lives as providing “evidence,” which to me suggests they could be part of an argument after all. But my exposition of Farrer, Coakley, Williams, and others on this theme conflated some important distinctions in the attempt to get the basic idea across.

Second reason: the very claim that “persons” or “lives” can function as “arguments” is itself inherently ambiguous, as Vicens again notes, and thus requires further clarification. So, as my final response to the exegetical issue, although in Solved by Sacrifice I indeed use the evocative but unclear phrase “incarnate arguments” (inspired by Farrer’s famous description of priests as “walking sacraments”), after further reflection I propose that we call this claim the “hagiological argument”—that is, the argument from holiness or sanctity. And I would further divide the hagiological argument (as I have encountered it in various authors) into two distinct forms: (i) the propositional (very roughly, “There are saints; therefore, God”) and (ii) the performative (where the “argument” is not propositional and is thus meant analogously to conventional propositional arguments, and the “evidence” is given in the observed character of an entire exemplary life-narrative). Coakley, I think, is aiming at (i), whereas Williams is aiming at (ii), and I am currently poised between them. Further exploration of the hagiological argument in both of these forms is the subject of my current sabbatical research project, so that’s basically all I can say about it at this point.

Second, what then about the conceptual issue raised by Vicens, namely the general normative “role of argumentation the life of faith”? In contrast to what she takes to be my overly-fideistic, anti-argument stance, Vicens defends “a positive role for arguments” in justifying the reasons for belief in God or indeed any belief at all. She thus writes: “At its best, I think that when we attempt to construct an argument for some belief that we hold, we are trying to introspect, to discover and articulate our most deep-seated reasons for holding that belief, so that others may come to see that it is true (or so that, upon closer inspection, we come to see that we have no good reason for holding it after all).” In this vein, she appeals to C. Stephen Evans’s book Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments as advocating “a view of the role of arguments similar to what I have just outlined.” 5

I have not read Evans’s book, so I will take Vicens’s description and endorsement of it at face value. I actually find myself in basic agreement with this stated position, with five important qualifications. First, any discussion of natural knowledge of God raises immensely complicated epistemological and doctrinal issues that neither Vicens nor I can possibly even begin do justice to in this context.6 Second, if we are going to offer an argument to justify a given belief then the Vicens/Evans description of such argumentation sounds plausible, but such arguments are not always necessary for our beliefs to be justified.7 Third, in general, recognizably rational arguments include not only deductive demonstrations but also inductive inferences, and probabilistic cumulative-case arguments are potentially more helpful in discovering and articulating our deep-seated reasons for a given belief than a deductive syllogism.8 Fourth, when it comes to introspecting, discovering, and articulating reasons to believe in God, human beings manifesting conspicuous sanctity—“saints”—are an important but neglected source of evidence. Fifth and finally, rather than Evans’s “natural signs,” such saints are perhaps more accurately described as “supernatural signs.” That is, human beings are of course natural realities—like mountains, sunsets, and so forth—and so any human being in virtue of its very existence can arguably serve as a natural sign pointing to God’s reality. But the operating intuition of the hagiological argument is that there is something distinctive about saints that evokes rather more than Evans’s “cosmic wonder”: something deeper or brighter is disclosed in such lives that is inherently more compelling to those who perceive it.

This is rather vague, so let me cite a passage that I quote in Solved by Sacrifice from the philosopher Peter van Inwagen. It would be difficult to find a more subtle and sophisticated contemporary analytic metaphysician than van Inwagen, so it is fascinating that he explicitly appeals to such extraordinary lives in an account of his own conversion to Christianity. Although he admits that “there is no way I can convey the evidence I am in possession of to you,” he nevertheless asserts that “there are five or six Christians I know who, for all the rich individuality of their lives and personalities, are like lamps, each shining with the same dearly familiar, uncreated light that shines in the pages of the New Testament. . . . When one is in the presence of this light—when one so much as listens to one of these people speak—it is very difficult indeed to believe that one is not in the presence of a living reality that transcends their individual lives.” Such lives, van Inwagen frankly admits, are among “the reasons I have for being a Christian.”9 Such lives, I contend, cannot be reduced to merely “natural signs,” unless I have misconstrued what Evans means by this term. But this also raises the question of whether there ever can be a truly “supernatural sign” for God’s existence, and if so what such a thing might be, or whether all possible signs pointing toward God are in fact merely “natural.”10

