The Kenotic Trajectory of the Church in Donald Mackinnon’s Theology: From Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee 9781472551375, 9780567114495

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acknowledgements

This study first took shape as a doctoral dissertation brought to completion under the patient supervision of Professor John Webster and presented to Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto. It was Professor Webster who first introduced me to the writings of Donald MacKinnon by putting the two Signpost Tracts in my hands and asking enticingly whether I had read them. I shall be forever grateful for that first fittingly tentative introduction and for the many gifts that were offered to me with characteristic generosity during the subsequent wrestling with MacKinnon’s works which led to this essay. I am indebted also to Professor Gary Badcock of the Faculty of Theology, Huron University College who served as external examiner and who has constantly encouraged me to publish the thesis. I also wish to acknowledge generous financial support from Wycliffe College which made study possible in the first place and am grateful to its principal, the Reverend Canon Dr. George Sumner, for opportunity to teach there as an adjunct lecturer and to Professor Joseph Mangina. I am especially grateful to the editors of this series, John Webster, Ian A. McFarland and Ivor J. Davidson, for accepting this work for publication and to Thomas Kraft of T & T Clark/Continuum Books for his assistance. Professor Michael Fahey, SJ, to whom I am also deeply indebted for his generous guidance during doctoral studies, once observed to me that the vocation of the theologian is so very often a lonely one. Nowhere, perhaps, does this judgement prove more telling than among those whose primary sphere of theological work is in the parish church. Among the mentors whose encouragement in this ecclesial setting has been invaluable are the Right Reverend Morse C. Robinson, retired Suffragan Bishop of Huron who first invited me to teach at the Renison Institute of Ministry in the University of Waterloo and who has been a constant exemplar and source of encouragement. His friendship brings me great joy. To those colleagues in this diocese where I serve, especially the Reverend Dr. Timothy Dobbin, the Reverend David Tiessen, the Reverend Gwen Fraser and Ms. Marilyn Malton, I give thanks for the gift of theological conversation and companionship on the way. The wardens and parishioners of St. George’s Anglican Church, London, Ontario, have been both patient and gracious in giving me time amid parish duties to teach and to complete this project.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgement is also made to James Clarke and Co., Ltd., the Lutterworth Press, for permission to cite excerpted material from Donald MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (eds. and intro. George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker; London: Lutterworth Press, 1968). Extracts from Explorations in Theology 5 by Donald MacKinnon are © SCM Press, 1979 and are reproduced by permission of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd. The person who has given most and suffered most in order that study and service in both academy and church might be undertaken is my wife Ruth to whom I owe more than words can express. To her I gladly dedicate this book.

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introduction

Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Anglo-Catholic tradition is the high seriousness with which it has recalled the Church of England, indeed the whole Anglican Communion, to confess the mystery of one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. Basic to this ecclesiological emphasis has been theological elaboration of the question, ‘What is the church?’ At its best this approach has furnished accounts which are visionary and constructive, holding up an ideal before the people of God, providing a vista of renewal of the visible ecclesial form of the life of the faithful baptized. At times, however, such accounts have portrayed, however unintentionally, an abstraction, even a docetic, invisible church, floating serenely above the accidents of history in a realm of immutable principle. They have often been highly nostalgic, privileging putatively formative periods of ecclesial existence at the expense of ongoing development. At their worst, they have degenerated into ideological tools of exclusion, fruitful for the unchurching of other Christians while extending the comforting security of the walled garden to those willing to embrace and live by them. If the church is essentially a lived, visible reality in the world, as this tradition has rightly insisted, the basic ontological question must be supplemented by a second line of inquiry responding to the question, ‘What has the church become?’, a probing of the historical rootedness and successiveness of the churches, their dialectic of stasis and change, growth and decline, faithfulness and apostasy. At their best such accounts shed light on the patterns of discipleship which have emerged in diverse and changing settings and may point the way to ever new appropriations of ecclesial faithfulness. At their worst they may fall prey to a reductive sociological empiricism which invites indifferentism by failing to put the lived reality of the church into relation with its transcendent horizon. Concentration on the sins and failures of the churches easily degenerates into disillusionment, negativity and ultimately abandonment of the church for the impossibility, in biblical terms at least, of a solipsistic faith. A focus on actuality, therefore, requires balancing by a third line of investigation couched in the moral question, ‘How ought the church to live?’, opening up broad perspectives on the ordering of its life ad intra and in relation to the world in which it is set. 1

THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

Optimally this approach conduces to repentance and the renewed embodiment of faith amid the realities of everyday life. Its potential pitfall, one to which Anglicans have been far too often prone, is a decline into a crushing moralism by which grace is eclipsed as the faithful are exhorted to engage an exhausting agenda of tasks by which the church attempts to bootstrap its life into conformity with its moral ideal. The prodigious attention to ecclesiology in response to such questions by Anglo-Catholic writers in the Church of England in the last century and a half has lent credence to the claim that their legacy constitutes an Incarnationalsacramentalist consensus which has come virtually to define Anglicanism in its North Atlantic manifestation.1 Its dual theological principle, as Rowan Williams describes it, can be glimpsed in the affirmation that God had become human and thereby shown that human nature could carry the divine glory; God had raised the whole of human nature and therefore every man and woman to new dignity, by opening to all a share in the fellowship of Christ’s body; the human God had established, as abiding tokens of his presence, material acts and objects, bread, wine and water, and so declared all material existence to be potentially charged with the life of God.2 The hallmark of this tradition is the oft–repeated assertion that the church is the ‘extension of the Incarnation’ and that its status as such is effectively attested and secured by its possession of the historic episcopate in the apostolic succession, the gospel sacraments, the catholic creeds and the Holy Scriptures. In the light of this highly positive claim and the almost hegemonic status of the liberal Catholicism erected upon it, there are two features of contemporary Anglican ecclesial experience which call for comment. First, contemporary Anglican ecclesiological writing, especially in the North Atlantic world, has come increasingly to focus on the discontents of the tradition, lamenting decline on several fronts, the erosion of scriptural and doctrinal norms and the fragmentation of communion, to the extent that crisis is fast becoming the

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For a penetrating critical description of this consensus see Rowan Williams’ 1989 Gore Memorial Lecture, ‘Incarnation and the Renewal of Community’, in idem, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), pp. 225–38. See also idem, ‘The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma’, in The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of ‘Lux Mundi’ (ed. Robert Morgan; Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), pp. 85–98; B. Hebblethwaite, The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 53–76; and Stephen Sykes, ‘The Incarnation as the Foundation of the Church’, in Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued (ed. Michael Goulder; London: SCM Press; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1979), pp. 115–27. Ibid., p. 225.

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INTRODUCTION

byword of many studies which have followed in the wake of Stephen Sykes’ ground-breaking work, The Integrity of Anglicanism.3 Indeed, along with this precariousness entailed by the erosion of its ethos, the question of the very survivability of Anglicanism is now regularly canvassed.4 For some, notably the partisans of particular traditions such as that remarkable radical AngloCatholicism which flourished in the aftermath of the Second World War, the matter is even more crucial. Is the tradition exhausted; has it already died out?5 Inevitably, coincident with the enumeration of such discontents comes the call for increased attention to ecclesiology, the critical and constructive elucidation of the forms by and within which one becomes and remains a Christian. Second, the three lines of ecclesiological investigation which we delineated earlier appeal in various ways to a norm or centre against which ecclesial performance and belief may be judged and renewed, perhaps in terms of principles culled from an essential New Testament image such as ‘Body of Christ’ or, more dynamically, by linking appeal to an initial foundational Christological institution with an emphasis on the ongoing pneumatological constitution of the church in legitimation of its claim to identity as the extension of the Incarnation. In terms of performance, it is noteworthy that despite acceptance of an authoritative call from its bishops gathered at the Lambeth Conference of 1988 for a decade of evangelism across the entire communion, the Anglican churches of the North Atlantic have faltered to varying degrees in responding to this challenge and opportunity to bear public witness to Jesus Christ in the particular localities in which they are placed, a fact of contemporary Anglican life disconcertingly at odds with the New Testament portrait of the mission-minded church of Great Commission and Pentecost whose service of word, sacrament and ministry among and to each other spilled out over its boundaries to engage the world.6 This state 3

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Stephen W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (London: Mowbrays, 1978). See now, more generally, Ephraim Radner, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing,1998). See, for instance, Stephen Platten, ‘Can Anglicanism Survive?: Reflections on Lambeth 1998 and Anglicanism as a World Communion’, Theology 103 (May/June 2000), pp. 178–88. See Kenneth Leech, Subversive Orthodoxy: Traditional Faith and Radical Commitment (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1992), p. 40. Leech asks: ‘Does Anglo-Catholicism today represent an exhausted religious tradition? Is it living on its past? Certainly in many of its manifestations, it seems to carry a ghetto consciousness, cut off from the central concerns of the Christian world, looking backwards to some fictitious golden age. However, there can be no doubt that fundamentalism is alive and well, not least in its Catholic forms’. See also K. Leech and R. Williams (eds), Essays Catholic and Radical: A Jubilee Group Symposium for the 150th Anniversary of the Beginning of the Oxford Movement 1833–1983 (London: Bowerdean Press, 1983). The Lambeth Conference 1988, The Truth Shall Make You Free. The Reports, Resolutions and Pastoral Letters from the Bishops (London: Anglican Consultative Council, 1988), para. 23, p. 35, and Resolution 43, p. 231.

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of affairs must be judged especially troubling if, as has been argued recently, the range of empirical practices (of which the Eucharist is the epitome) by which Christian ecclesial identity is said to be normed amounts from start to finish to a proclamation of the gospel.7 However Anglican resistance may be accounted for, the Lambeth summons itself echoes a climactic moment in the argument of an abiding classic of twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic writing on the church in which Michael Ramsey, in the dark years preceding the Second World War, invited Catholic Christendom to sustained attentiveness to the ‘source of convertedness’8 at the heart of the tradition, namely, the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus whose themes, Ramsey urged, are to be ‘learnt and re-learnt in humiliation’ and whose truth both creates and judges the church.9 It recalls also the apocalyptic insight of Edwyn Hoskyns that the theme of the church is the gospel, the unsettling, even explosive, salvific deed of crucifixion–resurrection in which is grounded the relation of humanity, and with it the whole creation, to God.10 If it might be said of the first generation of Anglo-Catholics that their call for ecclesial and ecclesiological renewal within the Church of England described a transit from emphasis on the interiority of faith to emphasis on external, traditioned ecclesial form, a century later the work of Ramsey and Hoskyns to some extent proposed a reversal of direction. Their primary point, however, stands: the church’s treasure is indeed the gospel. In a complacent church set amid a culture reeling in the wake of the horrors of the Great War, it remained nonetheless a discomfiting and disturbing treasure.11 The issue 7

See Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, ed Colin Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 22–31. 8 The phrase is John Webster’s. See idem, Theological Theology: An Inaugural Lecture before the University of Oxford on 27 October 1997 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 23. 9 Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1990), p. 180. 10 See from the 1932–1933 academic year the sermon by E. C. Hoskyns, ‘The Language of the Church’, in idem, Cambridge Sermons (with an appreciation by Charles Smyth; London: SPCK, 1970), pp. 90–97. Hoskyns’ image is not that of a church which has the detonation of gospel dynamite under its own control but rather one against whose very foundations that explosive power is precariously lodged. Alternatively, the sermon speaks of the gospel as a dagger pointed at the heart of the church. 11 Richard Roberts argues that despite awareness in the English churches of the catastrophic effects of accelerated social and cultural changes unleashed by the war, ‘it is a sense of an ecclesiastical and theological as-you-were, a return not only to pre-war questions, but also their old answers, as though nothing had happened’. See Richard H. Roberts, ‘The Reception of the Theology of Karl Barth in the Anglo–Saxon World: History, Typology and Prospect’, in Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (ed. S. W. Sykes; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 119–20.

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INTRODUCTION

here has been framed with admirable precision by the sometime Bishop of Salisbury, John Austin Baker, in terms of the legibility of the sign-character and the intelligibility of the sacramentality of the church, externally as well as internally, namely whether given much traditional ecclesiological rhetoric one should not expect greater correspondence of ecclesial performance with the saving effect of God’s activity in Christ: ‘The more we emphasize, in our description of the essential nature of the church, the divine sacramental and sanctifying life within the community, the more legitimate it becomes for the world to demand discernible results’.12 And for Anglican heirs of a putative Incarnational–sacramentalist consensus, Baker’s query is all the more probing: The more strictly the image of the body of Christ is interpreted, in a concern to emphasize the underlying God-given unity, holiness and apostolicity (cf. Jn. 20.21; Heb. 3.1) of the church, independent of the sinfulness of its members, the less plausible, from the viewpoint of the world, does the implicit claim become. The church does not look, to the world, like Christ. Nor are matters mended by making Christ the ‘Head’, not the whole body.13 In the face of this apparent gap between theory and practice Baker calls the church to repentance in faithfulness to the gospel. It is to this context, the crisis of Anglo-Catholicism and its much-heralded Incarnational–sacramentalist consensus in its confrontation with the crisis of the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus, that the theological work of the Scottish Episcopalian moral philosopher, Donald MacKenzie MacKinnon (1913–1994), makes an extraordinary contribution.14 While it may seem counterintuitive to write at length about MacKinnon’s engagement with patently ecclesiological themes, it will be shown that a fundamental preoccupation of his work was to delineate what might be called a pedagogy of Christian discipleship, a preoccupation which the distinguished Roman Catholic ecumenist and ecclesiologist Yves Congar once identified as the ‘first value’ in a doctrine of the church determined by Scripture and tradition, that is, ‘not organization, mediatorial functions or authority, but

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John Austin Baker, ‘A Summary and Synthesis’, in Church, Kingdom, World: The Church as Mystery and Prophetic Sign (Faith and Order Paper No. 130, ed. Gennadios Limouris; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1986), p. 155. Ibid., p. 156. The theme is pervasive from the earliest of MacKinnon’s writings but substantive treatments of the ‘shallowness’ of this tradition in the face of human tragedy and sin can be found in the Signpost Tracts. See, for example, Donald MacKinnon, God the Living and the True (London: Dacre Press, 1940), pp. 87–88.

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the Christian life itself and being a disciple’.15 Ecclesiology in this restricted sense focuses on the relation in which believers stand to Jesus Christ and hence to the living, Triune God, to each other and to the world in which they are engaged on the Christian way. There is nothing so deliberatively detailed or systematic in MacKinnon’s theological writings as a ‘model’16 or ‘blueprint’17 or even a full-fledged doctrine of the church but rather a trajectory of thought, an extended, if highly occasional and somewhat fragmentary, argument for the reorienting of the church’s belief and practice on the gospel as its source of convertedness. The source and goal to which MacKinnon directed the catholic church is the way of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee, and it is in description and redescription of what was revealed and effected along that trajectory from life to death to life that he found fundamental work in addressing the tensions generated in the context of the church by the conflicted claims of theory and practice, ontology and theology, culture and gospel. Along this gospel itinerary he reckoned that a ‘school of faith’ was to be found in which formation consisted less in precise theological formulation than in ‘separating pretence from reality in attachment to the way of the Son of Man’.18 Fundamental to this pedagogy of discipleship is MacKinnon’s insistence in concert with New Testament claims that theory and practice, theology and ethics, can be distinguished but not separated. In particular, then, two interrelated themes are elaborated along this trajectory, namely the relation between Jesus Christ and the church and the relation of the church to the world, to politics and to culture. It is noteworthy that in this context MacKinnon urged attention to the actual people of the church, neither as a congeries of deracinated individuals nor as a faceless collective, but as those women and men ‘sustained and illuminated, irritated and sometimes infuriated by particular traditions of Christian life and thought’.19 Beliefs and practices are not examined in

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Yves Congar, ‘The People of God’, in Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal (ed. John H. Miller; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), p. 200. As Congar notes, this first value is rooted in the economy of grace and places emphasis on the operations of God in constituting a people and conferring salvation upon them (pp. 198–99). Of the role of the magisterium in service to the faithful Congar asks, ‘What nobler thing can one do than to make men disciples of the gospel?’ The now-classic text is Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (New York: Doubleday, Image Books, expanded edition, 1987). See Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical–Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–51. D. M. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology: The Threefold Cord: Essays in Philosophy, Politics and Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1987), pp. 140–41. D. M. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars: The Gore Memorial Lecture Delivered on 5 November 1968 in Westminster Abbey, and Other Papers and Essays on Related Topics (London: Collins, Fontana Library, 1969), p. 66.

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INTRODUCTION

isolation from those who believe and practise them, nor is the individual neglected in favour of the institution or the institution in favour of the individual. In sum, the trajectory of MacKinnon’s theological thought runs from the ambiguities of the lived reality of the church back to the cross-resurrection of Jesus and from that fontal event back to the church and outward to the world. As his probing of that salvific event from which the church has sprung intensifies, MacKinnon becomes increasingly absorbed in the task of grounding Christian ecclesial discipleship in the relational context created by the redemptive act of Jesus’ cross and resurrection and therefore in the doctrinal matrix of Christological and Trinitarian thought. MacKinnon’s most concentrated reflections on this ecclesiological context belong primarily to two periods of crisis. In the early years of the Second World War he began to prosecute a work of ‘evangelical penetration’20 in which he set out the discontents in theory and practice of the particular tradition to which he belonged, all the while recognizing that in the midst of such turbulence and decline there was ‘unparalleled opportunity’ for the preaching of the gospel, the hope grounded in the good news of Jesus Christ.21 All the same, MacKinnon’s theological writings of this period are set in a minor key, a sombre if urgent tone forged in the crucible of ‘the terrible twelve years, 1933–1945’.22 Again, in the intellectual, social and political upheaval which marked the institutional crisis in the West in the 1960s, he intensified critical description of the church at a time in which he reckoned that faith was especially precarious and yet one in which perception of its objects might be renewed.23 The treasure of the church is indeed the gospel and if, with St. Paul, MacKinnon noted that it was held in earthen vessels, he did not neglect elaboration of key aspects of the ecclesial forma Christi 20

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The phrase, justly applicable to his own work, was once used by MacKinnon to characterize the theology of P. T. Forsyth in idem, ‘Teleology and Redemption’, in Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of Peter Taylor Forsyth (ed. Trevor Hart; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), p. 109. D. M. MacKinnon, The Church of God (London: Dacre Press, 1940), p. 25. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Christology with Special Reference to Theodramatik II/2 and III’, in The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (ed. John Riches; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1986), p. 165. MacKinnon argued here that any treatment of theological issues which refuses to reckon with the murder of six million Jews is marked with a ‘sort of shallowness’. His mood is shared by others who lived through this crisis, notably his friend George Steiner whose bleak appraisal of the past century considered it a ‘time out of hell’, marked by ‘core-tiredness’, the collapse of the future tense, that is, of hope, and by ‘the eclipse of the messianic’ in the face of staggering atrocities carried out by cultured and technologically sophisticated humanity come of age. See George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 3–4, 9–11. D. M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (ed. with an introduction by G. W. Roberts and D. E. Smucker and introductory essay by D. M. MacKinnon; London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), p. 21.

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which the gospel continually generates and sustains in such turbulent but hope-filled periods of renewal. At this point, however, the trajectory breaks off rather abruptly and MacKinnon rarely turned in his later works, with a few important exceptions, to reflect in detail on ecclesial forms and relationships. The line of critical thought which had brought him to reflect on the cross-resurrection of Jesus exercised an interruptive and virtually censorial mastery over his mind, impelling him to return again and again to description of the way of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee as the grounds for theological discourse. This tightly restricted focus pushed soteriological, Christological and Trinitarian themes into the foreground at the expense of positive ecclesiological elaboration which received its own ascetic discipline in the form of MacKinnon’s argument for the extension of the concept of kenosis to the doctrine of the church. At the same time, those soteriological, Incarnational and Trinitarian concerns led him to delineate, however tersely, the relational context within which positive intimations about ecclesial practice might come to expression. A train of argument that appears at first glance to lead only to an ecclesiological hiatus actually secures the church within a kenotic account of soteriological, Incarnational and Trinitarian themes. In the chapters which follow the relentless trajectory of MacKinnon’s theological thought towards the church’s source of convertedness in the gospel is traced against the backdrop of the alleged Incarnational–sacramentalist consensus which has come to expression in the Church of England in the form of ‘liberal Catholicism’. If one lesson which the Anglican ethos has persistently driven home, however, is that the line between the critic and the contrarian, the prophet and the malcontent, is exceedingly fine, we begin in Chapter 1 by situating MacKinnon’s oeuvre in good company on the map of contemporary Anglican ecclesiological discontents to which we have already referred.24 It is a methodological constant of MacKinnon’s approach that ‘any serious theological work must take account of the over-all ecclesial and human contexts in which it is carried on’.25 In so doing, we develop a portrait of the ecclesiological context of the post–Second World War Church of England which casts serious doubt on the applicability and fruitfulness of the use of terms such as consensus in its description. Moreover, apart from their setting in this particular context which they are intended to intersect in the form of a corrective, MacKinnon’s theological writings may seem little more than a collection of disjecta membra. In the second chapter, MacKinnon’s early efforts in critical elaboration of aspects of a doctrine of the church are described, at first in relation to themes explored in concert with the Christendom Group and then increasingly in the form of a 24

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MacKinnon himself was only too aware of this aspect of the Church of England’s ethos. See his caustic criticisms in idem, ‘Christology and Protest’, in Trevor Huddleston: Essays on his Life and Work (ed. Deborah Duncan Honoré; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 182–83. D. M. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 3.

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INTRODUCTION

theologia crucis influenced by dialogue with the continental theological ferment unleashed by and in response to Karl Barth and others. Ecclesiology carried out in the context of the early years of the Second World War, MacKinnon argued, must take account not only of the failures of the church but also of the multiform challenges to its thought and practice thrust upon it by a society overwhelmed by upheaval. In the third chapter, we examine MacKinnon’s most concentrated discussion of Anglican ecclesial life, charting his call in his Gore Memorial Lecture for extension of the concept of kenosis to ecclesiology. This call arose in the broader context of an extraordinarily self-questioning theological realism which in turn determined MacKinnon’s elaboration of basic ecclesiological themes in the light of a kenotic conformity in thought and practice to the way of Jesus Christ. Mindful that MacKinnon is urging an extension of a kenotic Christological norm to ecclesiological construction, we then examine in two stages in the final two chapters the shape of that Christology and the reconstructed doctrine of the Triune God in which it is grounded. Given the searching adherence to a theologia crucis at the heart of MacKinnon’s construal of kenotic ecclesiology, we trace in a first approach to MacKinnon’s probing of the question of faithful ecclesial dependence on Jesus Christ what is disclosed and effected in and by means of Jesus’ dependence on the Father in his words and works along the via crucis, the way from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee. Having emphasized first the dramatic aspect of MacKinnon’s presentation of the mission of Jesus Christ, in an intensified look at ecclesial dependence determined by the inwardness of the mysterium Christi in the last chapter we examine his ontological account, his grounding of Jesus Christ’s constitutive salvific deed in the doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Triune God. Finally, an updated list of MacKinnon’s published works is provided.26 This study, then, has as its focus MacKinnon’s theological concern for the church and his concern that a doctrine of the church should be in the first place theological. In outlining this concern we offer a reading of his ecclesiological arguments, remarks and queries in the form of a ‘journey of intensification’27 into the depths of the mysterium Christi which lays emphasis on the unified receptivity and response of belief and practice in 26

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This bibliography expands upon Paul Wignall, ‘Donald MacKinnon’s Published Writings 1937–1980’, in The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays Presented to D. M. MacKinnon (eds Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart Sutherland; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 239–48. David Ford adapts David Tracy’s use of this Kierkegaardian notion to describe a process of ‘concentrated convergence’ on a particular in which theoretical, historical and practical concerns fund a proposal which is ‘strongly directive or transformative’. See David F. Ford, ‘System, Story, Performance: A Proposal about the Role of Narrative in Christian Systematic Theology’, in Why Narrative?: Readings in Narrative Theology (ed. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1989), pp. 202–03. For the concept itself, see David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 125–35.

