Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry

Robert MacSwain is Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics, The School of Theology, The University of the South, Sewanee, TN, USA. The author of Solved by Sacrifice: Austin Farrer, Fideism, and the Evidence of Faith (Peeters, 2013), he has also co-edited four previous volumes: with Jeffrey Stout, Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein (SCM Press, 2004); with Ann Loades, The Truth-Seeking Heart: Austin Farrer and His Writings (Canterbury Press, 2006); with Michael Ward,The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and with Taylor Worley, Theology, Aesthetics, and Culture: Responses to the Work of David Brown (Oxford University Press, 2012).

• Chapter 1 Introduction: 'The form of divine truth in the human mind', Robert MacSwain; Part I Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision : Bampton Lectures for 1948, Austin Farrer; Chapter 2 Preface; Chapter I The Supernatural and the Natural; Chapter II The Supernatural and the Weird; Chapter III Images and Inspiration; Chapter IV The Metaphysician's Image; Chapter V The Rational Theologian's Analogy; Chapter VI Archetypes and Incarnation; Chapter VII Prophecy and Poetry; Chapter VIII The Poetry of the New Testament; Part II Commentary; Chapter 1a Metaphysical Philosophy, Scriptural Revelation and Poetry, 1985], David Jasper; Chapter 2a God and Symbolic Action, 1990], David Brown; Chapter 3 The Stuff of Revelation: Austin Farrer's Doctrine of Inspired Images, 1992], Ingolf Dalferth; Chapter 4 Making it Plain: Austin Farrer and the Inspiration of Scripture, 1992], Gerard Loughlin; Chapter 5 The Sin of Reading: Austin Farrer, Helen Gardner and Frank Kermode on the Poetry of St Mark, 1992], Hans Hauge; Chapter 6 Austin Farrer's Shaping Spirit of Imagination, 2006], Douglas Hedley;

’Theological readers owe MacSwain and his contributors a great debt for renewing our careful attention to Austin Farrer's The Glass of Vision. A fresh generation of scholars stands to benefit immeasurably by learning from Farrer's deep, catholic imagination. These lectures, and the whole of Farrer's work, display his standing as a nonpareil reader of Scripture and the Anglican Christian tradition.' A.K.M. Adam, St Stephen's House, Oxford University, UK