In all of my responses to my commentators I have tried to imagine how these discussions might sound to readers of Syndicate Theology who are more attuned to the postmodern Continental idiom of the symposia on, for example, Catherine Pickstock’s Repetition and Identity 11 and William Franke’s A Philosophy of the Unsayable.12 This particular dialogue between Vicens and me on “the role of argumentation in the life of faith” might well seem naively “foundationalist,” or “rationalist,” or “empiricist,” especially compared to the extreme apophaticism endorsed by Franke. And, in light of my forthcoming response to Griffiths, I think he would find this discussion as problematically adhering to a prescriptive rather than descriptive understanding of epistemology. But recall Vicens’s description of such argumentation: in it, she says, “we are trying to introspect, to discover and articulate our most deep-seated reasons for holding that belief, so that others may come to see that it is true (or so that, upon closer inspection, we come to see that we have no good reason for holding it after all).” This is thus not a purely Cartesian, hyper-individualistic view of reason. As Vicens sees it, there is both a private and a public aspect to such reasoning: it begins with introspection, yes, but then proceeds to articulation, and finally to persuasion—with the acknowledgement that such persuasion may well result in the holder of the belief surrendering rather than maintaining it. It is thus a rhetorical view of reason, which has much to offer contemporary discussions.13

Let me conclude by lifting up Vicens’s wonderfully apposite quotation from Bonhoeffer: “Acquired knowledge cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired.”14 Farrer would entirely agree, and this is indeed a point emphasized several times in Solved by Sacrifice: some things can only be known from within a commitment to them, rather than “externally” or “objectively.” But Bonhoeffer’s claim also illuminates the operating intuition of the hagiological argument: the existence in which we acquire knowledge of God is a personal existence—our own, and that of others—and cannot be divorced from it.

On 12 September 2007, at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, during a conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, I presented an early version of what would eventually become chapter 1 of Solved by Sacrifice: Austin Farrer, Fideism, and the Evidence of Faith.1 A soft-spoken Finn engaged me in conversation afterward regarding certain points of interpretation, and he mentioned self-depreciatingly that he was also working on a fideism-related project. This was Olli-Pekka Vainio of Helsiki, who subsequently published the significant study Beyond Fideism: Negotiable Religious Identities. 2 I am thus delighted that one of my very first interlocutors was able to contribute to this symposium.

Vainio’s commentary begins by placing my book on Farrer and fideism in the context of Anglo-American philosophy of religion from the 1930s until now. He identifies three phases in this international but still primarily anglophone conversation between analytic philosophy and Christian theology: the first phase—to which Farrer’s generation belonged—consisting of the immediate reaction to A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic3; the second phase, dominated by Alvin Plantinga in the United States and Richard Swinburne in the United Kingdom, but also informed by D. Z. Phillips’s Wittgensteinian investigations on both sides of the Atlantic; and the third phase being the present day, in which the achievements of the second phase are still consolidating and their further implications explored. Vainio then focuses on three themes from Farrer that have special resonance for this ongoing third phase: metaphysics, spirituality, and (analytic) theology.

I will address briefly these three themes in turn, but let me first observe that in the broader context of the extremely stimulating ongoing conversations initiated by Syndicate Theology, analytic philosophical theology has been curiously (although not entirely) absent. While I have not read all of the previous symposia (nor all the books that they are about!), a glance at the impressive backlist and the forthcoming titles to be discussed indicates a much stronger collective engagement by both authors and commentators with modern and postmodern Continental philosophy as the primary source to which contemporary Christian theologians turn for the conceptual substance of their work. Three of the previous symposia that I will refer to below are those on Adrian Pabst’s Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy,4 Catherine Pickstock’s Repetition and Identity, 5 and William Franke’s A Philosophy of the Unsayable.6 This preference of theologians for Continental philosophy is of course a well-known and oft-commented-upon phenomenon, and I don’t intend to engage deeply with it here, other than to make two observations.

First, among the various treatments of this vexed divide between Continental and analytic philosophy, the one I have personally found most illuminating is William J. Wainwright (ed.), God, Philosophy, and Academic Culture: A Discussion between Scholars in the AAR and the APA.7 While this is not a substantial volume of original scholarship, it helpfully situates the debate in social contexts rather than purely conceptual ones. Wainwright brings together philosophers of religion identifying primarily with the American Academy of Religion—i.e., those who have been trained and teach mostly in departments of religion or divinity schools—and philosophers of religion identifying primarily with the American Philosophical Association—i.e., those who have been trained and teach mostly in departments of philosophy. What emerges is how differently these various scholars have been socialized to think of their supposedly-shared discipline—and not just the “…of religion” aspect. What it means to do philosophy and be a philosopher is strikingly different between members of the AAR and members of the APA: thus, as J. Aaron Simmons rightly says in his commentary on Franke’s A Philosophy of the Unsayable, “if there is a ‘predicament of philosophy of religion today’ [as Franke claims] then perhaps the most troubling aspect of it is that there are two philosophies of religion and neither is interested enough in appropriating and learning from the other.”8 I am thus pleased that this current symposium on Solved by Sacrifice proves that Syndicate Theology is open to appropriating and learning from analytic philosophy as well as what Simmons describes as “deconstructive phenomenological continental philosophy”!