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Christian life. This task presents a number of difficulties. Any attempt to anchor the exposition of this trajectory in what MacKinnon actually wrote inevitably runs the risk of untangling in ploddingly exegetical fashion the complex skein of his thought and flattening out the often turbulent form in which it is expressed. In addition, a thinker whose theological work is so markedly occasional and allusive and set so angularly and tersely against the backdrop of several argumentatively rich and exegetically thick theological and philosophical oeuvres is difficult to summarize. Moreover, MacKinnon invites interpretation as a disciple of one or more major figures, particularly Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar in theology and Joseph Butler and Immanuel Kant in moral philosophy.28 Yet the attempt to trace tributaries of influence which themselves interweave and overlap leads all too often to a vast penumbra of thought whose thematic range and density MacKinnon only rarely exposed to detailed critical exposition. Only the most selective reading could ever locate him as a Barthian or Kantian tout simple. Further, it must be said that if polemic rarely serves clarity of expression, in MacKinnon’s case it leads in specific texts to one-sided overstatements of positions which are often mollified in related writings of the same period. If concern for balanced representation of his thought has led us to develop a synthetic account of strands of argument from across a wide variety of his works, care has been taken not to present MacKinnon’s thought as tidier or more settled than it actually is. That MacKinnon exacts patience from his readers is not simply due to the obliqueness of his style and the spiral pattern of his argumentation but, as Rowan Williams has acutely observed, because complexity in his work functions as a form of resistance against the twin perils of trivialization and idolatry of both the human and the divine.29 The self- and cross-questioning character of his work enshrines MacKinnon’s rather independent cast of mind and indicates that his interest lay primarily in probing traditions of argument or restating precisely and intelligibly the problems which they hand on in order to strip away the excrescences which deflect Christians from an authentic fidelity in thought and practice grounded in and expressive of the mysterium Christi. Most significantly, as the claim to find here a pedagogy of discipleship would suggest, MacKinnon was above all a master teacher, the exercise of whose vocation laid great stress on engaging with traditions of argument not 28

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MacKinnon’s comment that it was possible to learn a great deal from Barth without being a disciple and that in any case ‘he was too great a man to leave disciples, and for the same reason he makes it possible for very different men to learn very different lessons from him’ can perhaps be read as a piece of veiled autobiography. See idem, Review of Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method, ed. S. W. Sykes, Scottish Journal of Theology 34, no. 4 (August 1981), pp. 369–71 (369). Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon (ed. Kenneth Surin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 87–88.

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INTRODUCTION

always congenial to his own understanding in which unexpected lessons might yet be learned. In this regard, theology serves the elaboration of a pedagogy of discipleship in concert with the exercise of what might be called ‘metaphysical-mindedness’, not only ‘the kind of metaphysics that we often see realized when men half-committed or more than half-committed to particular policies or directions of human life, become articulate and questioning concerning their validity’30 but also that interrogative temper elicited by the way in which, as MacKinnon put it, the sense of being or the sharpness of the question how we are to live can be said to impinge on us.31 Here the setting out of the discontents of a particular tradition engages the crucial importance of the question of the truth of faith which resides objectively in Christ and is both dialectical in its human appropriation and eschatological in its fulness.32 While MacKinnon remained committed to the priority of theology understood as fides quaerens intellectum, he was at the same time fundamentally concerned to grant intellectus its rights, arguing that one must fashion one’s own paradigms of rationality ‘and then fearlessly acknowledging their authority, be met by the problem of faith’.33 Moreover, he insisted that it was of the utmost importance that the point of contact between faith and understanding be found in Jesus Christ who sets the work of the theologian in restless vibration and impels her thoughts in several directions at once.34 The abiding sense of an irresolvable tension between faith and its ecclesial, institutional expressions and the public domain of understanding suffused his work with a ‘borderlands’ quality expressed in the self-involving play between distantiation and nearness and evident as well in the strong missional and ethical character of his understanding of the church in the world. This tension impelled him in articulation of ecclesial faith to navigate cautiously between the shoals of fideism and relativism as he attempted to think both from faith and, in response, to 30

31

32

33 34

D. M. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 24. See Daniel W. Hardy, ‘Theology Through Philosophy’, in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (vol. 2, ed. David F. Ford Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 43, where Hardy underscores the importance of the public ‘moral location’ of MacKinnon’s concern for common practice, especially those forms of life, thought and prayer by which God’s work is mediated by human agents. D. M. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979), p. 111; and idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 38. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘The Christian Understanding of Truth’, Scottish Journal of Theology 1, no. 1 (June 1948), pp. 19–29 (27–28). D. M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 128. Ibid., p. 57; and idem, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection: A Dialogue Arising from Broadcasts by G. W. H. Lampe and D. M. MacKinnon (ed. William Purcell; London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1966), p. 85.

11

THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

faith within that context. If polemic and moral outrage are on occasion on display here, they are embedded in MacKinnon’s sustained intellectual exhibition of and plea for a radically open, prophetic, Christ-centred approach to ecclesiology in which the alleged Incarnational–sacramentalist consensus of liberal Anglo-Catholicism and its cherished epithet ‘extension of the Incarnation’ are decisively reworked under the impulse of his understanding of the gospel.

12

1 donald mackinnon and the discontents of contemporary anglicanism

At the close of the so-called century of the church, an agreed-upon assessment among Anglicans of their own achievement in ecclesiology has proved stubbornly elusive. In its rather chaotic and conflict-laden discourse about the doctrine of the church, at least three approaches are often followed. One proposal, signalling the burgeoning library of reports, domestic and international, bilateral and multilateral, which are the fruit of Anglican participation in ecumenical dialogue, directs attention to an emerging convergence among the Christian churches on the doctrine of the church and encourages the member churches of the worldwide Anglican Communion to press ahead with reception and implementation of such agreed-upon texts and proposals for union.1 Its thrust is both provisional and eschatological, viewing the

1

An impressive exemplar of this point of view is Gillian Evans, who lays emphasis on the priority of the authentically Christian over local confessional loyalties, recognizes the provisional character of structures and order among the separated churches and sees the attempt to move the churches from entrenched positions as key to an ecumenically oriented ecclesiology. See, for example, G. R. Evans, Authority in the Church: A Challenge for Anglicans (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1990); idem, The Church and the Churches: Toward an Ecumenical Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and idem, ‘The genesis of the ARCIC Methodology’, in Mélanges JeanMarie Roger Tillard (ed. G. R. Evans and Michel Gourges; Louvain: Louvain University Press, 1995), pp. 125–38. But note also her concern over the problems beginning to emerge in ecumenical endeavour in idem, ‘Taking in Santiago: Problems of Reception’, Mid-Stream 33, no. 3 (July 1994), pp. 253–63, where critical concerns about the piling up of documents in the ‘pipeline’ of reception, the growing ambiguity of the term ‘koinonia’, calls to let diversity run its course, acceptance of the validity of continuing disagreement and the tension between technical theological work and the demand for

13

THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

churches as moving and being moved away from their present institutional and doctrinal confusion towards unity on the basis of that consensus which beckons from the future. A second approach underscores by contrast the challenges of internal ecumenism among Anglicans. Here the escalating threats to Anglican unity linked to various trends towards fragmentation in Anglican theology and polity come into focus. In the Church of England, for instance, the latent divisiveness at the root of this problem has been further entrenched through official recognition of a state of ‘impaired communion’.2 Renewed attention to the identity of Anglicanism is urged, especially in the words of one proposal, to ‘the Anglican community’s responsibility to articulate the characteristics of the matrix it provides for the growth of Christian character, and to subject that self-understanding to criticism’.3 A third tack, while gladly confessing the church as an object of Christian faith that must be opened up to critical doctrinal and theological reflection, queries Anglican preoccupation with ecclesiology at the expense of critical attention to other doctrines.4 This point of view expresses concern as much over the manner of deployment of theological resources in churches, which, according to the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, manifest a ‘settled

2

3

4

contextualization are voiced. Cf. Stephen Platten, Augustine’s Legacy: Authority and Leadership in the Anglican Communion (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1997). See the judgment of Paul Avis, ‘What is Anglicanism’? in The Study of Anglicanism (ed. Stephen Sykes and John Booty; London: SPCK; Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1988), p. 409: ‘The domestic traditions of churchmanship – the so-called ecclesiastical parties, High, Low and Broad as they were once known: now Catholic, Evangelical and Liberal – would seem to have largely gone their own way, taking care to reinforce their prejudices through party patronage of livings, partisan theological colleges, newspapers and journals.’ On the impulse towards fragmentation within Anglican theology, see A. T. Hanson and R. P. C. Hanson, The Identity of the Church: A Guide to Recognizing the Contemporary Church (London: SCM Press, 1987), pp. 71–72. On the internal schism or ‘impaired communion’ within the Church of England, see Stephen Platten, Augustine’s Legacy, pp. 109–10 and, more generally, The Report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Communion and Women in the Episcopate 1989 (London: Anglican Consultative Council, 1989), §§ 44–46, p. 21. S. W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (London and Oxford: A. R. Mowbray, 1978), p. 50. See, with particular reference to the 1938 Report of the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, G. W. H. Lampe, ‘Introduction: The 1938 Report in Retrospect’, in Doctrine in the Church of England (1938). The Report of the Commission on Christian Doctrine Appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (with an introduction by G. W. H. Lampe; London: SPCK, 1982), p. ix; John Macquarrie, ‘The Anglican Theological Tradition’, in Theology, Church and Ministry (London: SCM Press, 1986), p. 95; A. T. Hanson and R. P. C. Hanson, Reasonable Belief: A Survey of the Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. x, where attention is drawn to their attempt to redress the balance; and Maurice Wiles, Faith and the Mystery of God (London: SCM Press, 1982), pp. 82–86, for strictures against disproportionate attention to institutional structures.

14

THE DISCONTENTS OF CONTEMPORARY ANGLICANISM

bias’ against sustained and rigorous theological study5 as with the propriety of attempting to determine ecclesiological issues in isolation from the doctrinal loci on which they depend, particularly the doctrines of Christ, the Holy Spirit and, thus, the Triune God. It raises the question whether preoccupation with ecclesiology may actually serve to mask the significant difficulties to which ecclesial existence is exposed in today’s world. The perduring challenge to achieve an agreed-upon doctrine of the church to which these voices propose divergent approaches is by no means an exclusively Anglican problem but one shared with many of its principal ecumenical partners. It is, however, felt particularly acutely by Anglicans, since the increasingly unstable identity of Anglicanism itself has virtually overthrown its long-cherished aspiration to serve as ‘a field of synthesis’ in the quest for Christian unity and added anxiety about its survivability to frustration with an ecclesial authority too weakened by internal conflict to effect binding decisions in matters of doctrine and discipline.6 Current developments in the particular churches of the Anglican Communion, as Paul Avis points out, have focused attention on the character of such commonplace identitymarkers as ethos and tacit consensus as ‘a post factum accommodation to the demise of doctrinal accord within the church’.7 It is just this situation which the persistent call for critical ecclesiological work is designed to meet.8 Donald MacKinnon attempted throughout his theological career to engage this ecclesiological conversation with, as he might put it, critical and ‘censorial’ intent.9 An agent of creative dissent not only within the Church of England but particularly among his fellow Anglo-Catholics, MacKinnon came to ecclesiological and indeed all theological questions, as he tells us, from the vantage point of the philosopher of religion making incursions into the realm proper to theologians in order to sift critically at two levels, the logic of language and theological truth-claims, the various kinds of discourse which the latter undertake within and on behalf of the church.10 From this stance, MacKinnon observed that the objectives of Christian confession are as a matter of course suffused by the styles of Christian life.11 Of these styles of Christian life, two interrelated aspects commanded 5

The Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, For the Sake of the Kingdom: God’s Church and the New Creation (Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement Publications; Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1986), para. 93, p. 58, where the effects of ‘vagueness in teaching, refusal to address fundamental theological issues, and a settled bias against serious and rigorous theological thinking’ are described. 6 See E. S. Abbott et al., Catholicity: A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West: Being a Report Presented to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury (London: Dacre Press, 1947), p. 49. See also Avis, ‘What is Anglicanism?’, pp. 408–09. 7 Avis, ‘What is Anglicanism?’, pp. 410–11. 8 See Stephen Platten, Augustine’s Legacy, pp. 92–102. 9 10 MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 41–42. Ibid., pp. 41–42, 54. 11 D. M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 36–37.

15

THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

his attention. One was the actual lived context of the Church of England, and indeed other churches, occasioned by the demise of Christendom, not only the collapse of a putatively Christian culture but the experience within and without the church of a crisis of faith, of the intelligibility of Christian credenda and of real fragility in the life of the churches themselves.12 In particular, MacKinnon was acutely sensitive to failed ecclesial response to the great international and domestic crises of twentieth-century life. A second aspect of the styles of Christian life which he observed in the Church of England was an attempt to shore up the crumbling structures of ecclesial life as a shelter against the volatility of faith itself.13 MacKinnon noted in this regard in English Anglican life a stubborn adherence to and unyielding defence of external structures coincident with an apparent willingness to relinquish hold of beliefs once deemed essential to Christian faith itself. He queried whether this betrayed a self-regarding introspection in the Church of England which displaced the proper object of its thinking and acting and distracted it from its mission in the world. If he unleashed a persistent and strident polemic against this ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’, as he called it,14 he did so in the service of a call to theological renewal and reconstruction. What may at first seem like an intemperate attack on the church, even that ‘shooting at ecclesiastical clay pigeons’ with which Gordon Dunstan once indicted him,15 might better be received as a passionate call for the reconstruction of a doctrine of the church which is cognizant of the ecclesial and human contexts in which its life and witness are actually lived out.16 The church is, MacKinnon insisted, implicated in the actual crisis of faith, and how it thinks about itself will determine and be determined by how it thinks theologically. In order to register the sense in which MacKinnon’s work is to be received as both a protest and a corrective, it is first necessary to gauge the extent to which his description of this crisis of faith within the Church of England is shared by a range of English Anglican theologians before proceeding to chart in general terms the shape of his protest against the ecclesiological preoccupation which, in his estimation, deflected it from addressing this pressing concern.

12

13 14 15

16

For the prominence of this theme see D. M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 43; idem, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 7–11; and idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 3–6. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 5–6. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 9. See Gordon Dunstan, ‘Comment’, in The Rules of the Game: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Models in Scholarly Thought (ed. Teodor Shanin; London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), p. 177, in response to MacKinnon, ‘Theology as a Discipline of a Modern University’, pp. 164–74. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 3.

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THE DISCONTENTS OF CONTEMPORARY ANGLICANISM

I. The Church of England and the Contemporary Crisis of Faith In a recent essay on the Church of England, Colin Buchanan identifies a number of features of its life which, in his estimation, call for renewed attention to the doctrine of the church.17 Among his criticisms are a number of themes now regularly canvassed in what over the last two decades has come to be called the Anglican identity crisis.18 First, he draws attention to the general doctrinal disarray in which the Church of England languishes. Second, he observes its penchant as a church for evading, if not abdicating, stewardship of the properly theological task by which this disarray might be addressed. Third, he points up the yawning gulf between those claims which the Church of England does make and its actual practice. We turn now to examine each of these aspects of its ecclesiological context in greater detail.

II. The Dislocation of Doctrine One aspect of George Lindbeck’s construal of the work which doctrines perform in Christian ecclesial life may assist us in gaining purchase on the problematic status of doctrine in general in the Church of England. In The Nature of Doctrine he proposes that ‘church doctrines are communally authoritative teachings regarding beliefs and practices that are considered essential to the identity or welfare of the group in question’.19 Further, Lindbeck claims that doctrines may come to enjoy official status through

17

18

19

Colin Buchanan, Is the Church of England Biblical?: An Anglican Ecclesiology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1999). Among a burgeoning literature, the following studies provide from a variety of perspectives an analysis of the several dimensions of the problem: S. W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, pp. 1–25; E. L. Mascall, Theology and the Gospel of Christ: An Essay in Reorientation, (London: SPCK, 2nd edn, 1984); Francis Penhale, The Anglican Church Today: Catholics in Crisis (London and Oxford: A. R. Mowbray, 1986); John Booty, The Episcopal Church in Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1988); Robert Runcie, Authority in Crisis?: An Anglican Response (London: SCM Press, 1988); Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 1–20; G. R. Evans, Authority in the Church: A Challenge for Anglicans; Kenneth Stevenson, ‘Anglican Identity: A Chapter of Accidents’, in The Identity of Anglican Worship (ed. Kenneth Stevenson and Bryan Spinks; Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1991), pp. 184–96; Alister E. McGrath, The Renewal of Anglicanism (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1993), pp. 11–47; Stephen Ross White, Authority and Anglicanism (London: SCM Press, 1996); and Stephen Platten, Augustine’s Legacy: Authority and Leadership in the Anglican Communion. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 74.

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THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

formal articulation, or they may remain informally operative within a church. Not only, then, do doctrines formally delineate the shape of faithful membership of a community, but in so doing they operate in communally formative ways; that is, operative doctrines may be said to be ‘necessary to communal identity’.20 Doctrine and ecclesial identity are thus inextricably linked. On this account, a member in good standing is one who not only gives assent to her church’s doctrine, but also is open to and receptive of its capacity to shape her identity as a Christian by means of effective appropriation. In addition, Lindbeck observes that disputes provoked by controversy over what it is permissible to teach and practice in a church normally provide for that community a means ‘whereby implicit doctrines become explicit and operational ones official’.21 At the same time, he cautions that official doctrines may not give an accurate picture of a church’s most enduring orientations or beliefs. Integral to this proposal as well is the distinction, invoked more readily by Roman Catholics than by Protestants, between doctrine and theology. While allowing that doctrine and theology are correlative, the task of theology here is described by Lindbeck primarily as the explication, communication and defence of the communally authoritative and essential framework, the pattern or grammar of the religion, which doctrines encode, and in this role theology has come to exhibit considerable diversity among and within the churches.22 Lindbeck, however, is not at all sanguine when faced with the psychosocial obstacles which stand in the way of Christian doctrine being taken seriously in this regulative sense today, even within the churches. He points to the anti-authoritarian mood of a pervasive, postliberal, intellectual culture which has rejected the idea of communal norms, ‘de-objectivized’ or privatized religion and canonized religious pluralism.23 He notes the erosion of the confidence of individual believers due to the chronic disputes generated within the churches on the basis of quite divergent accounts of doctrine. More seriously, the fact that ‘fewer and fewer contemporary people are deeply embedded in particular religious traditions or thoroughly involved in particular religious communities’24 virtually undermines the 20 22 24

21 Ibid. Ibid., 75. 23 Ibid., 76. Ibid., pp. 21, 77. Ibid., p. 21. Later, Lindbeck concedes that ‘the conditions for practice seem to be steadily weakening. Disarray in church and society makes the transmission of the necessary skills more and more difficult’ (p.124). See also Stephen E. Fowl and L. Gregory Jones, Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1991), pp. 65–80. John Milbank, whose ‘radical orthodox’ theological proposal lays such immense weight on ecclesiology, has also recognized that ‘for all the current talk of a theology that would reflect on practice, the truth is that we remain uncertain as to where today to locate true Christian practice’. See idem, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), p. 1.

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THE DISCONTENTS OF CONTEMPORARY ANGLICANISM

regulative function of doctrine, since in many places the number of competent practitioners is dwindling and the rigorous set of practices through which such competence is said to be formed is losing vigour. Lastly, Lindbeck acknowledges that liturgical and expressive uses of the creeds have come to outstrip their cognitive and performative doctrinal function among many Christians.25 The result is an acute tension between the affiliative thrust of experiential–expressivism, which tends towards accommodation with the surrounding culture, and the regulative role of doctrine, which should serve to conserve and promote the churches’ distinctiveness from that culture. All of this is especially applicable to the Church of England.26 Of those most concerned with documenting and exposing to criticism this highly problematic development, the work of Stephen Sykes27 and Paul

25 26

27

Ibid., 95. Ibid., p. 89, n. 12, where Lindbeck instances Anglican churches as among those who have for the most part abandoned attempts to draw explicit doctrinal limits, and refers particularly to the work of the Church of England Doctrine Commission. See G. R. Evans, Authority in the Church: A Challenge for Anglicans, pp. 84–88 for a historical contextualization of this judgement. Evans notes the tendency of those in authority to ignore both the problem and its consequences by simply reiterating that the Church of England’s doctrines are found in its official formularies. It is the uncertain status of these formularies and the lack of consent to them which today renders such a claim disingenuous. See, for example, S. W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism; idem, ‘An Anglican Response’, in Who Has the Say in the Church? (ed. Jürgen Moltmann and Hans Küng; Edinburgh: T & T Clark; New York: Seabury Press, 1981), pp. 32–37; idem, The Identity of Christianity: Theologians and the Essence of Christianity from Schleiermacher to Barth (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984); idem, ‘Anglicanism and the Anglican Doctrine of the Church’, in Quadrilateral at One Hundred: Essays on the Centenary of the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral 1886/88–1986/88 (ed. J. Robert Wright; Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement Publications, 1988), 156–77; idem, ‘The Contestability of Christianity’, in The Trial of Faith: Theology and the Church Today (ed. Peter Eaton; Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988), pp. 209–23; idem, ‘Faith’, in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of ‘Lux Mundi’ (ed. Geoffrey Wainwright; Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press; Alison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1988), pp. 1–24; idem, ‘The Fundamentals of Christianity’, in The Study of Anglicanism (ed. Sykes and Booty; pp. 231–45; idem, ‘Episcope and Power in the Church’, in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck (ed. Bruce Marshall; Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1990), pp. 191–212; idem, ‘Whither Lutheranism?: An Anglican Perspective’, Word & World 11, no. 3 (1991), pp. 297–300; idem, ‘The Genius of Anglicanism’, in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, (ed. Geoffrey Rowell; Wantage, Oxford: Ikon Press, 1992), pp. 227–41; and idem, ‘Foundations of an Anglican Ecclesiology’, in Living the Mystery: Affirming Catholicism and the Future of Anglicanism (ed. Jeffrey John; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994), pp. 28–48. Several of Sykes’ essays on Anglican ecclesiology and authority have been reissued in idem, Unashamed Anglicanism (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995).

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THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

Avis28 has been particularly searching. Its failure to define formally, much less subject to rigorous critical scrutiny, issues of Christian belief led Sykes to ask, in the wake of the Church of England Doctrine Commission’s 1976 Report Christian Believing, whether Anglicanism could ‘sensibly be regarded as a sign of anything Christianly significant whatsoever’.29 The primary problem which Sykes identifies, a problem exacerbated by Anglican participation in ecumenical dialogues, is the challenge of establishing consensus on limits of permissibility for doctrine and practice in a context of entrenched and increasing pluralism among and within its own parishes. In view here is not simply the problem of the contestability of particular accounts of Christian doctrine within Anglicanism but also disagreement among its theologians about the extent of the ground which Christian faith itself describes.30 In terms of practice, it has proved as detrimental to the church’s mission as it is for ecumenical dialogue to be unable to communicate with clarity the content of its faith and the subject of its teaching, as anxiety and frustration within the Church of England about the Lambeth 1988 call to a ‘decade of evangelism’ has shown.31 Yet Paul Avis has remarked that the confessional documents of Anglicanism are not easily identifiable and are thus of questionable status.32 The erosion of a coherent doctrinal identity has come about through a relentless process of deconfessionalization, which began in the early part of the nineteenth century and has continued to the present.33 Of course, any claim that the Church of England has no official doctrinal texts or that adherence to the beliefs which they enshrine is not required by duly 28

29 30

31

32

33

See Paul Avis, Truth Beyond Words: Problems and Prospects for Anglican–Roman Catholic Unity (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1985); idem, ‘The Church’s One Foundation’, Theology 89 (1986), pp. 257–63; idem, ‘Reflections on ARCIC II’, Theology 90 (November 1987), pp. 451–59; idem, ‘What is Anglicanism?’; idem, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective; idem, Authority, Leadership and Conflict in the Church (London: Mowbray, 1992); and idem, ‘Keeping Faith with Anglicanism’, in The Future of Anglicanism: Essays on Faith and Order (ed. Robert Hannaford; Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 1996), pp. 1–17. S. W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, p. 3. See S. W. Sykes, ‘The Contestability of Christianity’, pp. 214–15, where Sykes invokes the notion of an ‘essentially contested concept’ to explore the indefiniteness of Christianity itself and the persistent disputes of theologians about its identity. See also idem, The Identity of Christianity, pp. 251–61. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, p. 6. On confusion about, and resistance to, the call to evangelism, see S. R. White, Authority and Anglicanism, pp. 88–89. Avis, Truth Beyond Words, pp. x–xi. The judgement is sustained in G. R. Evans and J. Robert Wright (eds), The Anglican Tradition: A Handbook of Sources (London: SPCK; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), p. xvii. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, p. 4. This process is chronicled in detail in Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, pp. 157–299.

