Making it Plain: Austin Farrer and the Inspiration of Scripture

Abstract

‘God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.’ I take this couplet of William Cowper’s to lie at the heart of Austin Farrer’s reading of scripture, the essence of his biblical hermeneutic. In this essay I want to suggest that it provides a key to a contemporary understanding of the doctrine of biblical inspiration. My purpose is not, as it was for Farrer in the third of his Bampton Lectures, ‘to construct some account of scriptural inspiration from first principles’,1 but to sketch an account of biblical inspiration that draws upon Farrer’s subtle and penetrating investigations in The Glass of Vision and the essays collected in the volume Interpretation and Belief. I trust that the subject of biblical inspiration will not, as Farrer feared it might, ‘seem to many people a topic so old and so wearisome that it can be no longer endured’!2 As Farrer rightly noted, in the question of biblical inspiration ‘interests more vital than those of curiosity are at stake’.3