Second, while I avoid the formal techniques often associated with analytic philosophy, my book is indeed concerned primarily (but not exclusively) with the implications of that intellectual tradition for Christian theology, as seen through the lens of Austin Farrer’s life and work. To that extent, despite the fact that I am myself a theologian teaching at a seminary, Solved by Sacrifice is more oriented toward the understanding and practice of philosophy currently dominant in Anglo-American philosophy departments and the APA rather than the understanding and practice of philosophy currently dominant in Anglo-American religion departments and the AAR. This orientation is of course largely contingent on my choice of a mid-twentieth-century Oxford philosopher and theologian as a topic, but that choice was itself intentional. As I will explain in more detail in my response to Darren Kennedy, I agree with Rowan Williams that Farrer is an important but neglected figure, and my goal was to point readers toward a reengagement with his work. But I would also argue that theologians should at least be conversant with the dominant form of philosophy in their own cultural milieu, and for me that is (for better or worse) defined more by the APA than by the AAR. In Solved by Sacrifice I thus assume and operate within the conceptual and terminological conventions of analytic philosophy at least partly because that is, arguably, what “philosophy” means in my Anglo-American culture. This is both a methodological and rhetorical strategy, as I will explain further below.9

Moving then to Vainio’s three themes, he astutely observes that metaphysics was a primary concern of theologians in the early twentieth century, that it suffered a dramatic eclipse in both philosophy and theology in the middle of the century, but that it has now made a remarkable recovery among contemporary analytic philosophers. Farrer and his circle defiantly called themselves “The Metaphysicals” in 1940s Oxford because (according to Basil Mitchell) it was then, under the influence of logical positivism, “the rudest word in the philosopher’s vocabulary.”10 However, over the last few decades, in the wake of post-positivism “‘metaphysics’ ceased to be used as a term of opprobrium and has become the name of a respected field in analytical philosophy, a field in which jobs are advertised and tenure is granted.”11 Or, as Wainwright puts it, albeit twenty years ago in 1996, “Contemporary continental philosophy is deeply antimetaphysical. But contemporary analytic philosophy is not.”12 The tide now seems to be shifting in Continental philosophy as well.

But what about in theology? Has theology overcome its recent suspicion of metaphysics and reluctance to engage with it? On the basis of the Syndicate Theology symposia on Adrian Pabst’s Metaphysics and Catherine Pickstock’s Repetition and Identity, the answer seems to be a contested, partial, but still surprising “yes.” Thus, in his opening commentary on Pickstock, Silas Morgan writes:

“After a long “postmodern” hiatus, it certainly appears that metaphysics is back. Much like the “return” of the theological in contemporary philosophy, it has not so much returned as it has recurred, and so has acquired both a new visibility as it once again tries to claim purchase on the state of the contemporary present. The importance of this development, not only for the relation of philosophy and theology, but also for that of theology and politics, is as difficult to overstate, as it is to fully understand.”13

And Pabst’s bold thesis is “that metaphysics never went away and that it is returning to the fore.” 14 However, what Pabst and Pickstock mean by “metaphysics” and how they do it is unlikely to correlate precisely with what contemporary analytic philosophers intend by their own reconfiguration of the discipline over the past few decades.15

As it happens, J. Aaron Simmons commented on Pickstock’s volume as well as Franke’s, and in a similar manner he observes with some perplexity that although Repetition and Identity is ostensibly “a contribution to ontology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion, this book rarely includes direct engagement with the debates occurring in those areas.” Simmons argues that, although he is a Continental philosopher himself and thus entirely sympathetic to drawing on Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Quentin Meillassoux, “without an equally rich engagement with analytic philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and contemporary metaphysics, it is difficult to see how the account of reology [Pickstock’s term for the study of things] that Pickstock offers could be supported with the requisite warrant to make it stand as a proposal worth serious consideration.” Pickstock, of course, resists this assessment of her work.16

All that notwithstanding, it seems that some theologians are still wary of the return of the metaphysical project, or at least of its potential return to dominance—for an impressive recent example, see Kevin W. Hector’s Theology without Metaphysics: God, Language, and the Spirit of Recognition.17 As Paul Griffiths’ commentary on Solved by Sacrifice indicates, I myself sought to offer a less-metaphysical and more-epistemological reading of Farrer’s significance for contemporary readers, despite the fact that Farrer is most well known as a metaphysician, as one who “does theology metaphysically,” and indeed as the “central figure” of the aptly-named Metaphysicals! 18 I did so under the assumption that shifting attention to Farrer’s epistemology would gain more purchase in what I perhaps naively still regarded as the generally anti-metaphysical climate of contemporary theology.19 Griffiths, however, chides me for this, charging both Farrer and me with the modern mistake of making epistemology first philosophy, rather than (I assume) metaphysics, and I will address his concerns in due course. Meanwhile, I note that (apparently as of this year) Catherine Pickstock has moved from being “University Reader in Philosophy and Theology” at Cambridge to holding a personal chair as “Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics.” As Vainio puts it, “The tides of intellectual seas move rather fast and sometimes in an unexpected manner.”