20

THE DISCONTENTS OF CONTEMPORARY ANGLICANISM

constituted authority in the Church of England is quite mistaken.34 One can point with Sykes to the statement of doctrine and the rudiments of ecclesial self-description in the Constitution and Canons of the Church of England to which those about to be ordained and instituted to parishes are expected to give assent. But the status of these legal instruments is rendered ambiguous in the actual life of the church by three aspects of its pervasive ethos. First, English Anglicans have been resistant to juridical approaches to confessional norms, even if, as in this case, they are hidden away from view and pertain primarily, though not exclusively, to the ordained members of the church. Second, they have championed freedom of conscience in matters of faith and broadly tolerated deviation from official teaching; and, third, they have acquiesced since the mid-nineteenth century in a widespread practice of illegality in the face of rubrical and canon law injunction, often with impunity from official sanction, in the face of which imposition today of juridical disciplinary norms must seem a counsel of despair. Despite instances of appeal in the writings of individual theologians to the constitutionalist tradition, which locates the doctrine of the Church of England in its historic formularies, such official documents as the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, The Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal, as well as, to a lesser extent, the Homilies, texts clearly intended to exercise a normative role in setting forth the doctrine of the Church of England and still referenced in its constitutional documents and canon law as instruments of declared doctrine, have each suffered substantial diminution in status.35 Indeed, Sykes has argued that when the Articles were removed as a basis for theological education in the

34

35

See Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, pp. 36–52 for what follows. See also Martin Dudley, ‘Waiting on the Common Mind: Authority in Anglicanism’, One in Christ 20, no. 1 (1984), pp. 65–69. For the relegation of the Thirty-Nine Articles to the status of historical source see the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine, Subscription and Assent to the 39 Articles (London: SPCK, 1968) and Resolution 43 of the 1968 Lambeth Conference in Roger Coleman (ed.), Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences 1867–1988 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1992), p. 165. Of the Book of Common Prayer, the Mission and Ministry section report of the 1988 Lambeth Conference, while noting that in some Provinces ‘it often remains as a standard of doctrine’, judges that ‘its era is slipping irretrievably into the past’. See The Truth Shall Make You Free: The Lambeth Conference 1988, p. 68. There is every indication that this process will gain momentum as Provinces respond to the call of Lambeth 1998 to inculturate their forms and practices of worship. See Resolution III.14 in The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998 (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1999), p. 401. For a forthright recognition of the problem of declared doctrine in the Church of England see N. T. Wright, ‘Where Shall Doctrine Be Found?’, in The Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, Believing in the Church: The Corporate Nature of Faith (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow; Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1981), p. 134.

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THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

interests of forging a consensus, there remained no relevant point of reference for accessing Anglican treatments of the central doctrinal substance of the Christian faith.36 Similarly, during this process the notion of assent to such formularies, now construed as foundation charters or historical sources, has weakened from ex animo to general assent and then to a simple affirmation of adherence to the catholic faith to which the formularies are said to bear witness. Moreover, the recognition that doctrine has a history, that its articulation is always inadequate to its subject and hence provisional, has both contextualized and relativized the traditional formularies of the Church of England. Since virtually no one theologizes by Article today, the Homilies are unknown and the Book of Common Prayer is giving ground before a variety of new ecumenical and culturally embedded liturgical forms, Sykes’ dictum is especially pertinent: ‘What is more authoritative can lose authority by disuse . . . what is formally less authoritative has gained authority by use’.37 In attempting to account for this official doctrinal reticence, Oliver O’Donovan has suggested that Anglicans throughout their history have taken Scripture and the creeds so seriously as never to have allowed their authority to be usurped by any other confessional text.38 One product of this reticence has been what Sykes has dubbed the ‘no special doctrine’ claim by which Anglicans have denied having any doctrines of their own save those of the catholic church which are agreeable to Scripture, a claim which has tended rather effectively to sideline theological elaboration in the church’s life by rendering material accounts of doctrine superfluous in the minds of its members.39 Another has been the investment by Anglican theologians since the English Reformation in the fundamental articles tradition, which has also foundered on the failure to reach agreement on their number and content.40 The shift in the Church of England from officially declared doctrine to officially sponsored studies of doctrine, that is, from prescriptive 36

37

38

39 40

S. W. Sykes, ‘Theological Study: The Nineteenth Century and After’, in The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays Presented to D. M. MacKinnon (ed. Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart Sutherland; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 110–111. S. W. Sykes, ‘Introduction: Why Authority?’, in idem (ed.), Authority in the Anglican Communion: Essays Presented to Bishop John Howe (Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1987), p. 12. Oliver O’Donovan, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1986), p. 12. Sykes, ‘Anglicanism and the Anglican Doctrine of the Church’, pp. 157–65. See Sykes’ discussion in ‘The Fundamentals of Christianity’, pp. 232–41, and with reference to J. H. Newman, in idem, The Identity of Christianity, pp. 102–22. Note also his quip that ‘since the nineteenth century there have been dissident Anglicans, like John Henry Newman, who thought that there could not be so few elements in Christian faith as that, or those who, like Hastings Rashdall, saw no reason why there should be so many’. See idem, Unashamed Anglicanism, pp. 163–64, emphasis Sykes’.

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THE DISCONTENTS OF CONTEMPORARY ANGLICANISM

texts to descriptive accounts of the diverse doctrinal opinions operative in the church, can be traced in the series of reports from the 1922–38 Doctrine Commission to its 1981 document Believing in the Church.41 That doctrines are required as boundary-markers for the faith is admitted readily enough, but that they should be few in number and relatively easy to remove or reposition is not an unfair characterization of the conclusion towards which these officially constituted doctrinal commissions have worked. It might be objected at this point that the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral is precisely the kind of official doctrinal text which spells out the identity of Anglicanism in a particularly clear and succinct way. Indeed, since 1888 successive Lambeth Conferences have adopted and reaffirmed it, and the 1998 Conference commends it not only as an ecumenical instrument for unity (its original purpose), but as a statement of Anglican identity.42 Yet, while The Virginia Report wants to affirm that ‘the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral is a list of norms and practices which must characterize the Church at all times everywhere’, it concedes that, given its interpretative ambiguity, it scarcely amounts to ‘a complete ecclesiology’.43 This listing of necessary ecclesial elements, it might be said, simply marks out formally and rather tersely the ecclesiological topoi over whose material elaboration chronic disputes have raged in the Church of England.44 Moreover, the Quadrilateral provides no 41

42 43

44

See, for example, Doctrine in the Church of England (1938).; E. S. Abbott et al., Catholicity; S. F. Allison et al., The Fulness of Christ: The Church’s Growth into Catholicity: Being a Report Presented to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury (London: SPCK, 1950); The Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, Christian Believing: The Nature of the Christian Faith and Its Expression in Holy Scripture and Creeds (London: SPCK, 1976); and The Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, Believing in the Church: The Corporate Nature of Faith (London: SPCK, 1981). See Resolution IV.2 in The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998, p. 404. James Rosenthal and Nicola Currie (eds), Being Anglican in the Third Millennium: The Official Report of the Tenth Meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1997), para. 4.25, p. 263. The Virginia Report, produced by the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, was endorsed in Resolution III.8 of Lambeth 98 and commended to the Provinces of the Anglican Communion for a decade of study. For a historical judgement that the Quadrilateral in its early American formulation managed to skirt the most pressing areas of theological conflict between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals and hence was from the outset a ‘lowest common denominator’ or compromise statement, see R. W. Prichard, ‘The Place of Doctrine in the Episcopal Church’, in Reclaiming Faith: Essays on Orthodoxy in the Episcopal Church and the Baltimore Declaration (ed. Ephraim Radner and George R. Sumner; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 26–28. It is tempting, though perhaps too schematic, to suggest that current conflicts across the Anglican Communion reflect an emerging gulf between those who adhere to a catholicity conceived in terms of faithfulness to Scripture and the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds and those who value a formal apostolicity shaped by the gospel sacraments and the historic episcopate.

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context in which the list of ecclesial features it commends can be understood, and to that extent has fostered an ecclesiological vacuum in the understanding of Anglicanism. Although the sufficiency of Scripture, the confession of the catholic creeds, the celebration of the gospel sacraments and the episcopal government of the church all presuppose the church’s active life of worship, discipleship and mission, the dynamics of the context in which these churchly acts take place is nowhere spelled out in the Quadrilateral. Its ambiguity and incompleteness, as Sykes has argued, illustrates rather than obviates the urgency of responsible theological work.45 But, as Peter Hinchliff has remarked, a doctrine of the church has not yet been devised in the Church of England because it is the very nature of the church itself that remains in dispute.46

III. The Aversion to Theology John Muddiman has rightly noted that this doctrinal reticence at an official level does not, however, indicate a doctrinal vacuum in the Church of England. Conflicting doctrinal formulations have been left ‘to run on and jockey for position, from the most rigid to the most tenuous’, and this has led to rather abrupt changes in emphasis in the public discourse of the church as manifested, for example, in successive Lambeth Conferences.47 Moreover, these divergent formulations have given rise to schools and movements and finally distinct identities, each with its corresponding stream of ecclesial life within English Anglicanism such that ‘Anglicanism’ itself has become something of a wax nose, twisted and turned by its various exponents to polemical ends.48 Such conflicting, polemical construals of the shape of Anglican belief and practice have opened up in the foreground of the Church of England ample opportunity to attempt an expression of the common mind of the church through rigorous theological dialogue, but this critical challenge, clouded perhaps by the ugly spectre of Victorian hostilities, has repeatedly been turned aside in favour of keeping the peace. A second criticism, then, has to do with the marshalling and deployment of theological resources within the Church of England. In his critical review of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, John Webster observed that the 45

46

47

48

Sykes, ‘Anglicanism and the Anglican Doctrine of the Church’, p. 177. See also idem, ‘Episcope and Power in the Church’, pp. 200–01, where Sykes criticizes the Anglican propensity for simply insisting on episcopacy on pragmatic grounds without offering a theological account of the context in which bishops function as office-holders. Peter Hinchliff, ‘The Church’, in The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of ‘Lux Mundi’, p. 146. John Muddiman, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, in The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of ‘Lux Mundi’, p. 128. Sykes, ‘The Genius of Anglicanism’, p. 235.

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deliberations of the bishops as distilled in their Resolutions reveal the lack of a unified theology.49 What is true of the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion is equally true of the churches from which they come. As Richard and Anthony Hanson attest, the last several decades in the Church of England might aptly be described as ‘a period when theology and scholarship are governed by a spirit of fragmentation, a centrifugal impulse, . . . an era of what might be called theological dissipation’ in which little systematic theology is being done and projects to dismantle traditional construals of doctrine proceed apace.50 E. L. Mascall has criticized the tendency of Church of England theologians to allow ancillary disciplines to supplant theology in the strict sense, substituting analyses of the ecclesiastical context and preferring to proceed historically and genetically,51 resulting in what David Nicholls has colourfully described as ‘the resounding slap of the dead hand of “church history” on the living body of theology’.52 Among Anglicans the result is the privileging of particular strands of that history, whether the patristic matrix of the first five centuries or the ‘classic Anglicanism’ of the seventeenth century, or the unofficial canonizing of particular theologians, as if God’s word to and presence within the church were more active then than now, elsewhere rather than here. In a similar vein, Paul Avis has decried the general neglect of theological study by clergy and ordinands in the Church of England and sharply criticized calls to reduce academic education in the classic theological disciplines in favour of more attention to practical vocational skills.53 He extends his criticism to the laity whom he finds ‘notoriously deficient’ in their sense of the nature and purpose of the Anglican church.54 In addition, it has been recognized that the rupture of liturgical continuity through the introduction of alternative service books has effected significant shifts in its theological

49 50

51

52

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John Webster, ‘Lambeth: A Comment’, Pro Ecclesia 8, no. 2 (1999), pp. 143–46. Hanson and Hanson, The Identity of the Church, pp. 71–72. See also Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, pp. 6–10. E. L. Mascall, Theology and the Gospel of Christ, pp. 16–23. Here, while not denying the validity of historical, sociological, psychological and linguistic studies in relation to theology, Mascall laments how few studies of God and God’s relation to God’s creatures Church of England theologians tend to produce. See also Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, pp. 77–85. David Nicholls, ‘Two Tendencies in Political Theology’, in Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers (ed. Geoffrey Rowell; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986), p. 150. Paul Avis, Authority, Leadership and Conflict in the Church, p. 105. Avis acknowledges the rich Anglican theological tradition but concedes that nowadays it is not much read, a situation that obtains also with regard to the historic formularies. See idem, ‘What is Anglicanism?’, p. 422, and also Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, p. 76. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, p. 10.

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tradition.55 The picture which emerges is one of considerable change and flux and yet, strangely, one marked also by considerable passivity on the part of the church. Though individual scholars may well undertake theological work of varying kinds in the hope it may serve the church, theological vitality and passion, as a rule, do not characterize the Anglican churches in their internal or public life.56 One reason may be, as Lindbeck has suggested, that when doctrine is abstracted from ecclesial practice, theological discourse idles; it is not clear what work it has to do in the church.57 Here the warning of Rowan Williams to the effect that the historicizing and relativizing of doctrine may simply invite replacement of traditional accounts ‘by some unthematized commitment to the developing stream of Christian life and reflection in a way which makes the self-critique of the tradition practically impossible to articulate’, is especially pertinent.58 The virtually unrestrained and irreconcilable theological pluralism59 of the Church of England has for

55

56

57 58

59

Kenneth Stevenson has commented on the accidental character of much of this enlargement of Anglican identity, drawing attention to Aidan Kavanaugh’s contention that the repertoire of multiple Eucharistic prayers in new Anglican service books imports multiple Eucharistic theologies and thus plays a role in determining plural ecclesiologies in the church. See Stevenson, ‘Anglican Identity: A Chapter of Accidents’, p. 191. The effect of this on Anglican participation in ecumenical work has been noted. John Muddiman argues that ‘theologians representing the Communion expound their own personal views with sincerity and conviction but are quite unable to appeal to any consensus in the church they represent’. See idem, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, p. 128. Paul Avis has chided the Anglican members of the first Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission for giving no indication of how their common statements cohere with the Anglican theological tradition, ‘incorrigibly pluralist’ as it may be. See idem, Truth Beyond Words, x–xi, pp. 116–17, and idem, ‘Reflections on ARCIC II’, p. 457. For a dissenting opinion, grounded in her rejection of an adversarial definition of Anglican identity, see Gillian Evans, Authority in the Church, pp. 1–2. It would seem fairer to acknowledge how untenable the position of such theologians is given the lack of a consensus among Anglicans than to reproach them for not being able to do the impossible. For a trenchant critique of the notion that the métier of the theologian in the church is best served by the search for consensus, see John Webster, ‘The Church as Theological Community’, Anglican Theological Review 75, no. 1(1993), pp. 102–15 (106–07). Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 107. Rowan Williams, ‘Doctrinal Criticism: Some Questions’, in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles (ed. Sarah Coakley and David Pailin; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 248. See also the InterAnglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, For the Sake of the Kingdom, para. 97, p. 60: ‘For too long Anglicans have appeared willing to evade responsible theological reflection and dialogue by acquiescing automatically and immediately in the co-existence of incompatible views, opinions, and policies.’ Discussion of this pluralism is itself hindered by the growing elasticity of such terms as ‘catholic’ and ‘protestant’ and the emotional freight invested in the use of such epithets as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’. Both can be witnessed in the increasing diversity, polarization and antipathy within the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic ‘parties’ in the Church of

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some time been masked by its claims to comprehensiveness. Again, Stephen Sykes was among the first to subject this notion to critical scrutiny, probing the anxiety of its theologians when attempting to speak for the church to sublate the historic dialectic of its parties’ doctrinal prospectus in a ‘tertium quid’, an undifferentiated ‘Anglicanism’, which, by emphasizing similarity at the expense of difference, persists in thwarting its recognition, let alone reception, by the respective parties as an acceptable account of their most particular and deeply held commitments.60 If this is so, and if the status of doctrine in the Church of England has shifted from the officially declared to the pluralistically operational, clergy do not attend by and large to theological study and the laity are ‘notoriously deficient’ in their understanding of these matters, the reliance of that church, together with its sister churches of the Communion, on patterns of dispersed authority, consensus and ‘open reception’ raises significant problems. The claim, current among Anglicans since the Lambeth Conference of 1948, that the one proper authority which inheres in the Triune God alone is dispersed in the church as a moral and spiritual authority among such interacting and mutually conditioning elements as Scripture, Tradition, Creeds, the ministry of Word and Sacraments, the witness of saints and the consensus fidelium, demonstrates a commitment to what might be called the ongoing liturgical processes of Christian formation and nurture and a refusal of a magisterium vested in any one person or elite group of office-holders.61

60

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England today. See, for example, Melvin Tinker (ed.), The Anglican Evangelical Crisis: A Radical Agenda for a Bible Based Church (Fearn, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 1995), which takes aim at R. T. France and Alister E. McGrath (eds), Evangelical Anglicans: Their Role and Influence in the Church Today (London: SPCK, 1993) or the earlier debate in James I. Packer, The Evangelical Identity Problem: An Analysis (Oxford: Latimer House, 1980) and N. T. Wright, Evangelical Anglican Identity: The Connection between Bible, Gospel and Church (Oxford: Latimer House, 1980). On the Anglo-Catholic side, witness the divergent agendas of the Forward in Faith and Affirming Catholicism movements. See Francis Penhale, The Anglican Church Today: Catholics in Crisis and, more dispassionately, W. S. F. Pickering, Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity (London: SPCK, 1991). Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, p. 20. Sykes revisits this argument in more detail in ‘Anglicanism and the Anglican Doctrine of the Church’, pp. 170–72, with reference to Leonard Hodgson, ‘The Doctrine of the Church as Held and Taught in the Church of England’, in R. N. Flew (ed.), The Nature of the Church: Papers Presented to the Theological Commission Appointed by the Continuation Committee of the World Conference on Faith and Order (London: SCM Press, 1952), pp. 121–46. Hodgson’s synthetic presentation was vetted by Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic theologians whose critical queries and dissenting views are reflected in the footnotes. Sykes’ judgement is shared by The Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, For the Sake of the Kingdom, para. 93, p. 58. See the discussion in G. R. Evans, Authority in the Church, pp. 86–88, and S. W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, pp. 87–100. The notion is said to have emerged from

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It is also indicative of a continuing shift away from attempts to shore up discursive doctrinal unity towards an emphasis on external instruments or structures of ecclesial solidarity. And it is in this context that considerable weight has come to be placed on the notion of the ‘mind of the church’ and the liturgical and synodical processes required for its discernment. As contemporary Anglican and ecumenical texts display, the notion of consensus is coming more and more to be inextricably linked to the juridical structures required by an ecclesiology of communion.62 But among English Anglicans the notion remains unclear in its reference both to the instinctual life of the people of God and to such processes as may make it available for consultation and decision-making. Given this state of affairs, Paul Avis has bluntly charged that preoccupation with the mechanics of consensus is ‘a forlorn attempt to close the stable door after the horse of pluralism has bolted’.63 Nevertheless, some English Anglican voices remain remarkably sanguine about the existence of the ‘common mind’ of the church, no matter how elusive and ill-defined the notion has proved to be or the claim that, as Martin Dudley concedes, ‘Anglicans are good at seeking the common mind, but not so good at enunciating it’.64 Gillian Evans, in her comprehensive discussion of consensus fidelium and reception,65 lays emphasis on the cognitive processes by which assent is given by the faithful to the appropriation and clarification of the Christian faith. As such, her treatment orders consensus and reception not to that which is distinctively Anglican but to that which is characteristically Christian. A consensus, she argues, will be identified through decision-making processes located at the intersection of descending and ascending, centralized and dispersed, patterns of authority. This dialectic is said to be embedded in a robust catechetical life in which bishops formally and collegially exercise a ministry of episcope and magisterium in matters of faith, while an active

62

63 64 65

Anglican dismay at the treatment of Roman Catholic Modernists by official authority in the opening decade of the century. It is instructive that the same Lambeth Conference gives evidence of the failure both of the church to engage people and of the people to look upon membership of Christ in the church as central in their daily lives. See Resolutions 36 and 37 in Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences 1867–1988, pp. 98–99. This point is brought into succinct focus in the agreed statement of the Second Anglican– Roman Catholic International Commission, The Gift of Authority: Authority in the Church III (London: Catholic Truth Society; Toronto: Anglican Book Centre; New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 1999), para. 56, p. 40. Anglicans hedge here, however, limiting the authority of such structures to the moral and spiritual force of their decisions and hoping to secure authority by expanding the instruments of consultation at the international level. Avis, ‘The Church’s One Foundation’, p. 261. Dudley, ‘Waiting on the Common Mind’, p. 75. See G. R. Evans, Authority in the Church, pp. 84–103, and idem, The Church and the Churches, 251–90.

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and instructed laity who have embraced the gospel and learned the faith join with them in the shared expectation that minds will be persuaded through reasoned discussion, leading to a shared act of recognition that what has been taught or formulated expresses the authentic apostolic faith consonant with Scripture. This cognitive, catechetical process both depends upon and conditions the enactment in belief and practice at the ecclesial and individual level of that which has been ‘received’. The conditions for the operation of consent and reception are not, however, available locally or presently, Evans argues, but will become fully operative in a fully united church. Gillian Evans’ construal of the process of consensus and reception has the merit of calling for a sustained and vigorous theological and catechetical life, recognizing with Paul Avis that theological questions can only be answered by theological work.66 It is a patient protest against the production of putatively authoritative texts which mask discordant voices beneath bland, highly qualified accounts which retreat into sophistication at the expense of clarity and communicability. It shares with Stephen Sykes an acknowledgement of the characteristic Anglican insistence that within the context of the church’s life the people of God are to hear, ponder and respond to the whole of Scripture.67 In insisting that consensus and reception mark out a living, continuous process, non-coercive, tentative and provisional in character, Evans resists the temptation to foreclose on disputed doctrinal and theological matters by a bare appeal to authority.68 But the described process founders, not so much by virtue of the fact that it glosses over the contemporary catechetical impoverishment of the Church of England, in which the importance of catechesis is recognized by all while uncertainty about agreed-upon texts or authorized processes persists,69 but because, as Sykes has argued, the reading of Scripture to the people of God has the effect of unsettling the church by virtue of the lack of precision in its first-order language, the narratives and symbols of the Christian faith.70 The chronic doctrinal disputes down the centuries of the church’s life have arisen from attending to Scripture which repeatedly threatens to break out of the stable traditions of interpretation in which the church has attempted to embed it. There is an important recognition here that the church can never be fully in possession of the truth attested in Scripture but must find its beliefs and practices constantly interrupted and opened up to critical appraisal through active participation in the ministry of the Word.71 Finally, there is the growing 66 67 68 69

70 71

Avis, Truth Beyond Words, p. 77. Sykes, ‘Anglicanism and the Anglican Doctrine of the Church’, pp. 173–75. Evans, Authority in the Church, p. 103, and idem, The Church and the Churches, p. 255. See the overview in James Hartin, ‘Catechisms’, in The Study of Anglicanism (ed. Sykes and Booty), pp. 154–63. Sykes, ‘An Anglican Response’, p. 36. See here John Webster, ‘What Is the Gospel?’, in Grace and Truth in the Secular Age (ed. Timothy Bradshaw; Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans

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recognition that the list of agreed-upon ecumenical texts to be received is multiplying and that those which have apparently already been ‘received’ appear to have a relatively short shelf life. The Section IV Report ‘Called to Be One’ of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, for instance, reveals that while discernment of the ‘mind of the church’ is closely allied in Anglican practice to democratic decision-making processes vested in majority votes at Synods, it involves a longer and more widespread process of reception in which what is thus ‘received’ must become entrenched in the life of the churches. Despite widespread consultation in these forums on the ARCIC Final Report and the Faith and Order document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (BEM) and the commendation of the 1988 Lambeth Conference on the basis that both were consonant with the faith of Anglicans, some Provinces reported at Lambeth 1998 little or no knowledge of them.72 Further, suspicions have been raised that ‘open reception’ as a process requiring a considerable span of time is hospitable to revisionist practice, treading the path of least resistance to innovation and change as new developments come over time to appear part of the furniture of the church.73 Similarly, Paul Avis exposes the notion to an ideological critique, arguing that ‘consensus can easily become a formula for paralysis – for marginalizing prophetic voices, for concocting unprincipled compromise and for failing to face genuine conflicts’.74 He has trenchantly observed that unless consensus is consensus in the truth of the gospel, more aptly designated ‘catholicity’, it need not concern the

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Publishing, 1998), pp. 109–10: ‘The church hears the gospel as it reads Holy Scripture in the context of the assembly of the people of God who gather to praise the Lord Jesus in sacrament, fellowship and service. But this “hearing” is much more than indolent passivity; nor can it be made a matter of comfortable routine. The church hears the gospel in the repeated event of being encountered, accosted, by the word of the gospel as it meets us in the reading of Scripture in the midst of the community of faith and its worship. Hearing the gospel in this way involves repentance and faith, that is constantly renewed abandonment of what the gospel excludes and embrace of what the gospel offers. Such hearing can never be finished business.’ Webster continues with a warning against ‘the temptation to make it [the gospel] into a manageable and relatively tame message, something which can perform useful functions in our religious world, and which we can make our own by annexing it to our own viewpoints or projects’. See also idem, ‘Locality and Catholicity: Reflections on Theology and the Church’, Scottish Journal of Theology 45, no. 1 (1992), pp. 1–17. The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998, pp. 263–65. The response of the Conference was a recommendation to create an Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations to monitor and encourage the process of dialogue and reception. See Resolution IV.3, p. 405. See Timothy Bradshaw, ‘Unity, Diversity and The Virginia Report’, in idem (ed.), Grace and Truth in the Secular Age, pp. 180–193. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, p. 14, and idem, Truth Beyond Words, pp. 60–81.

