Daily Inspiration Quote by Austin Farrer

Farrer smuggles a quiet revolution into a homely comparison: religion, he argues, shouldn’t feel like taking orders from a credentialed specialist. It should feel like answering someone you know. That shift in metaphor matters. “Obedience to an expert” implies distance, hierarchy, and the modern itch to outsource meaning to professionals who can’t be questioned. It’s the posture of the lab report, the compliance memo, the doctrinal quiz. You do what you’re told because the person on the other end has the training.

“Response to a friend” relocates faith into relationship and reciprocity. A friend can be trusted, but not in the bureaucratic sense; trust is earned through presence, history, and a kind of moral intimacy. You respond because you’ve been addressed. Subtext: the core drama of religion isn’t rule-following, it’s encounter. That framing also protects religion from a common caricature of the mid-20th century: faith as mere submission to authority in an age increasingly impressed by scientific expertise and suspicious of institutions.

Context sharpens the point. Farrer, an Anglican theologian working in a Britain reshaped by war, secularization, and the prestige of technical “experts,” is resisting both crude authoritarianism and sterile rationalism. He’s not rejecting doctrine or discipline; he’s demoting them from the center. The line nudges believers away from treating God as a remote examiner and toward treating prayer, conscience, and worship as conversational acts - less like passing an audit, more like keeping faith with someone who knows you and expects you to answer back.