Very briefly, as for spirituality, Vainio notes the signal contributions of Sarah Coakley, John Cottingham, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, and I would also add works such as David Brown’s God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, 20 Paul K. Moser’s The Evidence for God: Religious Knowledge Reexamined,21 Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering,22 and Mark R. Wynn’s Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life.23 These are all books written by scholars trained in analytic philosophy but who in various ways fruitfully break or blur the boundaries between philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

Finally, among various contemporary movements Vainio mentions Analytic Theology as having the potential to carry forward the work begun by Farrer and the Metaphysicals in the 1940s.24 I tentatively agree, but only if practitioners of Analytic Theology heed the advice of William Abraham and actually read Farrer and the Metaphysicals! This is where it is important to stress that, like Continental philosophy, analytic philosophy is also an internally diverse movement. One of Analytic Theology’s defining members, the philosopher Michael Rea, describes analytic philosophy as “an approach to philosophical problems that is characterized by a particular rhetorical style, some common ambitions, an evolving technical vocabulary, and a tendency to pursue projects in dialogue with a certain evolving body of literature”; analytic theology then “is just the activity of approaching theological topics with the ambitions of an analytic philosopher and in a style that conforms to the prescriptions that are distinctive of analytic philosophical discourse.”25 I wrote earlier that in Solved by Sacrifice I adopted the conceptual and terminological conventions of analytic philosophy as both a methodological and rhetorical strategy, and in light of Rea’s general description of this twin enterprise I hope these claims make more sense to readers of Syndicate Theology. Analytic philosophy is not so much a set of substantive “positions” as it is a way of thinking and writing associated with a specific community of philosophical scholars, and so to think and write in that way is to belong to that community rather than another.26 It is thus also a question of audience, of one’s implied readership.27

So, back to the question of Farrer and Analytic Theology, in his essay, “Turning Philosophical Water into Theological Wine” (published in the first issue of the Journal of Analytic Theology in 2013), William Abraham identifies two strands of analytic philosophy of religion: what he dubs the strand of “St. Alvin” (Plantinga) and the strand of “St. Basil” (Mitchell). The currently dominant strand of St. Alvin has inspired most practitioners of Analytic Theology—Rea, for example, is one of Plantinga’s students—and emphasizes “clarity, precision, logical dexterity, probability lattices, and no metaphors please.” But as a student of Mitchell, Abraham rather lifts up the strand of St. Basil and says:

“The story—which I cannot tell here—would include a lengthy treatment of the essays in Faith and Logic (1957), displacing the role given either to New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955) or to Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (1983) in the conventional narratives. The canon of exemplars is different: Basil Mitchell, John Lucas, I. M. Crombie, M. B. Foster, and Austin Farrer, for starters. The site of operations is different: Oxbridge and various outposts. The theological heritage in which it originates is different: Anglo-Catholic Anglican, and Arminian. The canon of literature is different: start with Faith and Logic and the material subsequently published by the authors included. So too are the methodological strategies and the prized intellectual virtues. Consider the following laundry list of maxims: Pay attention to the historical etiology of our concepts, allow for the possibility of open as opposed to closed concepts, be especially aware of essentially contested concepts, make ample use of parable and apt metaphor, avoid convoluted imaginary examples, write in a way that allows access to those interested in the big questions that motivate philosophical inquiry, cultivate wisdom and other informal intellectual virtues, and allow elbow room for growth in insight and spiritual perception.”28

Whether Abraham’s advice is taken by Analytic Theologians remains to be seen, but I am very much of the school of St. Basil. Although Solved by Sacrifice was written before Abraham published those words, for those who want to explore this neglected strand my volume provides a genealogy of Farrer’s influence on Basil Mitchell and the other Metaphysicals and thus tells part of the story that Abraham outlines here. The implications of that story for contemporary metaphysics and epistemology are detailed in my responses to Griffiths and Vicens, but in addition to thanking Vainio for his generous commentary I’m curious to know more about how Analytic Theology informs his work as a Finnish Lutheran who began his career as a Reformation historian before moving into systematic and philosophical theology. The conversation continues!