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church.75 In order to receive the concept and process of consent, the Church of England will have to import rigorous theological dialogue into the centre of its life at all levels.

IV. The Gulf between Theory and Practice It might be said that the perennial aspiration of the Church of England in the twentieth century has been to serve the whole church as a focus for unity. In its public rhetoric, an appeal to comprehensiveness, its holding together of ‘catholic’ and ‘protestant’ elements and welcoming of diverse theologies, has been wed to its aspiration to be a ‘bridge church’, a model of communion through unity in diversity, which by its very incompleteness beckons Christians towards a future oneness. In the heady words of the 1947 Report Catholicity we are told that ‘this comprehensiveness opens the way for the Church of England to be a school of synthesis over a wider field than any other Church in Christendom’.76 This rhetoric has been embodied in a commitment to leadership in the formative decades of the ecumenical movement, especially by William Temple and Leonard Hodgson in Faith and Order and George Bell in Life and Work, who, among others, helped lay the groundwork for the World Council of Churches. Its continuing participation in a host of bilateral and multilateral dialogues and the utterances of its bishops and theologians gives evidence of the paramount importance which the Church of England places on visible unity.77 Consequently, the mark of unity has been allowed to dominate and subsume all other dimensions of the church’s life, stretching with apparently limitless elasticity to keep together on a largely pragmatic basis Anglicans of quite diverse moral commitments, doctrinal beliefs and theological emphases, ducking the ecumenical insistence that unity must be unity in a shared faith and a common order. If, however, as recently as 1972 Richard Hanson could note the comparative success of Anglican resistance to the

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Avis, Truth Beyond Words, pp. 73–74, where he also notes the argument of John Jewel that in the Church there can be consensus in error. E. S. Abbott et al., Catholicity, p. 49. By the 1960s, however, it was recognized by Archbishop Michael Ramsey that ‘it is not for us Anglicans to speak in self-consciousness or self-commendation about our claims. There was a period when other Churches used to speak nice complimentary words about our role as a “bridge-Church”. Today in an ecumenical age Christians everywhere are ready to go to one another without the aid of our bridge, or perhaps any bridge to help them.’ See A. M. Ramsey, Canterbury Essays and Addresses (London: SPCK, 1964), p. 77. Typical is Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, p. 311: ‘As those who have been baptized by one Spirit into one body, our ultimate obligation is to be in communion with one another, otherwise we rend the body of Christ’.

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fissiparous trajectory of some churches, grounds for such self-congratulation are no longer available.78 In his programmatic address to clergy and laity in the Diocese of Derby in 1992, the Archbishop of Canterbury, noting that the forces of polarization and fragmentation were rife in the Church of England’s life, called his people to renewed concern for the matter of internal unity.79 Subsequently, the decision of the General Synod to proceed with the ordination of women to the presbyterate was not received by a sizeable minority of English Anglicans, who have since in some places found themselves on the opposite side of the issue from their diocesan bishop and hence unable to receive his ministry. The role of the bishop as the focus of unity has been undone as local churches have been plunged into internal schism. ‘Impaired’, ‘restricted’ or ‘incomplete’ communion are the terms now employed to describe the anomalous situation which the loss of recognition and hence interchangeability of ministries consequent upon this decision has effected. The situation has been met with creation of a doctrine and a device to contain the rupture of communion. The Church of England now recognizes two incompatible polities under the doctrine of ‘two integrities’, a notion which the 1998 Lambeth Conference has endorsed, arguing that both those who have received and those who have not received the ordination of women are to be counted loyal Anglicans whose views in the matter should be treated with courtesy and respect as the process of open reception continues.80 One result of this decision, as Stephen Platten has noted, is that ‘islands of dissent and disagreement’, which impair fellowship between Anglicans of one parish and those of another within the same diocese, have been created.81 The device which has been put into place to contain the local impairment of communion within a translocal pattern of authority is the ministry of Provincial Episcopal Visitors, or ‘flying bishops’, invited from outside the diocese to supply the episcopal sacramental needs of such parishes.82 Some English Anglicans have found this double integrity intolerable

78

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R. P. C. Hanson, ‘A Marginal Note on Comprehensiveness’, Theology 75 (1972), pp. 631–36. George Carey, A Charter for the Church: Sharing a Vision for the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1993), p. 164. For his presidential address to the General Synod (1991) in which he recognized that while comprehensiveness is rightly to be cherished, it had come to the breaking point in the debate over the ordination of women to the presbyterate in the Church of England, see pp. 133–34. The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998, Resolution III.2, (c), (d) and (e), p. 395. S. Platten, Augustine’s Legacy, 109. The development of alternative episcopal oversight has undermined Rowan Williams’ otherwise compelling description of the authority of a bishop as entailing ‘the rejection of rejection’ by which a bishop acknowledges as within his communion those who find themselves divided from each other. See Rowan Williams, ‘Authority and the Bishop in

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and have left the Church of England.83 Now that the General Synod of the Church of England is in the process of adopting and implementing legislation to permit the ordination of women presbyters to the episcopate’ tolerance of opposing views has waned and the place of traditionalist Anglo-Catholics and others in communion with that church remains an open question. The problem of such fracturing extends far beyond the Church of England into the furthest reaches of the Anglican Communion. In addition, the Lambeth Conference has now officially recognized alongside its provinces the presence of ‘continuing Anglican churches’ no longer in communion with the See of Canterbury but who are said to ‘own the Anglican tradition’, and has enjoined its churches to engage them in ecumenical dialogue.84 The polarization evidenced in the growing gulf between its rhetoric of commitment to unity and the fragmentation of its ecclesial life at the local level may be seen in part as the fruit of its doctrinal disarray and the abdication of theological work. The implications of this untidiness for the Church of England’s doctrine of the church have given rise to repeated and insistent calls for renewed attention to ecclesiology.

V. The Call for Ecclesiology How then is it proposed that the ecumenical and domestic crisis of Anglican identity be addressed? The situation in which the Church of England finds itself calls obviously enough for a critical articulation of a doctrine of the church. Stephen Sykes has vigorously prodded the Church of England to spell out the contours of the liturgical matrix by which it hopes through faithful performance to form its members in the Christian faith.85 Paul Avis in Anglicanism and the Christian Church has proceeded historically, organizing the leading ecclesiological ideas of various periods of English Anglicanism, albeit bracketing evangelical voices, under the concept of paradigm, criticizing its successive ‘Erastian’ and ‘apostolic’ doctrines of the church, with a view to establishing a baptismal paradigm as the key

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the Church’, in Their Lord and Ours: Approaches to Authority, Community and the Unity of the Church (ed. Mark Santer; London: SPCK, 1982), pp. 99–100. Other proposed innovations to the polity of the church are proving equally contentious as acrimonious debates take place over such issues as the place of gay, lesbian and transgendered Christians in the church; lay presidency at the Eucharist and the practice of comensality or ‘open table’, which extends Eucharistic hospitality (the reception of communion) to the unbaptized. The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998, Resolution IV.11, p. 410. See also the sub-section report on p. 228. These ‘continuing churches’ are said to have entered into a self-imposed exile in which foreclosure of the issues of Anglican and Christian identity has apparently already taken place. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism, pp. 50–51, 60–61, 85.

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to Anglican and ecumenical identity and integrity. Evangelical Anglican writers, such as Timothy Bradshaw86 and Colin Buchanan,87 eschewing Evangelical relegation of the doctrine of the church to matters adiaphora, have updated the English Reformation ‘centre-circumference’ model to focus ecclesiology derivatively upon the person and work of Jesus Christ.88 With intensive ecumenical industry, the Church of England, through representative theologians, has participated constructively in ecclesiological dialogues with Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed churches. With the significant exception of the Porvoo Common Statement89 and the agreements between North American Anglicans and Lutherans,90 reception of this important work has apparently stalled. Now the need for ecclesiological construction seems even more pressing, given domestic concerns about the survivability of parishes and other institutional structures due to the significant decline in attendance and resources among congregations and dioceses in many places. If there is currently a preponderance of attention to the doctrine of the church among English Anglicans, this, as Oliver Quick once argued in response to those who indicted the 1938 Doctrine Report for a surfeit of ecclesiological discussion,91 is presumably due to the fact that for many this is where the most acute problems are seen to lie. Yet a sense of disquiet persists. How much attention to the doctrine of the church, especially in a church displaying a settled bias against, and meagre resources to sustain, theological work, is too much? Does the incessant call for ecclesiology lead to ecclesiological self-preoccupation and even narcissism, an obsessive wrestling with the church’s identity or doctrine ad intra to the detriment of its mission to the world of which it is a part? A caution in this regard has been sounded by a number of Roman Catholic and Lutheran ecclesiologists and ecumenists.92 In a similar vein, Avery Dulles has suggested

86

87 88

89

90

91

92

Timothy Bradshaw, The Olive Branch: An Evangelical Anglican Doctrine of the Church (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1992), and idem, ‘The Christological Centre of Anglicanism’, in The Future of Anglicanism (ed. R. Hannaford), pp. 90–103. Colin Buchanan, Is the Church of England Biblical? Cf. Paul Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1981), pp. 2–3. See Together in Mission and Ministry: The Porvoo Common Statement with Essays on Church and Ministry in Northern Europe (London: Church House Publishing, 1993). See W. A. Norgren and W. G. Rusch (eds), ‘Toward Full Communion’ and ‘Concordat of Agreement’: Lutheran–Episcopal Dialogue, Series III (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press; Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement Publications, 1991); and for the Waterloo Declaration, Called to Full Communion: A Study Resource for Lutheran–Anglican Relations (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1998). O. C. Quick, ‘The Doctrine Report and the Sacraments’, Theology 39 (November 1939), pp. 344–53 (344). See also G. W. H. Lampe, ‘The 1938 Report in Retrospect’, p. ix. For discussion of the very real temptation for the churches to become isolated, introspective, self-congratulating or self-celebrating communities, see Richard McBrien, Do

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that there is a tendency in elaborating certain biblical models of the church to inflate its status, exalting it beyond its due and ‘leading to an unhealthy divinization of the Church’.93 Colin Gunton and Daniel Hardy have also cautioned that such tendencies have the effect of isolating ecclesiology from the wider theological purview, ignoring the constitution and being of the church in favour of encouraging ‘an approach to the practicalities of church life which owes more to contingency management (or the exercise of power) than to a discerning of the way of the people of God in the world’.94 Where the ecclesiological context has become infected with myths of progress, whether political, technological or even theological, self-critical vigilance is required. Yet as Paul Avis has suggested, critical articulation of a doctrine of the church is arguably not the Church of England’s most urgent need. In fact, he has argued that the attention given to it can be deemed legitimate only to the extent that such study issues in a more vigorous Christian faith and life. Indeed, he points to the fact that the church finds its identity not primarily through an exercise in critical introspection but as it looks away from itself to contemplate, as St. Paul put it, the glory of God which shines in the face of Jesus Christ.95 The question facing Anglicans, then, is what kind of reflection on the doctrine of the church is called for in its present circumstances. It is as a response to this latter question that Donald MacKinnon’s critical ecclesiology makes an interesting, fruitful and strikingly independent contribution.

VI. Donald MacKinnon’s Protest against Ecclesiological Self-Preoccupation From the outset of his theological career Donald MacKinnon was alive to the fact that the Church of England was in crisis, recognizing amid the upheaval of English society in the aftermath of two world wars that its numbers and influence were markedly on the wane. Although the deep

93

94

95

We Need the Church? (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 229; Hans Küng, The Church (trans. Ray and Rosaleen Ockenden; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Image Books, 1976), pp. 619–20 and idem, Reforming the Church Today: Keeping Hope Alive (trans. P. Heinegg et al.; New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1992), p. 156. Michael Root has argued that sustained attention to ecclesiological problems can but need not issue in a narcissistic or self-glorifying doctrine of the church in his ‘Identity and Difference: The Ecumenical Problem’, in Theology and Dialogue, p. 178. See most recently, Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical– Prophetic Ecclesiology, pp. 4–36. Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, pp. 55 and 60, with particular reference to the ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ and ‘Mystical Communion’ models. Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy (eds), On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), pp. 6–7. Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, p. 20, echoing 2 Cor. 4.6.

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THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

divisions within it revealed by the resurgence of party conflict disturbed him,96 it was not primarily this set of identity issues, the bitter controversy which swirled around such matters as liturgical and canon law revision, the clash between traditional piety and radical social activism and even the nature of Anglicanism itself, which absorbed his mind. If the need to attack a trend is at all indicative of its prevalence, the sharpness and frequency of MacKinnon’s assaults on certain kinds of ecclesial practice and self-understanding reveal his conviction that English Anglicanism in both theory and practice required radical reconstruction. If his starting point is empiricist and moral in its orientation, it is inextricably rooted in a theological critique. He saw in the Church of England’s characteristic concerns and attitudes a failure to come to terms with the real weakness of its actual form of life, its inability to mediate a common life or to furnish resources for revolt in the face of the most pressing needs of the human communities among which it was placed.97 In this regard, MacKinnon did not shrink from calling the cultural whole in which the Church of England was implicated and imprisoned the fruit of an apostasy.98 However, MacKinnon argued that in a post-Christian world the church cannot be the primary focus of concern.99 The crisis in which the Church of England was embroiled, in his estimation, arose from its postponement of sustained critical engagement with the acute theological issues attending belief in the gospel.100 His assessment of this postponement identified two deleterious consequences. First, it exposed the aloofness, the alienation and invulnerability of the Church of England and its evasion of the most urgent concerns, political, economic and social, besieging the human race.101 Second, in so doing it had perpetuated among its members a false security, an anaesthetic and cushioning effect, in the face of the real problems in which the church was already deeply enmeshed.102 In effect, it was the Church of England’s self-preoccupation, the dissipation of its theological energy on the issue of episcopacy and other ‘parlour games played with denominational abstractions’, as he caustically put it, which evoked from MacKinnon a passionate call to revolt in the name of the gospel of Jesus Christ.103 On MacKinnon’s account, the crisis was not at all the displacement of the Church of England in the life of the nation but rather the cultivation of an isolated, self-regarding and

96

D. M. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 78–79. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Christian and Marxist Dialectic’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith: A Series of Studies by Members of the Anglican Communion (ed. D. M. MacKinnon; London: MacMillan & Co., 1953), pp. 240–41. 98 D. M. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True (London: Dacre Press), p. 25. 99 D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Some Questions for Anglicans’, Christendom 13 (March 1943), pp. 108–11. 100 101 D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 179. Ibid., p. 177. 102 103 D. M. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 26. Ibid., p. 71. 97

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THE DISCONTENTS OF CONTEMPORARY ANGLICANISM

inauthentic church life which served more to distort and obscure the gospel than to proclaim it.104 MacKinnon’s attack on this self-regarding ecclesiological preoccupation could, of course, be dismissed as an instance of an ‘impossibilist’ investment in the church, inevitably to be disappointed, such as Richard Roberts finds in the early works.105 It is, to be sure, one-sided and, undoubtedly, intentionally so, but it should not be read as a wilful or idiosyncratic disparagement of the church or even of its ordained members by a lay theologian. There can be no question of simply dispensing with the churches for, as MacKinnon acknowledges, they deserve gratitude that ‘in spite of their continuing historical infidelity to his [Christ’s] inspiration, his Spirit’s presence has enabled them to bear witness to the secret of his ways’.106 Moreover, this criticism, as MacKinnon reveals, was acutely self-involving since, in the first place, it was levelled at the tradition of Oxford Anglo-Catholicism of which he counted himself a faithful, albeit critical, member. Further, it gave voice to the lifelong tension of a borderlands existence which ran unabated through his person and his work.107 What exercised MacKinnon most acutely was his estimation that the Church of England had embraced a settled pattern of life that stood in stark contradiction to the radically unsettling promise and demand of the gospel demonstrated by the way of Jesus Christ.108 His attack on the ecclesiological preoccupation of the Church of England arises, then, from his recognition that, as Roberts puts it, ‘the Church had become what it was intended to deny’.109 It is from MacKinnon’s concern with the wide gap that had opened up between a church doctrine and practice determined by the gospel and the Church of England’s self-understanding and way of life that the protest which fuels his characteristic approach to ecclesiology flowed. It is important to see MacKinnon’s writings on the church as a form of prophetic protest rather than as merely academic or even apologetic critical

104 105

106 107

108 109

D. M. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979), p. 10. Richard Roberts, ‘Theological Rhetoric and Moral Passion in the Light of MacKinnon’s “Barth”’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon (ed. Kenneth Surin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 12. D. M. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 5. For the nature of this tension, see his 1961 Cambridge Inaugural Lecture in Borderlands of Theology, pp. 41–54 and idem, ‘Theology as a Discipline of a Modern University’, pp. 164–74. Roberts’ characterization of MacKinnon as an ‘inside outsider’ captures well the restlessness generated by the tensions he felt between the work of an academic philosopher in a secular setting and commitment to the church in his role as theologian, as well as from the fact that he was a Scottish Episcopalian layman engaged in the affairs of the Church of England. See Roberts, ‘Theological Rhetoric and Moral Passion in the Light of MacKinnon’s “Barth”’, pp.1–2. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 179. Richard Roberts, ‘Theological Rhetoric and Moral Passion in the Light of MacKinnon’s “Barth”’, p. 12., emphasis Roberts’.

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introspection. The protest takes two interrelated forms. First there is a scathing critique of what might be called ecclesiasticism, the particular modes of the Church of England’s relation to power, of which he wrote: It may well be thought that this is an area in which the Churches have all in one way or another failed, either by accepting uncritically the attitudes and standards of the society around them, or of a certain strata within it, or else by a kind of half-deliberate aversion from the problems raised, and decisions become necessary, by means of their own involvement with the power-structures around them.110 On the political level, he portrayed it as a church clutching at its status established by law, forging alliances with power brokers in civil society in order to maintain a position of privilege at the centre.111 Far from being an avenue of service and mission or an opportunity for presence, MacKinnon argued, this position of establishment gave occasion to the besetting sins of legalism, triumphalism and clericalism. By assigning priority to the task of ecclesiastical preservation, it encouraged an ‘intellectually frivolous’ pragmatism and enticed its theologians to expend their energies in the service of its apologetic.112 In the social realm, the alienation of the Church of England from the poor, the unemployed and uneducated underscored for MacKinnon its conformity to an ideology of class-consciousness in which Christian spiritual life came almost to be seen as a luxury for the well-to-do.113 In the moral realm, MacKinnon protested against its willingness to acquiesce in situations of great evil or ethical peril, citing the threat to all that is genuinely human in such crises as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, total warfare and economic injustice.114 He bridled at the cruelty exhibited by the 110 111

112 113

114

MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 4. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘La communication efficace et les tentations du Christ’, in Herméneutique de la sécularisation: Actes du colloque organisé par le Centre International d’Etudes Humanistes et par L’Institut d’Etudes Philosophiques de Rome (Paris: Aubier, 1976), pp. 375–76. Earlier at Malvern he had argued that disestablishment was not a panacea, but that its acceptance might help the Church of England to recognize its postChristendom context. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’ in Malvern, 1941: The Life of the Church and the Order of Society: Being the Proceedings of the Archbishop of York’s Conference (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1941), p. 104. D. M. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 58–59. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Recall – to What?’, Christendom 8 (1938), pp. 48–56 (55). MacKinnon might be read here as an early practitioner of that rather distinctive kind of Anglo-Catholic liberation theology for which Kenneth Leech once appealed, namely ‘liberation from the state and from the establishment ethos; liberation from English gentility and from class captivity; liberation from conformity to the dominant culture’. See Kenneth Leech, Subversive Orthodoxy, p. 55. D. M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp 119, 202–03, and idem, ‘Recall – to What?’, p. 51.

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ordained members of the church whose service often consisted in‘closing the gates of mercy’ to those who needed and sought it most.115 Ecclesiasticism also raised the question for MacKinnon whether Anglican participation in efforts at ‘home reunion’ could ever be viewed as anything other than a power game, a kind of ecumenical imperialism.116 In view here is a church whose way of being in the world, he charged, has been shaped as much by the style of Caiaphas as by faithfulness to the way of Jesus Christ.117The second aspect of MacKinnon’s critical refusal of ecclesiological preoccupation might be characterized as an attack on ecclesiocentrism, those attitudes, practices and doctrines which make churchly existence an end in itself and manifest a readiness to accept the historical and spiritual experience of the church as self-justifying.118 Here MacKinnon signalled the Church of England’s ‘tired institutional conservatism’119 or ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’120 by which its particular forms and structures are assigned a finality which belies their development within history and ends in an idolatry of the institution, the absolutizing of the contingent. In this vein, MacKinnon excoriated the artificial enclosed life of Anglo-Catholic Oxford, its ‘temper of exclusion’ directed towards other Christians and churches in the form of arrogance and spiritual pride born largely of ignorance.121 MacKinnon stubbornly disavowed the claims of consensus often advanced in support of the Anglo-Catholic achievement in ecclesiology, arguing that such claims simply pretended a unity where, in fact, very real and deep-seated differences among English Anglicans and with other Christians on such matters as the ordained ministry, sacramental theology and the nature of the church persisted. But the essence of MacKinnon’s charge of ecclesiocentrism levelled at the Church of England is that it made the church’s life, understood as a tradition of liturgical and spiritual experience, the fundamental subject matter of the theologian’s concern.122 It shied away from critical engagement with much in that life that he saw as an obstacle to belief, a betrayal of Christ and the eclipse of God by the failures of the institution.123 Ecclesiocentrism,

115

116 117

118 120 122 123

D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Moral Objections’ in idem et al., Objections to Christian Belief (London: Constable, 1963), pp. 27, 30–31. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 73, 77–78. Ibid., p. 29. ‘Caiaphas’ represents here and throughout MacKinnon’s writings the selfregarding service of those dedicated to the perpetuation of the structures of the church at all cost. See also ibid., p. 7; idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 100; idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 202; idem, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 115; and idem, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, in Religious Imagination (ed. J. P. Mackey; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), pp. 183–84. 119 MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. 121 MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 9, 20–25. Ibid., pp. 69 and72. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 6. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 10.

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THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

MacKinnon charged, marks a flight from the gospel and a trivialization of the church’s witness.124 That Donald MacKinnon’s strident protest against the Church of England’s ecclesiological preoccupation should be sounded most eloquently and publicly125 in the context of the church-world relationship is indicative of his insistence that Christianity is in the first place not a complex of ideas but a way that is ultimately one with the whole of human life.126 It is a life lived by faith. Of faith MacKinnon wrote that ‘it is at least arguable that receptivity is of its very essence, and that it is a response elicited, though not compelled, by external occurrence, and always orientated upon that which lies outside the interior life of the believing subject’.127 By contrast with an account of faith as mediated and safeguarded primarily by the institutional structures of Christianity, MacKinnon spoke of it as a lived correspondence or conformity of the believer’s thought and action with that by which it has been evoked, namely the mysterium Christi.128 Thus, in a moment of self-revelation in which he records a ‘deepening distrust of the ecclesiastical Apparat’, he is moved by contrast to confess that ‘the domination of the mysterium Christi deepens its almost obsessive sovereignty over my mind’.129 Again, in a context in which he laments the preoccupation of the churches with the problem of their own survival and with advancing their apologetic, he bears witness to the impact of the mysterium Christi: The memory of the person of Christ continually beckons one’s intelligence as well as one’s will in a direction that at first sight seems quite different, but after a while is seen to engage that same intellectual integrity for which philosophical activity calls. There is a riddle here that will not let one rest until one has solved it, an opening-up of the frontiers of the unknown that calls out one’s energies. To speak in these terms is to do no more than state empirical facts; it may indeed be doing no more than record an obsession.130 The conclusion to which this led MacKinnon, following E. C. Hoskyns, is that Christology is not simply one among many of the loci of Christian theology, but that which generates and keeps in constant activity the work of 124 125

126 127 128 129 130

MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 4–6. Much of MacKinnon’s most critical writing about the Church of England first took the form of public lectures and radio broadcasts. The Gore Lecture, ‘Kenosis and Establishment’ was given in Westminster Abbey, arguably the symbolic heart of establishment Anglicanism. D. M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 178. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 44. MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory (London: A. & C. Black, 1957), p. 261. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 31. MacKinnon, ‘Theology as a Discipline of a Modern University’, p. 169.

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the Christian theologian.131 It is the actuality of the interrogation of Christ himself by which he puts to us the question, ‘What think you of Christ?’ MacKinnon observed, which the church must serve.132 Those who submit themselves to this scrutiny become part of the question put to others and through the task of theology, understood as ministerium verbi divini, they must seek ways to ensure that the interrogation is ‘searching’.133 But if the doctrine of the church awaits the imposition of this Christological interrogation, it is a Christological discipline grounded in the soteriological direction of the story of Jesus which MacKinnon calls for. It is, therefore, on the way of the cross that this ecclesiological askesis must focus: If Christianity survives it will be in part because the lonely figure, dying in agony upon the cross, crying out in dereliction to the Father, whom he believes to have forsaken him, remains ceaselessly interrogating men and women, outside as much as within the Christian churches, concerning his significance and that of his supreme hour .. . .134 MacKinnon calls for Christology to be reconstructed in such a way that the Christus Rex give way to the Ecce Homo and the Logos be measured by the Christus-patiens.135 A church defined by this gospel can never acquiesce in the status quo but must exhibit in changed and changing circumstances a fidelity, if always partial and imperfect, to the way of Jesus Christ.136 Theology, then, which must govern ecclesiology, is for MacKinnon always in the first place the elucidation of a gospel,137 a task in which he assigns Christian doctrine a crucial role to play. He rejected out of hand, however, a dogmatic positivism, which might serve as an ‘escape-route’ from critical engagement with the gospel and hence disallowed doctrines, understood as second-order propositions, to supplant the first-order affirmations of the gospels themselves.138 His recognition of the intractable philosophical difficulties inherent in the notions of reference and truth notwithstanding, 131

132

133 134 135

136 137 138

MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 57. See also idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 115. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 176: ‘From Christ there issues a continually repeated question, and his Church is his authentic servant only so far as it allows that interrogation to continue.’ MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 115. Ibid., p 10. MacKinnon, ‘Moral Objections’, in idem et al., Objections to Christian Belief, p. 33; and idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 114. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 187. MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 40. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology – A Cross-bench View’, in Christ, Faith and History: Cambridge Studies in Christology (eds S. W. Sykes and J. P. Clayton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 291.

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THE KENOTIC TRAJECTORY OF THE CHURCH

MacKinnon described the function of doctrines as ‘lashing the church to its historical moorings’139 and insisted that we need only bother with them to the extent that they could be shown to correspond with ‘that which is the case’. He enjoined the theologian to seek from within this tradition the possibilities for clarification and reconstruction of its formulations. Doctrines, then, like all human cognitive constructs, are open to revision, not simply because they are subject to the limits of language but, more importantly, because the church is constantly subject to the interrogation of its sovereign Lord. Together with these realist epistemological concerns, MacKinnon placed great emphasis on the moral force of Christian doctrines. To receive a doctrine, he wrote, was to give assent to it in such a way that it took root in one’s life, not only pervasively shaping choice and behaviour but also determining what one sees and knows.140 Moral failure, he argued, could distort and pervert doctrine, while inadequate doctrines could only promote moral confusion.141 All of these aspects of MacKinnon’s theology are conditioned by the gospel affirmation that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life, an affirmation, as we shall have opportunity to explore at length, which oscillates between epistemological and moral correspondence and properly ontological concerns. Christian faith, thought and ethics are not to be construed as arbitrary expressions of an endlessly creative self, then, for they are the forms of receptivity to the order of the world disclosed in Jesus Christ. There is much here, as MacKinnon recognized, which legitimates identification of the character and direction of his theology as fides quaerens intellectum.142 If fides retained priority in his thought, it did not do so in isolation from the pressing questions furnished by a rigorous exercise of intellectus. If theology as a necessary ecclesial discipline claimed its right to enter into public dialogue with the academy and with the secular world, it must make its claims available to the most exacting scrutiny. It is not merely the intellectus fidei by means of which theology is enabled to state, clarify and revise its own claims which MacKinnon had in mind but an intellectus which enjoys a genuine autonomy and which invites, even demands, engagement with questions raised by various schools or movements of thought on their own terms. Though he argued that these two realms were discrete and that each possessed its own dignity, he claimed that for the theologian an autonomous understanding both penetrated and was penetrated by the realm of faith.143 The relation of philosophy to theology was in MacKinnon’s understanding and practice always ad hoc, corresponding to no correlationist schema and hence one in which faith does not surrender its sovereignty: ‘Philosophy . . . is never master 139 140 141

142

MacKinnon, The Church of God, pp. 54–55. MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, p. 17. D. M. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 129–37; idem, ‘Some Questions for Anglicans’, p. 109. 143 MacKinnon, Borderlands of Christology, p. 63. Ibid., pp. 65–66.

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in theology, but its indispensable servant, never however giving a service that can be construed after a formula, but one that throws light, now in one direction, now in another.’144 If the faithful Christian is a philosopher, MacKinnon avowed, ‘he will see a kind of intellectual attraction and repulsion at work between the concepts and categories whereby he secures to himself Christ’s very grasp upon him, and those by which he shows forth to himself the stuff of the world about him in all its familiarity and diverse richness’.145 This character of MacKinnon’s work is glimpsed in the extent to which his philosophical discussions are so often limited by their usefulness for serving the intelligibility of MacKinnon’s theological explorations.146 If ‘borderlands theology’ is carried out at the place where various traditions of thought intersect and interpenetrate, MacKinnon took up that task as one who held to Christian faith, or perhaps better as he put it, one whom Christian faith would not let go.147 MacKinnon’s fear, then, of an ecclesiological preoccupation which makes the church’s life the focal matter of theological concern, the pressing problems of that life notwithstanding, is that Jesus Christ, the nerve centre of Christian faith, is thereby displaced. MacKinnon did not deny that the church must have its rightful place in Christian theology, and it was with the goal of putting the church in that place that he raised his voice of protest and sounded the call to revolt. It was his contention, then, that the doctrine of the church must be reconstructed in terms of the doctrines of the Incarnation and Triune God. As a result, MacKinnon’s work challenges Anglican neglect of theology proper and invites thereby renewal of its ecclesiological context through a critical exercise of Nachdenken, thinking along and beyond the pathways of the church’s doctrinal tradition and its elaboration by diverse theological voices in response to the gospel in the midst of the world. On this account, its ecclesiological context is subject to a Christological grammar which MacKinnon spells out in its interrogative, imperative and indicative modes. Under this regulative tutelage, the direction of Christian theological thinking and ecclesial living oscillates towards the centre which sets and sustains it in motion, namely Jesus Christ in his mission, cross and resurrection, and then outward to the world which God loves. We turn now to an exploration of that itinerary in the form in which MacKinnon came to understand it in the early years of his theological career set against the dark crisis of the Second World War. 144 145 146

147

D. M. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 89. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 66. Much of MacKinnon’s philosophical work is oriented towards his polemic against ‘idealism’ or, more accurately, the theological use of idealist philosophical styles, and at times he contented himself with only so much philosophical commentary (and in so doing left unarticulated in the background matters of quite daunting complexity) as to make his discussion of the attendant theological issues intelligible. See, for instance, his apologetic comment in this regard in idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 154. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 64.

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2 mackinnon’s early ecclesiology along the way of the cross

The Anglo-Catholicism of the late 1930s in which Donald MacKinnon first began to find his distinctive theological voice was a complex milieu characterized by considerable diversity of theological opinion and liturgical practice.1 It marked, moreover, a time which Gresham Kirkby has aptly dubbed ‘the period of Anglican Catholic “triumphalism”’.2 This triumphalism stemmed in part from an awareness of a double achievement. First, what had begun a century earlier as a moment of dissent in response to an ecclesial crisis had become by that time not only an integral part of the Church of England but a movement which in the inter-war years found itself in the ascendancy among its various parties. Immediately following the Great War, Anglo-Catholicism had emerged from the parishes and universities, which to that point had been its stronghold, to celebrate its liturgical advances and display the theological vitality of its leadership on the public stage in a series of successful and impressively well-attended Anglo-Catholic Conferences held in the nation’s capital. Significantly, the primary leaders of the movement were passionately concerned with issues

1

2

Will Spens suggested that this diversity may perhaps be accounted for on the basis of a distinction between Oxford and Cambridge types of Anglo-Catholicism. He also claimed that as late as 1933 the movement was beginning to attract support from the English Anglican episcopate and sympathy from the secular press. See idem, The Present Position of the Catholic Movement in the Church of England: An Address Delivered at the Conference of the Clergy of the Diocese of New York at Lake Mahopac on October 18, 1933 (n.p., n.d.), pp. 1, 8. Gresham Kirkby, ‘Kingdom Come: The Catholic Faith and Millennial Hopes’, in Essays Catholic and Radical), p. 58. For a critical description of the fortunes of Anglo-Catholics during this period between the two world wars, see W. S. F. Pickering, Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity, pp. 41–64.

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of faith and order, and some, notably Will Spens, were instrumental in forming the first Doctrine Commission appointed in 1922 to address the crisis of doctrinal confusion in the Church of England.3 In the tradition of the celebrated Lux Mundi, several of its theologians attempted to effect a new synthesis between the catholic faith and contemporary critical thought in their published symposium, Essays Catholic and Critical.4 Emerging out of this creative theological ferment, the self-confident public rhetoric of this dynamic Anglo-Catholicism arguably testified to its aspiration to exchange its actual status as ecclesiola in ecclesiae for identity with the ecclesia Anglicana itself. Second, the crowning achievement and indeed rallying point of this diverse movement was doubtless its doctrine of the church, which in its main points also proved attractive to a number of highly placed and influential theologians who otherwise did not count themselves fellow-travellers of the movement. In this regard, William Temple, then Archbishop of York, commented that by the outbreak of the Second World War ‘theologians of today are more concerned than we were in 1910 or 1920 about the theological status of the Church. The Church is part of its own creed. To be in Christ is to be in the Church – and vice versa. Hence there is a new appreciation of the importance of the Church for faith itself’.5 As Temple went on to point out, whereas the older generation of theologians to which he belonged had not failed to insist on ‘the necessity and claim of the church’, this had been ‘secondary and derivative’ but now among the younger generation it had become ‘primary and basic’.6 Yet at the very heart of this ecclesiology there is an intransigent insistence upon a high doctrine of the ministry, focused on the historic episcopate as the foundation and legitimation of the church’s continuity with Christ, which tended to skew the doctrine in the direction of a triumphalist clericalism. As Richard Roberts has pointed out, the trajectory of this tendency towards a plerosis of the doctrine of holy orders corresponds to a trend present in some of its exponents towards a kenosis in the doctrine of the Incarnation, which lays full emphasis on the humanity of Christ.7 This recognition, he suggests, bears witness to ‘the largely silent struggle’ in the relation

3

4 5

6 7

G. K. A. Bell, Randall Davidson: Archbishop of Canterbury, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1935), pp. 1134–150. E. G. Selwyn (ed.), Essays Catholic and Critical (London: SPCK, 1926), p. v. William Temple, ‘Theology Today’, Theology 39 (November 1939), pp. 326–33 (331). See also the ‘Prefatory Note’ to Part II: The Church and the Sacraments in Doctrine in the Church of England (1938), pp. 99–100. Ibid., p. 331. Richard H. Roberts, ‘Lord, Bondsman and Churchman: Identity, Integrity and Power in Anglicanism’, in On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, pp. 160–61.

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between Christology and ecclesiology, which has left a deep imprint on the character of contemporary Anglicanism.8 The heightened theological importance attached to the doctrine of the church was further inflated by two other pressing issues of the day. First, the ecumenical movement which was then gaining momentum sought from Anglicans precise formulations on matters of faith and order, specifically the doctrine of the church and the ministry, a request which, as Eric Mascall then complained, caused considerable embarrassment to Anglican ecumenists.9 Second, both church and society were caught in the grip of a mood of disillusionment and anxiety provoked by the virtual collapse of received intellectual and moral conventions in Western culture at large.10 Temple himself could protest that ‘Christian standards of conduct are challenged as radically as Christian doctrine’ and that ‘men and women come to maturity with no sense that there is a place for them somewhere in a society resting on secure principles which it regards as Christian’.11 8

9

10

11

Ibid., p. 162. One might also instance in the remarks of N. P. Williams to the first Anglo-Catholic Congress held in London in 1920 an aspect of this ‘silent struggle’ which goes to the heart of Christian ecclesial self-description in relation to the gospel. Williams acknowledged that ‘most ex-service chaplains would agree that the men were willing to listen with eagerness to any vigorous preacher who spoke to them of the personal Christ; but that when the word “church” was mentioned, there was an immediate and obvious collapse of interest’. Williams goes on to press the point, however, that loyalty to the church is in actuality loyalty to Christ in the church. The bulk of his address is taken up with a reassertion of a conventional Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology. In this missional context there is an intransigence which shrinks from asking why such people failed to detect the continuity of identity between Christ and the church which Williams and his colleagues find so evident. See idem, ‘Authority in Matters of Belief’, in Report of the First Anglo-Catholic Congress, London 1920 (London: SPCK; New York: Macmillan Co., 1920), p. 64. More penetrating is Oliver Quick’s earlier judgement that people seemed not to encounter the message of gospel hope which the church exists to proclaim because ‘the living message has been hidden and stifled under the machinery which it should control . . . The voice of the gospel has been choked with the arid dust of convention’. See idem, Essays in Orthodoxy (London: Macmillan and Co., 1916), pp. xxiii–xxiv. E. L. Mascall, ‘The Future of Anglican Theology’, Theology 39 (December 1939), pp. 406–12 (411). This mood is finely captured in Neville Talbot’s observation that the intellectual and moral realms had been rocked by a series of ‘convulsions’ and the pervasive feeling was one of ‘being swept by violent tides out of old anchorages, both religious and moral’. See Neville S. Talbot, ‘The Modern Situation’, in B. H. Streeter et al., Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought: By Seven Oxford Men (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), p. 11. For further description of the two decades of disenchantment, resentment and restlessness in both society and church between the wars see Roger Lloyd, The Church of England 1900–1965 (London: SCM Press, 1966), pp. 241–48. William Temple, ‘Theology Today’, p. 329.

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In the face of this impetus towards ‘disintegration’,12 it was the AngloCatholic hope that the life of Christian faith might find its sanction and security in a Church of England re-grounded on a distinctively Catholic ecclesiology that would furnish principles by which Christian doctrines might be safeguarded and Christian moral and social action brought to effect. In particular, there emerged at that time a robust confidence, which would persist for several decades, that the institutional ecclesial forms which were believed to incarnate Christian faith, particularly the catholicity of Anglican forms of worship and the apostolicity of its ministry, might provide a shelter from the storms of modernity then relentlessly crashing upon the church.13 In fact, Anglo-Catholics of diverse types appear to have been much more successful in working together to secure the principles of ‘Catholic order’ than in formulating a united Catholic witness in mission to society at large.14 In the light of these considerations, the task which this present chapter addresses is twofold. First, it describes two early forays by Donald MacKinnon into critical ecclesiology in the turbulence of the period 1936–1945. Both of these early essays elaborate in remarkably different ways the notion of the church as extension of the Incarnation, surely Charles Gore’s most lasting legacy to liberal Catholicism in the Church of England. The Church, wrote Gore, is ‘the extension in idea and in reality of the Incarnation’.15 It is the extension and perpetuation of the Incarnation ‘because it embodies the same principle and lives by the same life’:16 The Church embodies the same principle as the ‘Word made flesh’, that is, the expression and communication of the spiritual and divine through what is material and human. It is a human and material society. Its sacraments are visible instruments: its unity is that of a visible organization bound into one at least by the link of an apostolic succession and an historical continuity. But this visible, material human society exists to receive, to embody and to communicate a spiritual life. 12

13

14

15

16

Paul B. Bull, ‘The Kingdom of God and the Church Today’, in A Group of Churchmen, The Return of Christendom, with an introduction by Charles Gore (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 219, in which he attributes such ‘disintegration’ to the attempt to organize human life apart from God. William L. Sachs, The Transformation of Anglicanism: From State Church to Global Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 308, 326. Judith Pinnington, ‘Rubric and Spirit: A Diagnostic Reading of Tractarian Worship’, in Essays Catholic and Radical, p. 102. Charles Gore, The Religion of the Church as Presented in the Church of England: A Manual of Membership (London and Oxford: A. R. Mowbray; Milwaukee: The Young Churchman Co., 1916), p. 45. Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God: Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1891 (London: John Murray, 1891), p. 219.

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And this life is none other than the life of the Incarnate. The Church exists to perpetuate in every age the life of Jesus, the union of manhood with Godhead.17 It is this incarnational principle which provides the unitive framework of Gore’s account of the being of the Church, its sacraments, ministry and mission in the world, amounting to an extraordinary ecclesial plerosis by contrast with his own elaboration of a kenotic Christology.18 MacKinnon’s early writing on the church wrestles with this inheritance in relation to his own deepening appropriation of a dynamic construal of the gospel. Second, we probe the way in which his understanding of that relation between the gospel and the church orients the church towards the world, a first look at MacKinnon’s understanding of the way in which a church normed by the gospel of Jesus Christ becomes in mission the place in which faith seeking understanding encounters understanding seeking faith. In this regard we then examine MacKinnon’s polemic couched largely in formal terms against idealist versions of ecclesiology which threatened to subsume the person and work of Jesus Christ under the church’s life of worship or highly subjective forms of spirituality.

I. The Early Ecclesiology of Donald MacKinnon: ‘Stat Crux, Dum Volvitur Orbis’19 To enter the world of Donald MacKinnon’s early theological preoccupations is to leave behind all that reflects the settled patterns of self-confident ecclesiological apologetic, the smooth translation of Christian thought into then fashionable philosophical idioms and the direct application of Christian norms for action to the problems of society for a maelstrom of perplexity 17 18

19

Ibid., p. 219. Sustained expositions of the kenotic doctrine can be found in Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God, pp. 142–65; idem, Dissertations on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation (London: John Murray, 1895), pp. 71–225; idem, Belief in Christ (London: John Murray, 1924), pp. 214–28; and idem, Can We Then Believe? (London: John Murray, 1926), pp. 193–96. Among the most probing critical examinations of Gore’s position are J. M. Creed, The Divinity of Jesus Christ: A Study in the History of Christian Doctrine Since Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), pp. 75–81; E. L. Mascall, Christ, The Christian and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and Its Consequences (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1946), pp. 26–28; Lewis. B. Smedes, The Incarnation: Trends in Modern Anglican Theology (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1953), pp. 1–10; J. Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London: Faith Press, 1960), pp. 146–73; and Paul Avis, Gore: Construction and Conflict (Worthing, UK: Churchman Publishing, 1988), pp. 87–92. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 40.

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provoked by questions of the intelligibility and practicability of that incarnationalist project. MacKinnon’s restless revolt in the face of the liberal Anglo-Catholic agenda of his day can be attributed to the rather unique set of influences to which he fearlessly opened himself. The primary theological tradition in which he stood at that time was the Anglo-Catholicism of the Christendom Group with which he had associated himself from 1937.20 As Paul Wignall points out, however, MacKinnon’s adherence to the group’s programme of a theologically grounded and ecclesially situated social criticism21 was both informed and disturbed by his participation in the philosophical discussions convened weekly in the rooms of Isaiah Berlin in All Souls College, Oxford, and by his sustained critical reception of the writings of a wide range of theologians from outside his own tradition, especially P. T. Forsyth, Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, alongside the more usual fare of works from Anglo-Catholics as well as from British and continental Roman Catholics, especially those of the neo-Thomist revival, which attracted the members of the Christendom Group.22 On the Anglican side, MacKinnon was indebted to such theologians as Joseph Butler, J. H. Newman, Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland, and one increasingly dominant strand of his ecclesiology at this stage reads like a trenchant, if highly occasional, gloss on the opening chapters of Michael Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church and on Sir Edwyn Hoskyns’ studies in New Testament

20

21

22

P. G. Wignall, ‘D. M. MacKinnon: An Introduction to His Early Theological Writings’, in New Studies in Theology (vol. 1, ed. Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes; London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1980), p. 77. In his introduction to the Christendom Group’s manifesto, Charles Gore summed up its theological programme as follows: ‘In every element of the fundamental doctrine – of God, of the Incarnation, of the Holy Spirit, of the ultimate victory of Christ, of the life eternal – they see some strong guarantee, which exists nowhere else, for the ideas and principles which real social recovery constantly postulates. Nor would they be content with any presentation of religion as a mere system of doctrine. They see the visibly organized Church with its sacramental fellowship as belonging to the essence of the religion of the Incarnation. This organized Church is the body of Christ. It is his organ and instrument for action in the world. It is commissioned not only to teach men the way, but to show it embodied before their eyes.’ A Group of Churchmen, The Return of Christendom, p. 11. Wignall, ‘D. M. MacKinnon: An Introduction’, pp. 77–78, 80–84. For these weekly analytical mind-clearing sessions in pursuit of the truth, dominated by A. J. Ayer and J. L. Austin, but with the ready participation of Donald MacNabb, A. D. Woozley, MacKinnon and Berlin, see Isaiah Berlin, ‘Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’, in Isaiah Berlin et al., Essays on J. L. Austin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 1–17. Berlin recounts that these meetings, which lasted from 1937 until the outbreak of the war, were primarily concerned with phenomenalism and the theory of verification, although moral topics were canvassed from time to time, albeit as ‘an escape, not to be repeated too often, from the sterner demands of the subject’ (p. 15).

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Christology together with his mediation of the early Barth.23 Each of these formative matrices left their mark. In his contact with empiricist philosophy, MacKinnon was deeply disturbed by what he would later call a ‘presence to the actuality of unbelief’, eliciting the stark recognition that there is simply no place of refuge for the reflective Christian from the pressing questions put by an intellectual culture hostile to the received claims of the Christian faith.24 In the face of such unavoidable challenges MacKinnon conceded that one might painfully be reduced to silence. Yet here he also learned the style of a realist philosophy which led him to fasten on to the irreducible complexity and particularity of things and events and fuelled his relentless attack on idealist philosophical styles which subordinated the particular to the demands of an all-embracing explanatory system. MacKinnon’s theological thought at this stage is highly prescriptive and narrowly focused, impatient of tight argument or exegetical warrants. Anyone coming to MacKinnon’s early theological writing from a sustained perusal of Anglican ecclesiological texts from Newman to Gore can scarcely escape the impact of his turbulent style and the urgent theological passion it conveys. At the vortex of this clash of influences, philosophical and theological, stands the cross of Jesus Christ exercising its disturbing mastery over the church’s life, its formulations of Christian truth and its mission to the world. MacKinnon moves restlessly to and fro at the juncture of these diverse influences, not concerned so much with the defence or synthesis of these various traditions themselves as with their usefulness for scrutiny of questions concerning the truth or falsity of the gospel, questions which might ultimately lead to a renewal of authentically Christian existence in the form of a unified belief and practice open to the world.25 The character of this work is that of a critical conversation – debate, argument, close questioning, a certain rhetorical

23

24

25

A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936); also E. C. Hoskyns, ‘The Christ of the Synoptic Gospels’, in Essays Catholic and Critical (ed. E. G. Selwyn; London: SPCK, 1926), pp. 151–78; idem, ‘The Eucharist and Revelation’, in Report of the Anglo-Catholic Congress (London: Society of SS Peter and Paul; Milwaukee: Morehouse Publishing Co., 1927), pp. 51–56; idem, ‘The Apostolicity of the Church’, in Report of the Anglo-Catholic Congress (London: Catholic Literature Association, 1930), pp. 85–90; idem, ‘Jesus the Messiah’, in Mysterium Christi: Christological Studies by British and German Theologians (ed. A. Deissmann and G. K. A. Bell; London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930), pp. 67–89; E. C. Hoskyns and F. N. Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament (London: Faber and Faber, 1931); E. C. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel (ed. F. N. Davey; London: Faber and Faber, 1940); and Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. E. C. Hoskyns; London: Oxford University Press, 1933). D. M. MacKinnon, Review of Studies in Christian Existentialism, by John Macquarrie, Journal of Theological Studies n. s. 18 (1967), pp. 292–97 (297). D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Mr. Murry on the Free Society’, Christian Newsletter 310 (1948), pp. 9–16 (16).