I first encountered the incisive mind of Paul Griffiths way back in 1993 when he intervened in a debate in the journal Faith and Philosophy between the liberal theologian Gordon Kaufman and the analytic philosophers Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann. This debate concerned formal and material differences between contemporary theology and contemporary philosophy of religion—differences that also inform the AAR/APA divide between the “two types of philosophy of religion” discussed in my response to Vainio. That whole extended debate is thus highly pertinent to the concerns of this current symposium and well worth revisiting.1 Griffiths and I then overlapped briefly at Durham University in 2007 when he was the Alan Richardson Fellow at the university’s Department of Theology and Religion and I was chaplain of St. Chad’s College. When I heard that he was contributing to this symposium on Solved by Sacrifice, I was both honored and (quite frankly) somewhat apprehensive given his formidable powers of analysis and critique. I was thus relieved by his appreciative comments, but also challenged profoundly by his arguments against the epistemological focus of my interpretation of Farrer’s current significance.2 While certain interpretive and normative differences may remain between Griffiths and me, his commentary has nevertheless changed the way I understand both Farrer’s thought in particular and epistemology in general, and for these new insights I am deeply grateful.

To begin with the interpretive difference about Farrer’s thought, Griffiths says that the first issue he wants to address is “Farrer’s straightforwardly post-Kantian assumption that epistemology is and must be first philosophy.” When I initially read that claim I thought it must be wrong, because I understood Farrer to be a Thomist-inspired metaphysician first and an occasional epistemologist second. In answer to the immortal question, “Who’s on first?” I was certain that Farrer (or at least, the “early” Farrer of the 1940s and 50s) would answer, “Metaphysics.” Farrer’s most important philosophical work is metaphysically oriented, and most serious studies of his philosophy deal directly with his various arguments for finite substance, free will, and divine action.3 My own contribution to Farrer scholarship, I thought, was thus to shift attention away from his oft-studied metaphysics to his neglected epistemology of “apprehension” and “interaction.”4 However, in regard to Farrer’s early work, specifically his monumental treatise Finite and Infinite (1943), I made this shift obliquely, by drawing out the epistemological implications of the metaphysical material.5

Thus, in Finite and Infinite, Farrer leads with the claim that “there are some metaphysical questions which must be settled if we are to vindicate the significance of any theological statements whatever of the traditional type,” and then later asserts that, among such metaphysical questions, “finite substance has to be vindicated if theism is to be upheld.”6 So—at least apparently—metaphysics is on first. Rather than engaging directly with the early Farrer’s arguments for finite substance, however, I contented myself with exploring how his conviction that such metaphysical arguments were necessary ebbed and flowed over the next twenty-five years. I observed how Farrer (arguably) changed his mind about the need for a metaphysical foundation for theology, and concluded instead in his final book, Faith and Speculation (1967), that the believer’s faith was a sufficient ground, at least initially, for rational religious conviction. I argued that in making this shift the later Farrer accepted the possibility of a non-metaphysical foundation for philosophical theology, and perhaps a non-foundational position altogether.7

How, then, can Griffiths assert that for Farrer “epistemology is and must be first philosophy”? The answer is that, according to Griffiths, epistemology is actually more central to Farrer’s project than I had realized, and if Griffiths is correct then post-Kantian epistemological concerns were driving Farrer’s metaphysics all along, even in his earlier Thomist period. For Griffiths, if Farrer was asked the question, “Who’s on first?” the correct answer would be, “Epistemology,” even if Farrer himself wanted to reply, “Metaphysics.” One can even see this epistemological enlistment of metaphysics in the two citations from the early Farrer in the previous paragraph, simply by italicizing “if”—“there are some metaphysical questions which must be settled if we are to vindicate the significance of any theological statements whatever of the traditional type” and “finite substance has to be vindicated if theism is to be upheld.” Thus, in Griffiths’s reading, even for the early Farrer such metaphysical questions must be answered and such theories upheld precisely for their crucial epistemological assistance in making theism rational. In other words, what I regarded in Solved by Sacrifice as the secondary epistemological implications of Farrer’s primary metaphysical interests, Griffiths sees as Farrer’s primary epistemological agenda appealing for justifying metaphysical support.

While Griffiths’s reading of Farrer on this question is partly a matter of where to place the emphasis—i.e., either on being or on belief—if he is correct it would make a difference to my overall argument regarding the nature of Farrer’s thought, and I am still thinking through its potential implications. But while Griffiths is clearly onto something here, things may be a bit more complicated. For example, Griffiths draws his epistemological interpretation of Farrer not just from Finite and Infinite, but also from a 1947 essay titled “The Extension of St. Thomas’s Doctrine of Knowledge by Analogy to Modern Philosophical Problems.”8 In Solved by Sacrifice I suggest that Farrer’s appropriation of Aquinas in this essay does indeed bear some resemblance to the Transcendental Thomism in which, as Fergus Kerr puts it, “Cartesian/Kantian philosophy could not be outwitted by being regarded as a total mistake: rather, Thomas had to be reread in the light of modern philosophical considerations.”9 But I also observe that this flow of influence between the medieval and the modern remains a two-way street and that “Farrer, at any rate, is here trying to do equal justice to both the undeniable conclusions of post-Kantian ‘critical’ philosophy and the epistemic wisdom of medieval Thomism. Although very well aware of the complicating character of the modern critique, he is still [i.e., in 1947] possessed by the Thomist vision.”10 Griffiths, I take it, would not even concede this much value or validity to the post-Kantian influence on Christian theology and philosophical reflection, and would thus condemn Transcendental Thomism as well.