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looseness or excess – which engages rather diverse and even opposed traditions of theological and philosophical thought ordered to the renewal of a common ecclesial practice faithful to the gospel. An ecclesiology fashioned at the confluence of such divergent traditions and facing the looming social and political crisis of war could hardly escape being primarily occasional and critical rather than systematic and constructive. In this context, MacKinnon was struck initially with the church’s incapacity to fulfil its mandate to mediate between the gospel and the world, namely to bear witness by word and action, even at the risk of martyrdom, to the truth of God.26 The times thrust upon the church the question of its understanding of and relation to that truth of God ‘which shatters human pretensions to pieces’.27 Sharpening the challenge and the task posed by this context, he asked: Will the churches speak to men in such words, or will they content themselves with summoning them to a crusade ‘to make the world safe for Christianity’? If they are to do so, their every member must first be broken in pieces on the Truth of God, that Truth to which Christ himself in his Passion bore witness – which is simply himself, the utterance of the Father. Have they the courage for this?28 Here are raised in succinct form key issues which MacKinnon saw at the heart of ecclesiology. First, what was the manner of the church’s presence, its message and its mission, to be in the midst of a world beset with catastrophe? Second, how did the church’s self-understanding relate to Jesus Christ, especially to his relation to God and to humankind disclosed in the event of his cross and resurrection? By way of analysis and clarification of these questions, MacKinnon sought to come to terms with the ‘fact’ of the church both on the empirical and transcendent planes of its existence. MacKinnon detected in the church of his day ‘an impotence moral and spiritual of so grave a kind that men have asked whether that society is not itself another self-seeking human corporation’.29 In the light of that question and its implicit judgement he subjected its life viewed in its external dimension to a bracing scrutiny. MacKinnon was appalled by the church’s propensity to seek security against the hostile impact of the death of Christendom by appeal to the military arm of state, in some places to putatively Christian dictatorships which did not hesitate to unleash the force of mechanized 26

27

28

D. M. MacKinnon, Review of Religion in Social Action, by M. B. Reckitt, Christendom 8 (1938), pp. 149–51 (150). D. M. MacKinnon, Review of The Pope Speaks, by Charles Rankin, Christendom 10 (1940), pp. 205–206 (206). 29 Ibid., p. 206. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, pp. 85–86.

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warfare against unarmed civilian populations, including their own.30 If English Anglicans were tempted to exculpate themselves by alleging collusion of the Roman Catholic Church with such dictatorships in Italy and Spain, MacKinnon reminded them that establishment linked the Church of England to a non-Christian state and reaped benefits for it from an unjust social and economic system to which it routinely gave its blessing.31 He charged that not only were the church’s members implicated in and held captive by the collapse of Christendom but that their security-seeking modus vivendi was in some measure responsible for it.32 The alliances contracted to ensure the church’s survival entailed endorsement of a cultural system which amounted to a denial of the Christian faith. MacKinnon’s judgement was blunt and uncompromising: the church in its historical actuality was implicated in an act that could only be considered apostasy.33 The church, he lamented, ‘has in many respects of late shown a distressing tendency to reflect, rather than redeem, the standards of secular society’.34 Notable among these institutions which MacKinnon deemed to have succumbed to unfaithfulness at the level of action, and one to which AngloCatholics might well have looked, given their enthusiastic rhetoric in defence of its necessity ad esse ecclesiae, was the episcopate. Yet bishops, MacKinnon charged, had willingly and prominently enlisted in the Church of England’s pastoral service to the war effort, not only in the crass forms of public blessing of the means of mass destruction or by putting their office at the service of recruitment campaigns, but also through their failure to subject to stringent moral scrutiny the means of war in their partisan advocacy of what they took to be its just end.35 When in 1937 the Archbishop of Canterbury sounded his ‘Recall to Religion’, MacKinnon complained that the message of the bishops simply confirmed Anglicans in their bourgeois mediocrity and sense of self-satisfaction by commending defence and perpetuation of the structures of traditional religious practices.36 In MacKinnon’s judgement, the captivity of the Church of England’s leadership to habitual forms of pastoral life and its privileged place in the nation stood in the way of a comprehensive declaration of the gospel in a ministry of prophetic proclamation, reconciliation and compassion.37 30

31 32

33 34 35 37

MacKinnon, ‘Recall – to What?’, pp. 51, 55; idem, ‘The Task of the Christendom Group in Time of War’, Christendom 9 (1939), 193–43; 201–06 (201–02, 206); idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, pp. 98–99. Ibid. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 20; idem, ‘Vexilla Regis: Some Reflections for Passiontide, 1939’, Theology 38 (April 1939), pp. 254–59 (258). The Church of God, pp. 20, 25. MacKinnon, ‘The Task of the Christendom Group in Time of War’, p. 141. 36 MacKinnon, ‘Recall – to What?’, p. 55. Ibid., p. 53. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Ecclesiastical Transcendentalism?’, Theology 39 (December 1939), pp. 452–55 (454–55).

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Such failure at the level of action, in MacKinnon’s estimation, reflected a pervasive failure at the level of thought. If bishops failed as teachers of the faith, at the root of such failure lay Anglican theological confusion magnified by ‘the absence of a recognized Anglican confession’ of faith.38 The implications of this failure were to be judged severe. MacKinnon protested that, faced with the rise of massive collectivities of power, Anglicans found themselves bereft of a substantial theological anthropology on the basis of which the absolute claims of totalitarian political and economic institutions could be stoutly resisted.39 The effects on the church’s members of the ‘psychological aggression’ of state propaganda went undetected and hence unchallenged.40 The task of defending Christian moral principles and Christological doctrine, given the failure of the hierarchy, now devolved upon the lay apostolate together with the parochial clergy.41 It was not simply the drift of Anglicans towards a ‘vague untheological Christianity’ which troubled MacKinnon but also the Anglo-Catholic tendency to subordinate theological perception to ‘devotional needs’ and to muster greater zeal for the safeguarding of structures of religious practice than for proclamation of the gospel to the world.42 He rued the self-preoccupation of such religion in its tendency to make human need the measure of God’s saving initiative and to promote a self-regarding piety which reduced God to a sanction for a religious world at the centre of which individual personal well-being might be secured.43 In the kinds of modernism advocated by some Anglo-Catholics, MacKinnon attacked the subordination of dogma to spirituality by which allegiance to the former was made contingent upon reception of the form of life it generated.44 To his mind, the surrender of the ‘givenness’ of dogma invited a romanticism which funded its translation into idioms which served to defuse its challenge to human self-sufficiency.45 He shared the judgement of both Barthians and Neo-Thomists that apologetic had become ‘the mistress, and not the handmaid, of theology’.46 Thus he castigated Anglican 38 39

40

41 42 43 44

45

46

MacKinnon, ‘Some Questions for Anglicans’, p. 109, emphasis MacKinnon’s. MacKinnon, Review of Religion and Social Action, by M. B. Reckitt, p. 149; idem, The Church of God, p. 55. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Christianity and Justice’, Theology 42 (1941), pp 348–54 (352); idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 102. MacKinnon, ‘The Task of the Christendom Group in Time of War’, p. 142. MacKinnon, ‘Some Questions for Anglicans’, pp. 108, 110. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, pp. 28–29. Ibid., pp. 30–31. The problem here is that God becomes ‘the object of an introspectible psychical state which we court for its psychological efficacy as a barrier against individual distress’. As such, we seek God ‘not for himself, but for what fruit the experiencing of him may bring to us in the ordering of our natural lives’ (p. 28). D. M. MacKinnon, ‘“Flesh and Blood Have Not Revealed It Unto Thee”’, Theology 40 (June1940), 426–31 (428). MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 29.

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predilection for the ‘Ersatz’ of Christian Platonism, Incarnationalism and the ‘logic of the sacramental idea’.47 These approaches were indicted for substituting an abstract metaphysics for the gospel, forcing the particular facts of the faith into conformity with certain predetermined ideas about the nature of things.48 Also he exposed a parochial Anglo-Catholic arrogance which refused to acknowledge Anglican indebtedness to the Reformed tradition and treated dismissively the contributions in biblical studies, philosophical theology and dogmatics which its theologians had made, especially at that time, by forcing upon the churches’ attention the urgency for a unity rooted in the truth of the gospel.49 That among Anglo-Catholics so much energy was deflected into a preoccupation with ecclesiastical matters and ‘Church defence’ rather than directed towards the world for which Christ died was for MacKinnon worse than a mere failure of nerve.50 By contrast, he argued that a genuine theological concern for the church must take up the task of conceiving, interpreting and affirming the being of the church existentially in relation to its context in full awareness of ‘the widening cleft’ which had opened up between the church and society.51 It could not suffice in a postChristian world merely to point to the church. Rather, he wrote: We need a pattern of theological activity that is determined by a deep self-consciousness in respect of its end, which is God, of its context, which is a world in agony, and of its practitioners, who are men continually tempted to give finality to the most partial of their insights and the most deeply engrained of their prejudices.52 This act of theological judgement on the failure and sinfulness of the church’s institutions led MacKinnon to conclude that ‘it is a deficient ecclesiology that is at the root of our failure and it is only through the conscious recovery of the doctrine of the Mystical Body that its members will be enabled to accomplish the purposes that are proposed to them’.53 The recovery 47 48 49

50 53

MacKinnon, ‘“Flesh and Blood Have Not Revealed It Unto Thee”’, p. 426. MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 62. MacKinnon, ‘Some Questions for Anglicans’, p. 109. Here he instances C. H. Dodd, P. T. Forsyth, J. S. Whale, H. H. Farmer, John Baillie and above all Karl Barth who ‘has thrust upon us all the problems that must concern us as Christians in their most acute, because most profoundly theological, form’. Failure to grapple with these contributions and to come to an Anglican position on these issues had, he claimed, ended in ‘our present hesitancies, follies and uncharities in the field of Christian co-operation’. 51 52 Ibid., 110. Ibid., 111. Ibid. MacKinnon, Review of Religion in Social Action, by M. B. Reckitt, 150. By 1941, this judgement became expressed as the cri de coeur of a prophetic spirit which still was prepared to see the necessity of the visibility of the church as ‘the absolute guarantee of God’s self-revelation of Christ’ and yet was also moved to pray, ‘Father, if it be possible, let this Church pass from me’. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 99.

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of a theologically informed ecclesiology in MacKinnon’s work proceeds not directly but dialectically through an early appropriation of the doctrine of the Corpus Christi Mysticum, learned first, MacKinnon tells us, from the Dominicans and the Jesuit Émile Mersch54 but then reshaped under the dialectical impact of a doctrine of the church determined by a theologia crucis in the work of Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Michael Ramsey. If his debt to the first tradition reminds us that the church is an object of faith, the second emphasis brings Anglo-Catholic concern for the historical continuity of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church and its institutions under the continuing purchase-hold of its generative event in the cross and resurrection of Christ. At the risk of undoing the tension between the transcendent and the empirical aspects which arises within this dialectic, we turn first to distinguish several aspects of MacKinnon’s initial attraction to a transcendental ecclesiology. MacKinnon’s response to the deficient Anglican ecclesiology of his day was to insist on the recovery of a witness to the intrinsic nature of the church.55 To begin with, MacKinnon asserted that each Christian must recover the vision of ‘the mystery of the Church, of the Lord’s Body, of the Mystic Christ’ of which by baptism he or she had been made a member.56 This vision is rooted not in ‘the feeling-tone of experience’ but in the ontology of the Catholic faith, the indicative, existential proclamation of the metaphysical truths of its dogma.57 This dogma fixes attention on the triune God and God’s action on behalf of, and in relationship with, God’s creatures. Thus, to the eye of faith, an exhibition of the church as the Mystical Body of Christ proclaims the existence of God.58 That is, the church by its very existence proclaims God’s sovereignty and God’s judgement which is the action of divine redemption. But, wary of a starkly triumphalist interpretation of such claims, he cautions that ‘if the Church is the Mystical Christ, its throne today is assuredly Calvary’.59 By that he meant that it was not only the highest vocation of the church to share in the passion of Christ but that the passion of the church itself was the necessary condition for the return of Christendom.60 Like Christ, the church had come to its ‘hour’, the hour of martyrdom which was both the product of Christian failure and an opportunity to be seized and made the occasion of the accomplishment of the redemptive purpose of Christ, whose Body the church is.61 This rather rhetorical argument was sharpened in MacKinnon’s 1939 article, ‘Vexilla Regis’.62 The church in coming to its hour must reckon with the 54

55 56 59 62

MacKinnon, ‘Recall – to What?’, p. 56, adding significantly that ‘we see the doctrine enshrined in all its fullness in our own Eucharistic Office’. MacKinnon, ‘The Task of the Christendom Group in Time of War’, p. 205. 57 58 MacKinnon, ‘Recall – to What?’, p. 52. Ibid., pp. 52–53. Ibid., p. 51. 60 61 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 55, 52. Ibid., p. 56. MacKinnon, ‘Vexilla Regis: Some Reflections for Passiontide, 1939’, pp. 254–59.

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particularity of Christ’s hour, that act of God performed in flesh and blood which is ‘of its nature incapable of repetition’.63 Yet that deed is ‘the pattern of action pre-eminently proposed to those who by baptism are made members of his Body, and who, by participation in the life of that Body, share in his relation to the Father’.64 While insisting on the unique redemptive causality of Christ’s act, MacKinnon suggested that the church’s marturia, the active participation in Christ’s passion by all who accept the fullness of the church’s vocation, has its own analogous redemptive causality.65 Appealing to the Dominican theologian Humbert Clérissac’s claim that the mystery of the church resides in the equation and convertibility of the terms Christ and church, MacKinnon claimed that universal redemption in the concrete actuality of historical situations would be brought to fruition through the church which, in turn, would find its own redemption in the completion of that task.66 Thus, as those in the divine society who have been bought with a price, the baptized are ‘straitened and constrained’ until the fullness of Christ’s baptism is accomplished in them.67 In baptism which roots Christians in the eternity of Christ’s response to the Father, as MacKinnon would later write, we take down into Christ ‘the whole present, rent fabric of which we by natural birth are part’.68 The vocation held out to the church’s members by virtue of their baptism is their own crucifixion, the drinking of ‘the chalice of the Messianic woe’, a vocation which is entirely dependent upon Christ’s victory and yet manifests ‘in conformity with the ordinance of our redemption’ the truth of God.69 It is a vocation that the members of the church can carry out only insofar as they are dead to self and alive to Christ, ‘whose alone is the victory over the powers of darkness’.70 Although in MacKinnon’s interpretation of the analogy (identity-in-difference) between Christ and the church derived from his Roman Catholic sources, the stress on identity predominates at the level of rhetoric; the movement of his own thought terminates in his emphasis on the Christus solus. In other early writings, MacKinnon consistently affirmed that the church is the unique divine society and that its presence in and to the world is the condition of the world’s restoration.71 In so doing he underscored the transcendent character of the church and the independence of its members from the relativities of their social context.72 ‘The Church’, he wrote, ‘is the true 63 66

67 68

69 71 72

64 65 Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid. Ibid., p. 257, alluding to Humbert Clérissac, The Mystery of the Church (preface by Jacques Maritain: London: Sheed and Ward, 1937). MacKinnon is indebted here especially to the second chapter, ‘Christ in the Church and the Church in Christ’. Ibid. MacKinnon, ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’, Blackfriars 23 (September 1942), pp. 353–58 (357). 70 Ibid., 258. Ibid., 259. MacKinnon, ‘The Task of the Christendom Group in Time of War’, p. 204. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘No Way Back: Some Principles of Catholic Social Judgment Restated’, Christendom 9 (1939), pp. 292–98 (296).

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fellowship of reconciliation. Her social vocation is to create the condition of the possibility of a natural order, and, through grace, to aid men to maintain a vision of themselves as they are’.73 The argument is compressed here, but MacKinnon’s point is that if the church is the mediator of that grace which preserves and perfects nature, the church’s presence and ministry within society extends that preserving and perfecting power to the social order in which it is placed. Its vocation to the work of charity and reconciliation must, however, follow the way of Christ to the cross: The Church can only reveal herself to suffering mankind as indeed his Body and their Peace, if she asks no more than to hang beside him. The detachment, that men look for in the Church, is not insensibility to pain, but rather absolute devotion to God, that is a condition of her bearing witness unto the truth. In a tortured world men look, and ask – Where? Whither? Why? Only the Church of Christ can answer. For only she, in virtue of her union with her Lord, can know what is in men, and of what stuff they are.74 Somewhat optimistically, MacKinnon suggested that a church bold enough to declare its transcendence of the dying order of Christendom, to proclaim the judgement and mercy of God at work in itself and in the world, might well draw back to itself the masses.75 But if the affirmation of the church as the mystical Body of Christ is the Christian’s hope, it is also the Christian’s problem.76 If its action is to be understood primarily as passion, what form is that action to take? MacKinnon underscored the call to a prophetic detachment while yet appreciating the already-existing commitments of individual believers to a vocation to embody the Christian faith, however imperfectly, in the life of the marketplace.77 He was alive to the fact that the answer to the problem of Christian moral agency posed here cannot be spelled out in advance. If it could be said formally that ‘the faith of the Church is the principle of our judgement and our membership is the spring of all action’, MacKinnon still found it necessary to reckon with the irreducible diversity of moral response in the church, even among adherents of the Christendom Group appealing equally to the same principles in the face of such specific problems as war itself.78 There is here, then, only

73 76 77

78

74 75 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 297–98. Ibid., 297. MacKinnon, ‘The Task of the Christendom Group in Time of War’, p. 203. Ibid., pp. 204–205. For a detailed examination of the impact of this aspect of the Corpus Christi Mysticum ecclesiology on the relation of church and state and the shape of Christian social action in the context of post-Allende Chile, see now William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). Ibid., pp. 140, 206.

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the quite formal injunction to strive for the realization of a new dimension of Christian life in which ‘the unity of faith with the practice it inspires’ is exhibited in the Mystical Body.79 The growing awareness that there was no direct move available from Christian doctrinal principles to specific forms of moral action surfaced explicitly in MacKinnon’s mid-war query, ‘Is there such a thing as meaningful, socially transformative Christian action, issuing from a truly “incarnating” life of prayer?’80 The gap between the perfect society (societas perfecta) and a society in the throes of upheaval, between the transcendent unity of the Mystical Body and the disunity of the body politic, is apparently too broad to span. At this point MacKinnon’s refusal to overlook the real weakness of the church disclosed in its war-time performance destabilizes the tendency of this Mystical Body ecclesiology towards over-determination by the received notion ‘extension of the Incarnation’. In his 1940 Signpost Tracts, MacKinnon outlined a more substantial doctrine of the church which for all its intended positivity is nonetheless primarily indirect in its approach. The shift in emphasis here marks the decision to treat both the Incarnation and the church under the focal concept of the gospel. Basic to this approach is the claim that ‘the Church can only be properly understood as an evangelical fact, as an aspect of the Gospel’.81 In concert with Hoskyns and Ramsey before him, MacKinnon’s understanding of the gospel is precisely focused; it is ‘simply Jesus crucified and attested Son of God by his rising from the dead’.82 In The Church of God he staked out his approach accordingly: a proper understanding of the church depends on an understanding of the Christ; a proper understanding of the Christ entails an understanding of the church because it is the Body of Christ.83 Consequently, he argued, ‘in discussing the doctrine of the Church, if our theological insight is sharp enough, we shall find ourselves thrust back on the question of the person of Jesus, of the revelation that he brought, or rather the revelation that he himself was in his life and above all in his Passion, as that is made intelligible by the resurrection that followed it’.84 79

80

81 83 84

D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Surveys: Christian Social Thought’, Theology 38 (May 1939), pp. 378–82 (378). D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Survey of Devotional Books’, Theology 45 (August 1942), pp. 107–10 (110). The failure of the Christendom Group to draft and implement a specific programme of social action on the basis of their adherence to Christian dogma has been explored in E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England 1770–1970: A Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 365–67. MacKinnon’s recognition that an account of moral agency was far from straightforward and that it must be framed in terms of the sovereignty of the gospel would remain a constant preoccupation of his theological ethics. 82 MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 20. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 11. See also idem, God the Living and the True, pp. 63–64. MacKinnon, The Church of God, pp. 36–37. MacKinnon cites Hoskyns’ famous dictum, ‘For the Catholic Christian, ‘Quid videtur de Ecclesia, What think ye of the Church?’ is not merely as pertinent a question as ‘Quid videtur de Christo, What think

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MacKinnon cautions that this gospel is something ‘creative and unmanageable’ and warns the theologian against any systematic reduction of it to something other than itself.85 The gospel enshrines ‘savage paradoxes’ which can neither be resolved nor domesticated within the life of the church itself.86 Only a person who has been broken by the ‘shattering paradox of the New Testament revelation which the Church attests’ comes to see that ‘the meaning of the Church is the death and resurrection of Jesus’ and that ‘the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus is the new Israel that is constituted thereby’.87 This dialectical understanding of the gospel controls MacKinnon’s exposition of the relationship which Christ has brought into being with the church and with the world. Taking up the notion of the church as extension of the Incarnation against this background, he allows that reflection on the one mystery can illuminate the other but only if within this analogy the Incarnation always retains priority.88 The direction here is always first backward-looking to the Incarnation construed in the light of the cross on which the church depends for its being and to which in its actuality it must point.89 The church, then, belongs to the revelation of God, the divine initiative by which the redemption of humankind is affirmed and effected, and cannot be understood apart from it. In spelling out the nature of that belonging, MacKinnon’s account first diverts our gaze away from the church towards the event on which all aspects of its life are centred. ‘Any account of the Church’, MacKinnon asserts, ‘must begin with the exposition of that to which the Church bears witness and that which in a measure she makes accessible to humankind – to wit, the mercy of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ’.90 MacKinnon’s account of the event of the cross of Christ sketches aspects of its epistemological, ontological and moral effect under the double theme of judgement and mercy, death and resurrection. To look to the cross is to discover there knowledge of God and of humankind which is ‘catastrophic’ in its impact.91 The whole thrust of MacKinnon’s outline of the gospel in God the Living and the True is that we come to know God’s being, however dimly, through God’s acts; that is, that through the work of the Son in redemption we are granted knowledge of God in relation to God’s creatures and, in a measure, of God in se.92

85 88 91

ye of the Christ?’: it is but the same question differently formulated’, indicating that his own work here is but a comment on that fundamental insight by which ecclesiological discussion is governed by a redemption-oriented Christology (pp.76–77). See Hoskyns, ‘The Christ of the Synoptic Gospels’, p. 153. MacKinnon’s debt to Hoskyns for the critique of liberal Protestantism and catholic Modernism, the narrative direction of the gospel as literary form and such ‘governing ideas’ of the gospel as the Kingdom of God, the humiliation of Christ, and the life of Christian discipleship as via crucis is throughout this work extensive. 86 87 MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 19. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 33. 89 90 Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Ibid., p. 40. 92 MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 23. Ibid., pp. 82–83.

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Indeed, ‘there can be no way from man to God unless there has been first set in the wilderness a way from God to man’.93 That we are dependent upon God for our very knowledge of God reveals our impotence and thrusts upon us the demand for a metanoia, the reordering of our entire outlook on life, by which any self-sufficient, naturalistic ‘inversion of the metaphysical intelligence upon itself’ together with its consequent ‘denial of the horizon’, the idolatrous refusal to understand humanity as radically subject to limits, is condemned.94 The unique particularity of the Incarnation requires that our questions about God and humankind and the relation between them be transcribed into its terms.95 In so doing, MacKinnon noted, there is disclosed in this event the dignity of the creature whom God comes to redeem. But in humankind’s tragic rejection of the one in whom God purposed to bring that redemption to fruition there is also laid bare the bankruptcy of all human cultural and religious achievement, the inversion of human values and our utter dependence upon God for our very being.96 The Incarnation, this ‘attack’ of God upon humankind in judgement and mercy, is construed not as the crowning of the whole course of human development but rather as the fundamental interruption and rejection of its direction.97 The cross of Christ is thus at once God’s act of judgment in which a false estimate of humankind and its reflection in the social and political institutions it has sponsored are exposed and God’s sovereign declaration of mercy and acceptance.98 It is also the refurbishing of human rationality through what can only look like its total eclipse in ‘dementia’.99 Yet God’s acts are not merely God’s communication of knowledge of God, but mighty acts of power, the source of life by which our movement from death to life is brought to effect.100 The act of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is both our redemption and the restoration of our inheritance.101 They are won through Christ’s realization of the vocation of Israel in that perfect obedience by which he attested the sovereignty of God, an obedience even to the point of death on a cross, which achieves our forgiveness and reconciliation with God.102 93 95

96 97 98 99

100

94 Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., pp. 23, 74. Ibid., p. 45; also, p. 63: ‘Christian theology is a theologia crucis simply insofar as it is the operation whereby the human intelligence adjusts its own appreciation of the human situation in the light of the impact upon it of the divine Word’. Ibid., pp. 22, 86–87. Ibid., pp. 53–54; also, idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 96. Ibid., pp. 22–24, 40, 43. Ibid., 14. The background of the remark is the attraction to Kierkegaardian themes among members of the Christendom Group and in the form of the paradoxical recasting of the Latin tag, Quem Deus vult salvare prius dementat, derived from Victor White’s review of the translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals. See Victor White, ‘Kierkegaard’s Journals’, Blackfriars 20 (November 1939), pp. 797–810 (810). 101 102 Ibid., pp. 19, 63. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., pp. 42–43.

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The Incarnation must be construed first, then, in historical terms. In looking back to Jesus of Nazareth, MacKinnon notes, one looks to a particular stretch of human life datable to a certain time and set within a particular culture and place – the Galilee, Judea and Jerusalem of the gospel narratives.103 This life is exposed and vulnerable to investigation by the tools of historical criticism. Yet to speak of Jesus as one sent, MacKinnon argues, is necessarily to ask whence he came and by whom he was sent, questions which direct our thoughts from Jesus to God and the purposes of God in sending him.104 However Christocentric MacKinnon’s thought is, it is always bounded by this theocentric orientation. Noting that these questions of the ultimate origin of the Christ, apart from the revelation of God, are entirely beyond the theologian’s ken, MacKinnon argues that she or he, like that centurion of the Synoptic Gospels, can only stand at the foot of the cross and there discern by the gift of faith the hidden presence of God in the lifeless, broken form hanging upon it.105 There in that extremity one comes face to face with the irruptive and disruptive impact of the Incarnation, the intersection ab extra of time by eternity, history by meta-history, the ‘conditions of a distinctively human existence’ by the act of God.106 That is, patently metaphysical questions are thrust upon the one who is given to see in the death of Christ the redemptive act of the living God. Bringing the hidden character of God’s self-manifestation in judgement and mercy in the cross of Christ to bear on the ecclesial mystery, MacKinnon claims that ‘it is the mission of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, to be his instrument for the extension of that irruptive and disruptive activity that was his coming’.107 The church, too, must be considered under a double aspect. It is but one historical institution among many and yet also a mystery of faith because the Christian believes that in it the saving power of God is at work.108 The church’s being as extension of the Incarnation is to be understood not only in terms of origin from, but also as judgement under, the cross and resurrection of Christ. MacKinnon first underlines that the church comes into, and is maintained in, existence not by the will of its members but by

103 104

105

106

107 108

MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 16. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 15; idem, The Church of God, pp. 33–34. MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 38. See also idem, ‘No Way Back’, p. 297; and idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 115. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, pp. 15–16, 53–54; idem, The Church of God, p. 17. Ibid., p. 53. MacKinnon, The Church of God, pp. 17–18. Thus the church can be said to be within history and yet standing outside it, pointing humankind to the events which give history its meaning and free it from frustration (p. 90).

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the sovereign act of God in the cross of Christ.109 The church is the fruit of Christ’s victory; Christians are the fruit of the tree of the cross to whom the proclamation of that redemptive event is entrusted.110 They are incorporated by baptism into the Body of Christ to acknowledge God’s sovereignty and to bear witness to God’s reign, ‘even as Christ attested it in the dereliction of Calvary’.111 MacKinnon goes on: But though in him we are dead to the world, yet still in ourselves are we intensely alive to its attraction. It is not a paradox that the Church, which in herself is to bear witness unto the Truth of God among the nations, is ever thrust back upon the admission of the Passion as alone the attestation of his sovereignty. Rather . . . the whole character of the life of its members is infected by the tension of being at once within Christ and without, at once of him and utterly dependent upon him. For the Church is sent by Christ to witness to Christ, and, in the achievement of his work, he, who is in his Church, is there outside her in his fullness, to be attested by her as other than herself.112 MacKinnon points out that an understanding of the relationship between Christ and the church is beset by the problem of how to interpret the conjunction ‘as’ in the Johannine warrant for its mission: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’.113 His interpretation of the analogy between Christ’s being and mission and that of the church now begins to highlight the greater difference by which that identity must be qualified. His insistence on the church’s being as contingent, utterly dependent on the saving act of God in Christ, and his characterization of the ongoing tension between grace and nature in the life of the church and of each Christian drive this point home. MacKinnon was nervous about the tendency of some Anglo-Catholics to underplay the gravity of sin in construing the relation between nature and grace and thereby underestimating, as he put it, the work which gratia sanans has to do.114 In this regard he ruled out any approach which might see in grace the perfection of nature as ‘icing might be said to be the perfection of a cake’. Grace presupposes nature but, he countered, sin also presupposes nature and that nature has become spoliatus gratuitis and vulneratus in naturalibus, distorted by sin almost beyond recognition.115 Grace

109 113 114 115

110 111 112 Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 33, with reference to John 20.21. MacKinnon, ‘“Flesh and Blood Have Not Revealed It Unto Thee”’, p. 429. MacKinnon, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 89; see also idem, ‘Christianity and Justice’, Theology 42 (June 1941), pp. 348–54 (352). Oliver Quick drew attention to the use of this formula by some of the young Anglo-Catholics of the 1940s as a point of contact by which a reconciliation between contemporary Protestant and traditional Catholic anthropological theories might eventually be effected. See Oliver C. Quick,

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struggles with nature in an eschatological conflict which remains unresolved even in the communion of the church.116 MacKinnon argues that the natural is not denied in the work of its restoration by supernature, ‘only “crucified with him that it may also be glorified together with him”’.117 The nature and extent of this struggle is brought out in his treatment of the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Baptism, he writes, is a participation in the death of Christ which engenders a change in a person’s innermost nature.118 It is indeed the act in which the members of the church have made the act of Christ’s cross their very own.119 Through it individual Christians have been knit together into the new Israel, the people of God.120 They have been enmeshed into the sweep of redemptive history which is ‘more than history’ and thereby extend the unique act on which they are utterly dependent.121 Baptism is death to sin, the act by which the whole of our life is set within the context of the movement to life through death.122 Baptism, as incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ, ensures that in the order of being Christians are by grace adopted children of God in Christ and, as such, the objects of that mutual love which the Father and Son eternally bear for each other, namely the Holy Spirit.123 However, the church of which we are made members in baptism is not an ‘ideal’ church but one whose members are sinners who fall short of the glory of God.124 Baptism thus sets up within each Christian the tension between nature and grace. As a result, ‘the tug of the world upon the individual members of Christ’s Body, the pressure of its assumptions and standards upon his judgment, the lure of some clear-cut, naturalistic substitute for the Christian theology of the cross, the absorption in a multiplicity of spiritual exercises’ ensure that ‘tension, strain and uncertainty are embedded in the very heart of the Christian life’.125 For this reason, MacKinnon argues, the authority of the church directs us continually to that centre point where in the Eucharistic oblation we are thrust back on the perfect obedience of Christ displayed in his cross. MacKinnon contended that the taint of sin upon our obedience, witness and faith thwarts the vocation of the church to realize through its life the sovereign reign of God and therefore it is thrust back on the Eucharist in

116

117 120 122

123 124

The Gospel of the New World: A Study in the Christian Doctrine of the Atonement (London: Nisbet, 1944), p. 36. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 20; and idem, ‘The Task of the Christendom Group in Time of War’, p. 202. 118 119 Ibid., p. 20. MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 21. Ibid., p. 29. 121 Ibid., p. 69. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 63–64. MacKinnon, The Church of God, 75. The kind of sentimentality that often cloaks baptism is ruled out for, as MacKinnon puts it, Christians are incorporated by the opus operatum of baptism ‘into Christ’s very nothingness’. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 103. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, pp. 78–79. 125 MacKinnon, The Church of God, pp. 82–83. Ibid., p. 78.

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which Christ’s perfect fulfilment of that vocation is attested.126 The Eucharist is situated at the very centre of the gospel by virtue of its character as the anamnesis of the sacrifice of the death of Christ in which our attention is riveted on the cross.127 There the assembled baptized are drawn not only into the locus of Christ’s self-offering but into that very offering itself.128 It is in the Eucharist that the church formally adheres to Christ’s sacrifice and makes its own that act which he alone could perform.129 As an attestation of the resurrection the Eucharist grants a vision of the restoration of the created order through the use of its elements as sacramental instruments of a divine movement towards humanity and of a corresponding human movement towards God thereby made possible.130 Again MacKinnon reiterates that one looks first to the gospel, then to its sacraments and finally outward to the world whose sacramental character is disclosed therein. Indeed, he claims that all Christian activity is related to the oblation of the Eucharist.131 The sacramental relationship of Christ and the church again must be construed in terms of the fundamental priority of Christ’s act: the condition of the extension of the work of redemption in the church. Each sacrament, MacKinnon acknowledged, points to Christ who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and in all of them his activity is embodied such that the entire life of the Christian is effectively relocated within the context of his movement to life through death.132 MacKinnon’s exposition of the church’s ministry of word and sacrament lays strong emphasis on its character as witness, expressed in a strikingly Barthian idiom.133 The church extends the Incarnation in its proclamation in word and deed and in its celebration of the sacraments by attesting, bearing witness to and acclaiming the death and resurrection of Christ. Here, too, the church diverts the attention of its hearers away from itself to the Incarnation. Of the work of preaching in the church MacKinnon claims that its task is to lay out the ‘terrible tale’ of the gospel with all its catastrophic implications for human self-sufficiency so as to bring its hearers to the foot of the cross. But there the oblation of Christ’s obedient self-offering is set out sacramentally in the Eucharist so that the encounter may be for mercy and not judgement alone.134 MacKinnon also re-construes apologetics by annexing it to this same task. If the church through its life and ministry exists to refer human conflicts to the moment in history at which their ultimate resolution can be found, locating human aspirations and failures within the Christ-drama, its apologetic must draw humanity’s sense of frustration and solitude under the all-embracing compassion of the cross.135 Apologetics, 126 130 133

134

127 128 129 Ibid., pp. 67–70. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 71. 131 132 Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., pp. 74–75. For the extensive use of the vocabulary of attestation and witness see The Church of God, pp. 29–30, 33, 39, 42, 44–45, 57, 87, 90. 135 Ibid., p. 80. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, pp. 55–56.

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then, is an intrusive, confrontational task, bringing humankind face to face with God in Christ, presenting to them their judge and redeemer. It is a task analogous in its own way to the Incarnation, MacKinnon claims, the prolongation, as it were, of that moment in which history was intersected by meta-history.136 Apologetics, in concert with all aspects of the church’s theology, is ordered to the renewal of the ‘Christ-impact’ in the midst of the whole range of human concerns.137 Thus MacKinnon accounts for the gospel rhythm which governs all aspects of the church’s life, that movement by which Christians are continually drawn to the centre and simultaneously impelled outwards which he characterizes as the peace of Christ, given not as the world gives, but in the cross which thrusts upon believers ultimate questions and confronts them with the restless, onward movement of Christ’s obedience.138 Consequently, the church’s members in a co-ordinate exercise of intellect and will move continuously under impulse of the Incarnation and its re-presentation in word and sacrament from scrutiny to practical action and back to scrutiny again.139 In all aspects of its life, thought and mission, the church exists to acknowledge and attest the divine sovereignty as attested by Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, in whom the members of the church are incorporate.140 In Christ and therefore as filii et filiae in Filio, the baptized live in the ambit of hope, looking back to the accomplishment of salvation in the death of Christ and forward to the revelation of the Son of Man in glory.141 The ecclesial realm is to extend this hope since ‘the Church is the hope of the world, for the New Israel, the Body of Christ, is herself the good news that she brings’.142 If Christian life is set in restless motion by ‘the rigid conformity of the individual to the inexorable demand of a final and an absolute revelation’,143 how does it relate to the external structures and practices of the church? First, MacKinnon observed that the New Testament knows nothing of an antithesis between spiritual and institutional religion.144 Christian life is necessarily ecclesial life, and the external structures mark out the context within which the life of the baptized is to be lived. Second, the church’s external organization is the necessary instrument of its ‘visible separateness’, pointing to the flesh of Christ as the hope of the world’s restoration.145 136 138

139 140 143

137 Ibid., pp. 58–59. Ibid., p. 62. MacKinnon, The Church of God, pp. 46, 79, 104. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p.109, where the peace of Christ is said to take the form of a restless, urgent seeking of God’s will and is tied to the Eucharist whose sacramental elements are said to indicate its nature. MacKinnon was highly suspicious of accounts of peace, Augustan or Constantinian, which privileged its providential character and in so doing masked the ruthless and violent means by which such ‘peace’ was achieved, especially to the degree that the church had benefited from them. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 63. 141 142 MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 45. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., pp. 92–93. 144 145 Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., pp. 56–57.

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It attests the character of Christianity as ‘an evangelical, biblical way of salvation’.146 The episcopate, the sacraments and the creeds in their respective ways belong to the sign-character of the church, tying it to the flesh of Jesus.147 The church’s dogma exercises a restraining function by safeguarding the gospel of the mercy of God from the speculative irresponsibilities of its theologians and from the idiosyncrasies of its members, and should elicit from the faithful a posture of humility.148 Its bishops fulfil the apostolic function as agents of unity by which individual churches are bound to each other and to the death and resurrection of Jesus by which the New Israel was constituted.149 Episcopate, sacraments and creeds are in their respective ways ‘the very lashing of the Church herself to her historical moorings’, the forms of recognition that ‘the whole Church is an organ of the Gospel’.150 The gospel thus enfolds originating event and perpetuating institution. The external organization of the church, the differentia which manifest its givenness, thus extends the Incarnation, ‘for the Church attests the ultimate demand, of which the coming of Christ in the flesh was the occasion, and by her presence brings that demand into relation with the whole anguish of today’.151 Again, relying heavily on Ramsey and Hoskyns here, MacKinnon reiterated that the essential value of these forms lies in their role of pointing both the church and the world back to ‘the moment when the Word of God was uttered upon the Cross’.152 The ecclesiology reflected in the writings of the period 1938–1945 holds together in dialogical polarity a rich mixture of elements from two distinct theological traditions. On the one hand, the primary ontological claims of the Mystical Body of Christ doctrine are sustained, albeit in cryptic and allusive fashion. Thus MacKinnon acknowledged the new ecclesial reality which comes into and is sustained in being, to use the scholastic terms, de Trinitate, in Christo and ex hominibus.153 On the other hand, this ecclesial ontology in all its relations is inscribed within, and determined by, the dramatic movement of a rather apocalyptic theology of the cross. That is, the being, thought and action of the church are set in restless motion by God’s redemptive act in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here the generative and perpetuating impact of this event on the church points up 146 150 153

147 148 149 Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., pp. 49–50, 55. Ibid., p 52. 151 152 Ibid., pp. 54–55. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 56. MacKinnon brings this ecclesiology into sustained focus in The Church of God, pp. 100–104. This tradition, it must be noted, embraced the soteriological direction in which MacKinnon was moving. Émile Mersch distinguished two currents within the orthodox tradition of conceiving the Mystical Body, one which was characterized by an emphasis on a moral order, the redemptive work of Christ and our complete dependence on him and another to which he turned in his own historical exposition of the theme which accentuated the real ontological union of Christians in Christ with the Triune God. See his Le Corps mystique du Christ: Études de théologie historique (Louvain: Museum Lessianum, 1933), pp. xxiii–xxv.

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the eschatological character of its existence. It lives, acts and thinks between the humiliation of the event of the cross and the promise of ultimate glorification. In the interim, its life is unremittingly subject to the disruptive and transformative impact of the death and resurrection of Christ through the action of the liturgy, particularly its proclamation of the word and celebration of the sacraments.154 In this action the dialectic between nature and grace, reason and revelation, thought and praxis, security and vulnerability, set in motion by the cross, is sustained. The purchase-hold of the cross on the church’s existence means that Christian life is repeatedly ‘broken’ at the foot of the cross, that is, subjected to judgement and redeemed in mercy.155 In the church and in the life of each member, MacKinnon claimed, the drama between Jesus and Caiaphas, Pilate and Iscariot is being played out.156 It is this ceaseless, inexhaustible impact of the cross and resurrection, judgement and mercy, which rules out any totalizing synthesis, any premature ecclesial realization of the eschaton and any triumphalist approach to structures, office and ministry in construing the church’s being, thought and action.157 The church which lives from and within the ‘Christ-drama’ is always subject to the centripetal and centrifugal power of the cross, and it is only as the church allows itself to be ‘mastered’ by that gospel of God that it can begin to enter upon fulfilment of its task.158 MacKinnon’s ecclesiological achievement here is the dialectical insertion of ecclesial reflection on the church into the biblical and liturgical framework of the way of the cross, the movement to life through death. 154

155

156 157

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At Malvern MacKinnon’s rather spare formulation of this dynamism was couched in language echoing the Reformation heritage of Anglicanism: ‘in every place where Christian men and women gather to hear the word of God and to make the oblation of the Passion of Christ in the Eucharist’. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 107. For the concept of ‘brokenness’ as he sketched it in a 1953 broadcast see D. M. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’, in The Resurrection: A Dialogue Arising from Broadcasts by G. W. H. Lampe and D. M. MacKinnon (ed. W. Purcell; London: A. R. Mowbray, 1966), p. 69: ‘We know . . . what it is to be broken; to shed, at least, some of the illusions we have about ourselves, and we know that these moments can be a kind of death; a death, too, that we must accept: for only as we accept it, as we go down into it, can we find renewal, or rather, be overtaken by the renewing hand of God’. MacKinnon, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 100. The possibility of a totalizing synthesis is ruled out on realist epistemological grounds. The temporally conditioned, fragmentary character of human cognition precludes the availability of a locus from which to see the totalizing vision. Moreover, MacKinnon argued that it was of the nature of sin in the form of ‘Titanism’ to usurp the divine task of synthesis, God’s eschatological act, disclosed in the resurrection, of weaving together the limited cognitive and moral responses of our lives. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, pp. 92–93, 97; and idem, ‘Some Reflections on the Summer School, 1945’, Christendom 14 (December 1945), pp. 107–11 (111). MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on the Summer School, 1945’, p. 111.

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In his exposition of this dramatic ecclesiology MacKinnon lets a variety of voices speak in his conviction that the most important issues are raised in the dialogue between neo-Thomist and Barthian exponents.159 As he noted at Malvern, his own ‘exposition-interest’ in exploring the issues raised in this debate ran both ways, not so as to achieve a victory on one side or the other but to allow the most pressing issues to come to the fore and receive clarification.160 With Aquinas he was prepared to maintain the ‘ultimacy of ontology’, recognizing that the achievement of theology through use of the analogy of being passes first along the via negativa by which the radical discontinuity between God and humanity and the asymmetrical character or ‘fundamental lopsidedness’ of their relation are maintained.161 At the same time MacKinnon applauded the ‘signal service’ of Barth in ‘his repeated insistence that all comprehension of God as creator is posterior to, and to some extent, determined by our knowledge of him as redeemer’.162 Analogia entis still attracts MacKinnon at this stage but is itself drawn into the gravitational pull of the analogia Christi. In line with this, by drawing the doctrine of the church into the ambit of the cross, MacKinnon reversed the poles of the Anglo-Catholic incarnationalist account, allowing his soteriology to determine his Christology, thus supplanting a theandric construal of the nature of the church in favour of a redemptive Christomorphism.163 His argument is that an ecclesiology cannot simply be read off the Nicene Christological dogma of the Incarnation but must be constructed on the basis of God’s act of redemption in the cross. The direction, then, in MacKinnon’s early ecclesiology may be said to run from a unitive, ontological construal of the Pauline image of the Body of Christ towards the more dialectical Synoptic portrait of the company of the disciples of Jesus, the New Israel, in which Jesus, though having decisively called his followers to be with him, yet stands over against them as their judge and accomplishes his redemptive work for them in isolation from them.164 159

160 163

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MacKinnon, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 83, instancing in particular the relation of the doctrines of creation and redemption. 161 162 Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 90. MacKinnon took exception to the claim that this approach was not ‘Catholic’. See idem, The Church of God, p. 26: ‘When Liberal theologians spoke of Christianity as “Incarnationalist,” or suggested that, whereas the central emphasis of Protestantism rested on the Atonement, that of Catholicism rested on the Incarnation, they failed to realise how utterly they were misrepresenting the primitive Catholic Gospel’. However, at Malvern, it was to the example of P. T. Forsyth that MacKinnon appealed for the conviction that ‘if we are wise, we will derive our Christology from our soteriology and not vice versa’ since ‘the cross reveals the final secret of the relation of man and God’. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 114. See P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), pp. 98–100. This reflects the decisive impact of Hoskyns’ thinking on MacKinnon’s doctrine. Hoskyns’ ecclesiology, insofar as it is determined by the Synoptic Tradition, portrays

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Within the former account, the direction of MacKinnon’s interpretation of the analogy between Christ and the church runs from strong initial emphasis on identity to a more pronounced stress on difference. Thus MacKinnon’s account lays greater emphasis on the church as object of grace than as its mediatorial subject. There is also a studied ambiguity about his repeated claim that the church makes the grace of God accessible ‘in a measure’, a claim which is not clarified and which reflects MacKinnon’s nervousness in the face of theologies of the ecclesial mediation of salvation which in any way occlude or supplant Christ’s sovereignty as saviour of, within and through his church, or underplay that aspect of the character of grace which breaks in upon its members as contradiction. The church’s agency in the ministry of the word and sacraments is here clearly secondary and derivative for MacKinnon understands it to point to and embody the ministry of Christ by virtue of that activity of the Holy Spirit which takes the things of Christ and shows them to the church.165 Again, the movement of MacKinnon’s thought is towards the conformity of the church to the character of its Lord whose sovereignty is displayed paradoxically in his death on a cross. Situating this ecclesiology against a broader canvas, one might say that its direction is from emphasis on the totus Christus towards a more differentiated account of the unity of caput et membra, from an emphasis on the whole ecclesial body to a focus on the individual life of discipleship-in-community in obedience to its Lord. Yet the dialectic retains its hold on the former pole and is never resolved. MacKinnon does not relinquish his claim that there is brought into effect at the cross an ontological, epistemological and moral relationship with God in Christ by which our being, our words and deeds are put into contact, in judgement and mercy, with the being and act of the Triune God. The full import of that dialectic for Anglican ecclesiology came into focus in MacKinnon’s address at Malvern in which he queried in an overtly Barthian idiom ‘whether Anglican apologists are brave enough to see that the only apologetic which has the least hope of convincing these, who are considering the Christian claim of the necessity of the Church, is one which

165

the church as the body of the disciples of Jesus who do not immediately participate in the liberty won by Christ through his death and resurrection but ‘remain in the world and succeed to his former position’. Following in Christ’s footsteps, the disciples endure persecution and humiliation and must take up their cross and be willing to die. Ecclesial discipleship, Hoskyns argues, is made both intelligible and tolerable by the eschatological promise, the coming of Christ at the end of the age, visibly and in glory, in which the liberty of Christ will become the full possession of his own. The Eucharist is the anticipatory act in and by which the company of disciples participate proleptically in that final reunion with Christ. See Hoskyns, ‘The Christ of the Synoptic Gospels’, pp. 174, 176. MacKinnon, The Church of God, p. 45.

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will openly admit that the Church is a question and a scandal’.166 The church is the extension of the Incarnation in the sense that it continually renews ‘every ultimate tension of human life that the Incarnation actualized and made manifest’.167 It finds the pattern of its achievement in that of its Lord. It provides no refuge from ‘the insecurities and questionings that must be set by a specifically human existence’.168 The implications of this doctrine of the church for its collective and individual social action are finally made clear: ‘Christian action begins here and now in our present espousal of Christ’s hiddenness, our willing endurance of his nothingness’.169 MacKinnon appeals for a compassion arising out of the recognition of the church’s impotence and a revolt against the burden of that ambivalent history in which the church is enmeshed.170 While the church is objectively a sign, a manifestation of the Incarnation, it is nonetheless a sign suffused with ambiguity, a sign perceptible only to faith in the midst of the risk-fraught contingencies of the world to which it is sent. It has already been observed that MacKinnon does not pause sufficiently to argue his case that the church’s thinking and acting must be brought into conformity with its true character revealed in the cross of Christ. Thus, to a considerable extent in the post-war years his writings turn to a deep probing of not only the intelligibility and communicability of the claims asserted here, especially those touching the relation of the temporal and the eternal and the moral and the transcendent which are at the heart of his understanding of the cross and resurrection of Jesus, but also the issue of their truth. Though the church slips out of primary focus as MacKinnon adopts his ‘borderlands’ perspective in order to explore these questions, it is nonetheless a particular doctrine of the Church, an ecclesiologia viatorum equally formed and troubled by the gospel and therefore set within and towards the world, which in part determines and is determined by that missional movement. It is to an examination of that post-war shift in focus that we now turn.