But Griffiths’s second and main critique of my book is what he regards as its mistaken understanding of the purpose of epistemology. If the interpretive difference that I have discussed so far deals with whether Farrer is best described as a metaphysician or an epistemologist, this normative question deals with the proper understanding of epistemology as such. As Griffith sees it, epistemology should be “descriptive rather than prescriptive.” The goal of epistemology is not to “discriminate rational acts of assent from irrational ones independently of discussing the truth of what’s assented to or the processes by which assents are arrived at.” Rather, epistemology “shows, when it’s working as it should, how we (we human creatures, that is) come to make assents; good description is its proper end, and when that’s done well, epistemology finds its proper place.” Thus, instead of Zechariah’s unfaithful question, “How will I know?” (Luke 1:18), Griffiths sides with the angel Gabriel in commending Mary’s “How can this be?” (Luke 1:34) And Griffiths lists a number of sacred and secular figures advocating various versions of this Marian epistemology, such as Newman, Wittgenstein, Quine, Donald Davidson, and John McDowell.

As a specific point of contrast, Griffiths singles out my appeal to what I now call “the hagiological argument” (see my response to Vicens for more details), following Farrer and others in construing saints as evidence for God. Summarizing this argument, Griffiths says that it takes the lives of saints as providing “warrant, perhaps even vindication, for the otherwise epistemically dubious enterprise of taking the divine precepts as such.” This undertaking, however, is a mistake, because it assumes a prescriptive rather than a descriptive role for epistemology. Properly understood, “the saints would vanish as epistemic guarantors, and as any kind of evidence; they would then reappear as what they are, which is as exemplary occasions of contemplative delight for Christians (and sometimes for others).”

As I said in my response to Vicens, further study of the hagiological argument and its potential contribution to religious epistemology is the topic of my forthcoming sabbatical research project, so I can only make a tentative reply to Griffiths regarding these normative claims. First, while it is not an adequate excuse for conceptual wooliness, I should say that in my view Solved by Sacrifice is more a book about epistemology than of epistemology. It is primarily a historical—and more specifically, as I explain in my response to Kennedy, a “historical-genetic”—argument about the development of Farrer’s thought on the relation between faith and reason. And yet in the conclusion I did indeed make some constructive claims regarding religious epistemology—that is to say, I “took sides”—and am thus fair game for the legitimate normative critiques of both Vicens and Griffiths. However, I note that they offer opposing concerns about my “semi-fideistic/soft-rationalist” epistemic position, with Vicens worried that I abandon justifying arguments and Griffiths worried that I deploy them. But I’m also sure that readers such as Vicens and Griffiths can hear the gears grinding as I shift in the last fifteen pages of the book from a historical into a constructive mode—no doubt in apprehensive preparation for what Luke Burns memorably described as the “snake fight” portion of the thesis defense.11

Second, regarding Griffiths’s view of the normative purpose of epistemology as descriptive rather than prescriptive, this is an unresolved tension that runs right through my exposition and analysis of Diogenes Allen’s influence on Farrer’s Faith and Speculation. The first chapter, “The Believer’s Reasons,” consists of a dialogue between a “believer” who offers a descriptive account of his faith and a “philosopher” who asks for a prescriptive justification of it.12 This dialogue nicely captures Farrer’s own uncertainty at the time as to whether the “believer’s” descriptive account is in fact adequate or whether it needs the “philosopher’s” further assistance—which is simply another way of saying that it captures Farrer’s uncertainty regarding the nature and function of philosophy itself. In Griffiths’s terms, is Farrer more with Zechariah or more with Mary? Griffiths rightly suggests that Farrer’s heart seems to be with Mary yet his head seems to be with Zechariah, and so the tension remains.

Third and finally, how then would I resolve this epistemic tension? Descriptive or prescriptive? Mary or Zechariah? Contemplation or evidence? Back to the immortal question: “Who’s on first?” The bases are loaded: should I swing or bunt? Griffiths places me on Zechariah’s team, and fair enough, but I must honestly admit that I have not yet resolved this tension for myself. However, Griffiths’s framing of the issue has brought it into new clarity for me, and I can now interrogate my epistemological assumptions more carefully, for which I am grateful. I really do want to be on the side of Mary and the angels. At the moment, while I resist rationalistic theistic arguments such as those offered by Richard Swinburne, Brian Hebblethwaite, and Denys Turner,13 it still seems to me that we do need some positive reason or evidence, if only discerned through faith, that justifies our belief. So, yes, rightly or wrongly I have indeed been holding out for some prescriptive function of epistemology, however modest or subtle, and I think that’s what Sarah Coakley is looking for as well.14

Thus, Farrer insisted against John Hick that the theistic interpretation of finite existence is “read off” rather than “read in” to the cosmos: the theistic interpretation is not simply projected onto a purely neutral, perfectly ambiguous world that could just as well be read atheistically. And I think that’s right: atheism is rational, but it is still intellectually defective.15 But, interestingly, Farrer thought that what opened our eyes to the correct theistic interpretation was not argument but contemplation:

“The chief impediment to religion in this age, I often think, is that no one ever looks at anything at all: not so as to contemplate it, to apprehend what it is to be that thing, and plumb, if he can, the deep fact of its individual existence. The mind rises from the knowledge of creatures to the knowledge of their creator, but this does not happen through the sort of knowledge which can analyse things into factors or manipulate them with technical skill or classify them into groups. It comes from the appreciation of things which we have when we love them and fill our minds and senses with them, and feel something of the silent force and great mystery of their existence. For it is in this that the creative power is displayed of an existence higher and richer and more intense than all.”16

With Griffiths’s instructive questions in mind, I can now ask whether saints can be prescriptive “evidence” (Farrer), descriptive “occasions of contemplative delight” (Griffiths), or perhaps both at the same time.

According to Rowan Williams—former Archbishop of Canterbury and now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge—the “greatest Anglican intellect of the last century [was] the philosopher and theologian Austin Farrer.”1 And yet, Farrer is now an almost completely unknown figure, even among Anglicans. Williams is perplexed by this state of affairs and has shared his perplexity in several occasional writings. For example, in an essay on John Robinson’s Honest to God,2 Williams observes that not only Farrer but also his fellow Anglo-Catholics in the 1940s such as Gregory Dix and Eric Mascall “had all produced work that represented an amazingly creative reworking of classical themes.” This postwar period produced “an explosion of first-class Anglican doctrinal reflection, still fresh and suggestive more than fifty years later,” but somehow “the 1950s had forgotten why any of this mattered.”3There are no doubt complex social and intellectual reasons for this neglect, and Williams explores some of them, but it still remains puzzling, and one of my primary goals in Solved by Sacrifice: Austin Farrer, Fideism, and the Evidence of Faith was to reengage with this generation of Anglican theologians and to encourage others to do likewise.4

As I was revising the text for publication I was thus both pleased and surprised to discover Darren M. Kennedy’s Providence and Personalism: Karl Barth in Conversation with Austin Farrer, John Macmurray and Vincent Brümmer.5 While Kennedy and I have never met in person, I quickly discovered that we have a lot in common: we both studied at Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1990s with Diogenes Allen and Bruce McCormack, and as a result we both later did doctorates at Scottish universities (Kennedy at Edinburgh and me at St. Andrews) on research topics dealing with both Farrer (due to Allen) and Barth (due to McCormack). Kennedy focused on Barth’s ad hoc appropriation of various personalist philosophies in the service of his Christocentric and Trinitarian theology, and used Farrer as one “pragmatic rather than historical” conversation partner among others;6 whereas I focused on Farrer’s religious epistemology and in one chapter discussed his studies with Barth in 1931, his review of Church Dogmatics I/1 in 1936, and what Rowan Williams describes as the lifelong attempt to develop—contra Barth—“a viable and sophisticated natural theology.”7 Kennedy’s Providence and Personalism thus became required reading while preparing to publish my own book, and I made sure to include references to it in the footnotes and bibliography, as well as reviewing it in Sewanee Theological Review. So I’m glad that I now get to engage with Kennedy on the substance of Solved by Sacrifice.8

Kennedy’s commentary is generous and affirming—for which I am grateful!—and it seems that we are in basic agreement regarding Farrer’s developing views on faith and reason and their significance for contemporary philosophical theology. However, a tangential and even tentative criticism of my fourth chapter opens up an interesting topic, namely that of genre. Kennedy focuses his commentary on chapter 4, “Can Reasonable Minds Still Think Theologically?” (a quotation from Farrer’s book Saving Belief),9 and notes that chapter’s concern with the surprising and neglected influence of the young Diogenes Allen on Farrer’s last book, Faith and Speculation.10 While appreciating and endorsing my argument here, Kennedy says that “MacSwain spends considerable time focusing on ‘The Believer’s Reasons’ [the first chapter of Faith and Speculation, which Farrer says he ‘plundered’ from Allen’s work]: its background, its content and its differing interpretations. While he is correct in seeing the crucial importance of the chapter, the weight of the analysis at times seems more than the fourteen-and-a-half page chapter can bear (Faith and Speculation, 1–15).”

This is a fair and insightful observation. Elsewhere Kennedy says that “Solved by Sacrifice depends on biographical information throughout,” and that my argument draws on “letters, interviews and textual analysis.” These comments raise the question of the genre of Solved by Sacrifice: is it historical theology, philosophical theology, doctrinal theology, constructive theology, or what? The answer is that it is a perhaps unwieldy amalgamation of these genres, with the weight distributed differently across the chapters, but let me here focus on the historical and specifically on what our mutual teacher Bruce McCormack calls the “genetic”—that is, a study that works “from a standpoint within the development itself.”11 It actually took me almost to the end of revising the book before I realized this, and so in chapter 5, note 38, on page 216, I wrote, somewhat belatedly: “I should at this point acknowledge the strong methodological influence on this study of Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), which taught me the value of a historical-genetic, rather than a synchronic-systematic, approach to a given theologian.”

McCormack’s book was published the year I graduated from Princeton Seminary but I didn’t actually read it until my doctoral studies a decade later. Despite the fact that McCormack is himself a professor of systematic theology, in the preface he contrasts the work of the theologian with the work of the intellectual biographer, and for the purpose of this text he sides with the biographer. Thus, he says, the problem with most previous studies of Barth is that they were written by theologians (!), with the unfortunate “tendency to stand outside the development and ask (consciously or unconsciously): what is the most significant result of this development from the standpoint of systematic theology?”12 By contrast, in Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology McCormack deliberately adopted the genre of intellectual biography rather than theology and thus immersed himself in the consecutive minutia of Barth’s published and unpublished writings, including letters and postcards and obscure editorials in socialist newspapers, as well as the social, cultural, intellectual, and economic contexts in Germany and Switzerland in this period.

Again, it took me a while, but I gradually realized that my research on the development of Farrer’s thinking on faith and reason was taking me from the publication of his first book Finite and Infinite in 1943 back to earlier articles, book reviews, and eventually to the archived Farrer papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and that, likewise, the question of Allen’s influence on Faith and Speculation in 1967 was taking me behind the published text to interviews, sources, and unpublished correspondence. While I could not hope to match McCormack’s magisterial accomplishment, I did become rather obsessed with the attempt to emulate it. But this historical-genetic approach to Farrer does explain, if not excuse, the weight of analysis brought to bear on one chapter of Faith and Speculation.13

Kennedy shares my sense of Farrer’s continuing significance, but readers of Syndicate Theology may well wonder why any such effort or even attention is necessary given Farrer’s current obscurity. (“Barth I know, and McCormack I know, but who is Austin Farrer?”) This raises the complicated question of influence. Although Farrer does seem to have been largely forgotten, he has in fact exercised a subterranean influence on several important contemporary figures. I have already mentioned Rowan Williams’s assessment of Farrer as the “greatest Anglican intellect of the last century.” While Williams rarely cites Farrer directly, this is beginning to change, as in several recent publications or lectures he has appealed to Farrer’s defense of substance in Finite and Infinite14 and to what Williams calls “the christological pattern of his metaphysical concern” in The Glass of Vision.15 There’s also a strong connection between Farrer and “Yale School” theologians such as Hans Frei (1922–1988) and Stanley Hauerwas. For example, in his “Remarks in Connection with a Theological Proposal,” Frei wrote that he was influenced “by philosophical psychologists such as Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Peter Strawson, and Elizabeth Anscombe—and theologians like Austin Farrer and Karl Barth.”16 And in his memoir Hannah’s Child Hauerwas also discusses the influence of both Barth and Farrer on him, via Julian Hartt, during his initial studies at Yale.17 And so on.

But the question of influence—which, remember, was raised by me and not by Kennedy—may be a red herring. We read figures not because they are influential, but because they are helpful. For any number of reasons, some readers may find Farrer helpful in various respects whereas others may not. Rather than dwelling on influence, Frei commends an understanding of theology as “first of all the contemplative and devotional habit of the mindform of the knowledge and love of God, and second, the use of the trained intellect in penetrating that abiding mystery”—and then adds parenthetically: “Austin Farrer’s Bampton Lectures, The Glass of Vision, come to mind.”18 It is important not to be caught in the web of what is currently influential and thus exist purely in an echo-chamber of the like-minded. Kennedy’s creative conversation between Barth, Farrer, Macmurray, and Brümmer proves that he is not thus trapped, and I am grateful for his reflections on Solved by Sacrifice.