II. The Church of Cross and Resurrection Oriented towards the World MacKinnon’s growing ecclesiological restlessness following the Second World War arose from his determination to shape an account of the church 166

167

MacKinnon, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 99. The material congruence of MacKinnon’s lecture at many points with Barth’s theological exegesis of the tenth chapter of Romans, ‘The Guilt of the Church’, is striking, especially the themes of ecclesial impotence and failure and of the offence and scandal of the Church. See Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, pp. 362–74. 168 169 170 Ibid., pp. 99–100. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., pp. 115, 111.

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governed by cross and resurrection which does not seek to take refuge from the culture of modernity, especially from critical engagement with the complex situation of the humanum in all its dimensions in a ‘Promethean’ age.171 Exposure to the world under the impetus of the gospel entailed preoccupation with a constellation of problems at the root of which lay the ‘tension of confessing certain events as final and decisive for the destiny of man, definitive of their status in eternity, and at the same time being compelled to go on living in a world that suddenly seems to have become too big for Christianity, to have outrun the simplicities of its confession’.172 MacKinnon was, however, self-critically aware enough to register the objection of those who protested the loss of identity which such exposure to the modern and secular might effect upon the church and readily conceded how risk-fraught such engagement always and inevitably was.173 But an exposed church faithful to the way of Christ, he held, cannot determine its conversation partners nor dictate the terms of its dialogue with them, nor succumb to offers of ecclesial peace achieved through coercive measures. It must also reckon with God’s active presence in the world beyond the bounds of the church in ways that it may scarcely recognize. This emphasis is consonant with the claim of an understanding of the Incarnation whose motto, as MacKinnon put 171

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MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 108–12. In view here are such challenges to human survival ingredient in the burgeoning human mastery over the environment as the exploitation and pollution of the natural environment, the use of artificial means of birth control, responsibility for the welfare of the developing nations of the world and the possibility of a radical social justice. Commenting on the seriousness of the task facing anyone who would elucidate critically a human norm, MacKinnon claimed that ‘there is a moral Luddism which seeks to dodge the task of the baptizing of Prometheus by the depreciation of his gifts, and by the by-passing of the problems the use of these gifts has raised’ (p. 110). For a treatment of the ‘Christian Prometheus’ to which MacKinnon is indebted, see Henri de Lubac, ‘La recherche d’un homme nouveau’, in Affrontements mystiques (Paris: Éditions du Témoignage Chrétien, 1949), pp. 17–92. The radical implications for Prometheus in such a transformation have been signalled in our account of MacKinnon’s understanding of baptism earlier. But see also his later comment with respect to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Milieu Divin that the tragic aspect of the promise of Prometheus must not be underestimated: ‘We must not forget . . . that Prometheus has proved himself repeatedly, and may prove himself irreversibly again in the future, author of his world’s destruction, rather than promoter of its growth.’ See idem, Themes in Theology, p. 195. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on the Summer School, 1945’, p. 111. Christians, MacKinnon claimed, unlike others content to inhabit their own ‘world’, are always concerned with what is being made of their beliefs ‘as if they knew that precariousness and vulnerability were part of the price they must pay if they are to be honest, as if the irrevocable depth of their commitment demanded, as part of itself, that they should not be at ease or neglectful of the sceptical insistence of the interrogating philosopher’. See idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 228. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Problem for Pilgrims’, Christendom 13 (March 1943), pp. 25–26.

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it to the Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1948, might well be expressed ‘nihil humanum a me alienum puto’, marking in Jesus Christ a penetration of human life and of the discontinuities and cruelty of its history so complete that there remained no depths untouched by his descent and no aspect of human being beyond the scope of salvation.174 This vocation, moreover, he held to be ecclesially grounded, for ‘the Church exists in part to manifest to the world, albeit in a splintered reflection, that ultimate love whose expression in time is found in the crucifixion of the Son of God – to call men and women to their rest in its unfathomable deeps’.175 The church beset by the problems and challenges of the world cannot, he argued, avoid an analogous intellectual ‘mucking-in’ by simple appeal to any tradition, ‘no matter how sanctified’.176 One aspect of the openness for which he adamantly pleaded, then, was a critical assessment of a rather utopian, if ultimately sterile, approach to tradition which claimed access to inviolable human and ecclesial norms (albeit norms often legitimated by sharply authoritarian means) in the dogmatic embrace, as he put it in a late essay, of a comprehensive and exalted Heilsanstalt.177 The claim, however, took shape early in MacKinnon’s career. In a key address to the Christendom Group’s Summer School in 1945 MacKinnon argued that, if the church’s witness ‘is something related to, and dependent upon, the total situation out of which it springs’, then ‘to be effective, true to its purpose, it must be proportioned to and made relevant to the context in which it takes place’.178 That context was marked by a thorough-going process of secularization which presented the church with both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge presented itself in the fact that the divide between the Catholic mind grounded in the ‘twin stabilities’ of faith and reason, grace and natural law, and modernity’s dialectical selfcriticism, radically open to contingency and change, was now recognized to be increasingly sharp.179 In MacKinnon’s estimation, the opportunity, given ‘a truly Catholic awareness of the complexity and unexpectedness of things human’, was for the church to renew engagement with its ‘responsibility to the temporal’, especially its defence of the human by insisting, for example, that the exercise of power be made accountable to human ends.180 It was evident that the church’s institutional existence did not automatically secure these ends and that their public forms had not already been achieved but 174

175 177

178 179

D. M. MacKinnon, ‘The Sacraments’, in Report of the Sixth Anglo-Catholic Congress (London: Dacre Press, 1948), pp. 130–31. 176 MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 183. Ibid., p. 180. See MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 110, 112; and, idem, ‘Aspects of Kant’s Influence on British Theology’, in Kant and His Influence (ed. George MacDonald Ross and Tony McWalter; Bristol: Thoemmes Antiquarian Publishing, 1990), p. 360. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on the Summer School, 1945’, p. 109. 180 Ibid., pp. 108–09. Ibid., pp. 107, 109.

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were always still to be laboured for. As he would later put it, this situation is part and parcel of the ‘perils and opportunities’ of a post-Constantinian world in which ‘the human norm has to be sought and affirmed in a mood of radical questioning, recognized in fact as the interrogation of the changing human order in the name of a human ultimate, the last-named at once a datum and a dandum, at once a starting-point and a goal’.181 Here we might simply register MacKinnon’s point that humanity cannot be defined in the abstract but only ultimately as it has been revealed and restored in Jesus Christ.182 His claim signals again the unsettling effect of the presence of Jesus Christ, not only for a theoretical anthropology but also for the practice of politics and economics, at the very point where the church and the world intersect. In response to this context MacKinnon counselled that if the spirit of Kant’s critical philosophy could be kept alive at the level of thought and action, the church could accept no principle, including its own, as selfjustifying and must thereby alert itself to the problematic element in every historical achievement. MacKinnon understood tradition, including church tradition, to be imbued with a tragic ambivalence and to carry within itself an element of corruption as well as discipline.183 Application of the spirit of the critical philosophy might well be salutary, MacKinnon suggested, in stimulating the church to that prophetic revolt which is needed, not so much against the tradition, as precisely in favour of it.184 If this ruled out any claim to absolute significance for the church’s actions, MacKinnon saw this relativity as but an aspect of the interiorization of human contingency, ‘our dependence on God, expressed less in ontological propositions than in an attitude of mind’.185 A properly eschatological faith, MacKinnon

181 182

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MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 112. The claim made at Malvern that an anthropological norm cannot be framed apart from a construal of the Incarnation which is ‘wholly irruptive’ remains a constant. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 96. D. M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 162–63, 190. MacKinnon also explored this ambivalence in epistemological terms, examining the way in which a tradition or discipline can both enable us to see and prevent us from seeing what is there to be seen. See idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 112–13. See also MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 115: ‘If one rejects a particular development, even stigmatizes as the invention of a perverted religious consciousness that which is defined as de fide, one has to allow that rejection by itself is not enough. One must dig deeper to find in the failures of one’s own tradition the causes which have helped to make a particular development historically almost inevitable’. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on the Summer School, 1945’, p. 110. It is important to underline MacKinnon’s urging that it be the spirit of the Critique which is to be kept alive. Though, as we shall see, MacKinnon made widespread use of Kantian insights in epistemology and ethics, they were incorporated critically in service to his theological ends which finally disavowed Kant’s ethical absolutism and subordinated

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argued, would recognize the open-textured character of its concepts, even the natural law itself, as awaiting an enlargement, renewal and reformulation of their content through processes of historical development: ‘To the Christian earth holds no promise of a continuing city, of a final stability. His faith shall remind him of the transitoriness of things human, of the peril of premature fixations, whether on the plane of social organization or philosophical construction’.186 Such contingency was, MacKinnon argued, simply unavoidable in statu viae.187 He elaborated this argument concerning human finitude on the one hand in scholastic terms, characterizing the movement of human thought as reflecting humankind’s situation in being, poised between being and not being, drawing its existence from the self-existent God and thus limited by its own creaturely condition from assuming the absolute perspective of God.188 On the other hand, adhering to the critical philosophy, he would underscore the situatedness of the church within the total situation in which it is set, necessitating both a dialectical reception of the forms of Christian faith and a thorough renewal of their presentation in faith and vision.189 Although he mooted the possibility of a theological synthesis of these two approaches, MacKinnon concluded that the fragmentariness of our thoughts and lives is not available to synthesis through theological activity, but must wait upon the act of God in the resurrection.190 A basic aspect of this ecclesiological context is, then, that a theology thus continually exposed will have to live with considerable untidiness, its style tentative and suggestive rather than systematic.191 Another implication for Anglican ecclesiology in particular is that there can be no flight from the exposure of historical location by means of ‘false archaisms’, the nostalgic privileging of any age, be it patristic, medieval, Caroline or Elizabethan – ‘we are where we are’.192 To embrace the historical, as MacKinnon urged, is to accept that the treasure of the gospel is always carried about in earthen vessels, including institutions, which are ‘the product

186 188

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190 191 192

his ethical imperative to the ontological indicative revealed in the death and resurrection of Christ. See idem, Themes in Theology, p. 67, for the claim that Kant does not so much supply solutions to problems as that ‘in his curiously and carefully nuanced agnosticism we find the road less inadequately to state at least some of them’. 187 Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 109. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Death’, in New Essays in Philosophical Theology (ed. Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre; New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 266. See idem, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, pp. 91–92. MacKinnon, ‘Christian and Marxist Dialectic’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 240. See MacKinnon, ‘Problem for Pilgrims’, p. 26. MacKinnon, ‘Theology as a Discipline of a Modern University’, p. 171. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 112. All the same, MacKinnon protested that ‘one must also reject a Utopian endorsement of the contemporary simply because it is contemporary’. See idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 111.

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less of divine providence than of the grisly complexities and accidents of human history’.193

III. MacKinnon’s ‘Anti-Idealist’ Polemic If MacKinnon thus repudiated a flight into history via false archaisms, he also ruled out a flight from history into the realm of ideas or experience, a withdrawal into such inwardness as might take the form of a cult of autonomous faith, a faith, that is, which creates its own objects.194 Here MacKinnon had in view the modernist ecclesiocentrism associated with such prominent Anglo-Catholics as Will Spens, A. E. J. Rawlinson and E. G. Selwyn (and their Roman Catholic counterparts) which, while conceding the deficiencies of Gore’s historical account, placed equal weight on the same ecclesial forms and failed in other ways to escape the limits of historicism.195 The primary difference was that these forms, in MacKinnon’s view of their approach, were now taken to be the necessary means by which an ever-expanding, all-absorbing catholicity of experience, ‘unbound by the factual’, might be mediated and contained.196 MacKinnon was not shy in expressing his judgement that the philosophical underpinnings of Spens’ Belief and Practice were ‘fundamentally destructive of Christianity’.197 His indictment of AngloCatholic modernism is, however, subsumed largely under his polemic against that ‘protean phenomenon’ which he characterized as idealism: ‘always in the end the acceptance of the realm of ideas as somehow self-justifying, of man’s spiritual experience as the real motor force of historical change; its arguments always somehow justify retreat from the concrete exchanges of action into the inner life of mind’.198 Such tendencies MacKinnon found as

193 194

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196 197 198

MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 57. Ibid., p. 33. See also idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, Religious Studies 26 (1990), pp. 439–51. See, for example, Will Spens, Belief and Practice (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915); A. E. J. Rawlinson, Dogma, Fact and Experience (London: MacMillan, 1915); E. G. Selwyn, The Approach to Christianity (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1925); and E. G. Selwyn (ed.), Essays Catholic and Critical (London: SPCK, 1926). MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 89. MacKinnon, ‘Surveys: Christian Social Thought’, p. 379. MacKinnon, ‘Christian and Marxist Dialectic’, pp. 235, 236. Of MacKinnon’s critical attack on idealism Rowan Williams has observed that the terms in which it is expressed are rather loose and that several versions of idealism and ‘anti-realism’ have been elided, forming ‘an implicit portmanteau scheme’ which no one philosopher could logically have held. See Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, p. 74. Those looking for a tolerably adequate description and analysis of both realism and idealism in MacKinnon’s work will be met by the same incompleteness which marks the theological discussions. See now, however, Paul D.

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well in exponents, both Protestant and Catholic, of theologies which could be generally characterized as essays in Christian existentialism. The ‘idealist gambits’, as MacKinnon dubbed them, which shape these diverse theologies are to his mind attempts ‘to escape from the precariousness seen to be involved in this dependence of its [the gospel’s] claim to truth on the truth of certain contingent, empirical propositions: that is, propositions of which it is perfectly good sense to say that they are not true, and whose truth is established by empirical observation, or vulnerable to refutation by such observation’.199 MacKinnon had early on decried an Anglican penchant for ‘facile Kantianism’, and much of his subsequent attack on Anglo-Catholic modernism and of idealism in general might well be read as an attempt to supplant it by means of a more rigorous construal of Kantianism, even if it might finally be said of the direction of MacKinnon’s wrestling with the problem of metaphysics and related epistemological questions that he thereby hoped to overcome Kant along pathways marked out by Kant himself.200 In particular, he now pressed for a rehabilitation of transcendence in the face of idealist conceptions of ‘an “excessively immanent God”’201 and attacked any tendency to identify too strictly the history of the church as the history of salvation. It was the intention of MacKinnon’s work in this vein in both its critical and constructive dimensions to lay the groundwork at least for the elaboration of a theological realism at the heart of which lay the notion of correspondence in both its epistemological and ethical dimensions. It was, however, the claim that ecclesial experience in its institutional, liturgical and devotional aspects could be accepted as self-justifying that elicited sustained criticism.202 Here again his doctrinal, epistemological and ethical concerns are inextricably interwoven in protest against the notion

199 200

201 202

Janz, God, The Mind’s Desire: Reference, Reason and Christian Thinking (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 80–101. D. M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 83. MacKinnon, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 84. MacKinnon’s complaint at Malvern was that this ‘facile Kantianism’ simply wrote off the metaphysical tradition, thwarted understanding of Christ’s revelation of the nature of God’s relationship with humankind by separating fact from value in theology and opened the door to a reductively expressivist faith. Also in view was a subjective preoccupation with moral motives which displaced attention from the realm of being and becoming and of human action in the world. MacKinnon’s attempt to overcome Kant by means of Kant takes its cue from his particular construction of elements of that philosopher’s project itself in terms primarily of a negative theology. See idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 57: ‘No modern philosopher raises more acutely than Kant, the problem of the representation of the unrepresentable, the problem of assuming to the full the disciplines of theologia negativa, and then, as it were, seeking to escape from them’. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 52. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 62.

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that the actuality of the church grounds the condition for the possibility of Christology. MacKinnon’s most succinct statement of the doctrinal problem focused on a key aspect of what he once censured as ‘a readiness to jettison much that might be thought central to Christian belief’ which, despite the paradox, he deemed expressive of ‘a tired institutional conservatism’:203 There is a very influential current in contemporary theological thinking which emphasizes the extent to which in the figure of Jesus the Christ, of whose historical existence it is alleged that we know next to nothing, we have to reckon with a series of essays in spiritual experience wherein the Church, whether collectively or in the persons of individual members of a genuine creative originality, has sought to come to terms with itself, with its life and the questions an inherited tradition of faith and practice thrust upon it, in its own particular environment, often . . . projecting this self-interrogation in the form of a narrative concerning the life and death of Jesus. Fundamentally such a narrative is not to be understood referentially, that is by the effort to make what sense one can of it as a description of what took place and its significance, but rather through some sort of Nacherlebnis of the experience out of which it sprang.204 In this experience with experience, MacKinnon claimed, the category of the ‘decisively significant’ gives way to a ‘vague concept of a developing spiritual tradition which somehow plays down the heights and depths of human existence, mutes the cry of Jesus in Gethsemane, turning his agony into a kind of charade’.205 All this MacKinnon deemed ‘perilously subjectivistic’, protesting its refusal to acknowledge the limits of human experience, historical and epistemological, by flirtation with the idea that ‘believing makes it so’ and adherence to the dubious claim that ‘the fides qua creditur [is] powerful to spin out of itself the fides quae creditur’.206 Against this tendency MacKinnon found a prophylactic in Kant’s philosophy which by emphasizing the limits of human experience permitted affirmation of a discontinuity in Christology, directing his thought to the way of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem and the work he performed therein.207 203 204 205 206 207

MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 5. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 29–30. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 58. Ibid., p. 114; also idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 43–44. It is at this point especially that MacKinnon acknowledged the important influence of P. T. Forsyth and Oliver Quick on his own thinking, and especially their rejection of that synthesis of evolutionary ideas with Alexandrine Logos theology so prevalent in at least one strand of the writing of Charles Gore and William Temple on the Incarnation. See idem, ‘Aspects of Kant’s Influence on British Theology’, pp. 360–61, especially the important claim about Jesus ‘that a human career should not merely

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A flight from the historical into the realm of experience betrayed to MacKinnon’s mind a flight from Christology with its disconcerting conviction that the person of Jesus could no longer bear the emphasis which the tradition had placed on it and that the weight of Christian faith should be distributed more evenly over the Christian spiritual tradition as a whole.208 MacKinnon’s fear was that this was but another way in which the transparency of the church to Jesus Christ becomes obscured as epistemological distinctions between the objective and subjective are elided, the concrete and particular surrendered to a freewheeling spiritual creativity: ‘Is it not the case that those who seek to subordinate Christology to the church’s achievement of self-consciousness in respect of her own spiritual life are in fact denying any special dependence – relation or relations between the Christian community and Christ’s person and work?’209 To MacKinnon’s mind this attribution of an ultimacy to church experience by which people are said to come to themselves by coming to terms with an inherited faith, with a devotional piety both individual and collective, is sheer ecclesiocentrism.210 In sum, he held that such constructions of faith are thoroughly anthropocentric, making humankind the object and measure of theology and the cultivation of interiority, whether in response to the preached Christ or the celebration of the sacraments, the grounds of salvation.211 The events of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection become reductively characterized here as disclosures of a way of life, a pattern inviting the Christian into forms of imaginative self-projection or matter for extended individual and collective essays in self-interpretation.212

208 210 211

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illustrate the order of the world but, by the submission to human limitation that lay at its foundation, constitute that order shows a resolute refusal to allow that career’s particularity to merge with the unfolding of a universal pattern’ (p. 360). 209 MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 292. Ibid., p. 298. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 61–62. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 84, where a contrast on this score is set up between Rudolf Bultmann and Catholic modernism. See also Borderlands of Theology, p. 31: ‘A comforting sense of the authority supposedly resident in the experience of the Church proves an anaesthetic, or at least a tranquillizer, against allowing ourselves to be bothered by the impact of the problem of metaphysics upon Christology; as if we were enabled to avoid the sharp needles of enquiry concerning how best to represent the one with whom we have to do by suggesting that in the end even as the proper study of mankind is man, so Christian man finds his appropriate study in himself’. D. M. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 75–76. MacKinnon traced this ultimately to Hegel, suggesting that his thought furnished ample grounds ‘to enable men and women to see that for him Christianity was something to be understood, a kind of illustrative epitome, or condensed picture, showing men and women as by a flash of lightning, the principle and sense of the whole divinely appointed order of the world. Thus they came to see that the ancient scheme – life, life laid down, life received again: Galilee, Jerusalem, Galilee – presents the substance of the moral life, even as it adumbrates the ultimates of being and becoming. If the journey of Jesus from life to death is

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MacKinnon faulted this tendency, then, as an ‘escape route’ from the nest of historical problems surrounding the life of Jesus which he believed a serious faith must always engage.213 The primacy of the deed done by Christ requires that the simple question be put whether these things did indeed take place.214 If they did not and if it could be shown that Jesus Christ did not exist, his existence being at least a necessary, if not sufficient, truthcondition of Christian faith, then, MacKinnon bravely concluded, ‘cadit tota quaestio’.215 Stripped of his historical actuality by a refusal to put this question, Jesus Christ is reduced to a merely formal transcendental condition of the Church’s life and his life and work, moreover, are taken to function as a kind of als ob, a Kantian regulative idea at the service of individual and collective efforts towards self-definition and justified to the extent that they promote moral excellence or holiness.216 Against this retreat into a kind of religious pragmatism he argued that it was a ‘radical mistake’ to suppose that propositions concerning actual historical events could be translated without remainder into propositions relating to spiritual and religious activities.217 He suggested further that idealists tended to seek the justification of the present in the future and protested against this that the Christian doctrine of the cross, the insistence on the particular deed done in human flesh and blood, cut off such easy trivialization of the past.218 Consequently, MacKinnon saw in the evasion of the world in this flight from historical contingency a refusal to address adequately the question of truth: Such tendencies . . . deliberately avert from questions concerning the truth and falsity of what men and women believe . . . but concentrate entirely on resolving the question of intelligibility by assigning to religious expressions their role in prayer and public worship, in rituals, in promoting and furthering a way of life, and argue that when such roles have been set forth, all that requires to be done has been done.219 The protest here is against the restriction of the notion of truth to coherence attested in performance or by mere translation into the terms of our own

213 215 216 217 218

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no longer, as in the view of traditional orthodoxy, the re-creation of the sum of human things entire; if it is relegated to the status of an episode in the last years of the Jewish state . . . it is still an episode indicative of the very order of the universe, and of the way in which human life should be lived’ (pp. 55–56). 214 MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 75. Ibid., p. 76. MacKinnon, ‘The Problem of the “System of Projection”’, p. 81. Ibid., p. 77. Cf. idem, ‘Our Contemporary Christ’, pp. 85–86. MacKinnon, ‘Our Contemporary Christ’, p. 88. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 248. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 102. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 30.

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situation.220 MacKinnon’s objection is not that the task of tracing the development of an idiom of spiritual acclaim does not have a significant role to play in the understanding of Christian life but that if this is all that is done, the more difficult challenge of attempting to draw out the meaning of what it is that such acclamations articulate is evaded.221 In addition, he charged this approach with an evasion of the challenges of ethical questions, recording his suspicion that ‘a sense for mystery can too easily become the refuge of the comfortably devout’.222 MacKinnon opposed this tendency by pointing to the Church’s liturgical tradition in which he found an objective focus on the centre of ecclesial life: ‘If lex orandi is in some sense lex credendi, it is still Christ’s person that raises the issue of the significance of the Church’s existence more than that existence which raises and implicitly answers the question of his significance’.223 Clearly again the theological concern which motivates MacKinnon’s protest is the overthrow here of such traditional doctrinal commitments as the lordship of Christ and his role as judge in and over his Church.224 We may ask parenthetically at this point to what extent MacKinnon’s early ecclesiology mirrored the development in the Anglo-Catholic ecclesiological tradition which Michael Ramsey had charted among some of its theologians in the first half of the twentieth century.225 These diverged from 220

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D. M. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 148. See also from the same work, ‘The Conflict Between Realism and Idealism’, p. 164: ‘It is the fault of the idealist always to seek escape from the authority of the tragic, to avoid reckoning with the burden of inescapable fact, to find in the supposed whole constituted by the history of the spiritual life of mankind the context not only within which individual essays after the Absolute have their meaning, but also their justification. Reference to an external standard is gone; meaning is defined in terms of conditions of assertibility, not in terms of truth-conditions’. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, pp. 441–42. MacKinnon’s recognition of the complementary roles which coherentist and pragmatist conceptions of truth play in addition to his insistence on truth as correspondence is set out in idem, ‘The Christian Understanding of Truth’, Scottish Journal of Theology 1, no. 1 (1948), pp. 19–29. MacKinnon, ‘Christian and Marxist Dialectic’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 234. See also MacKinnon’s devastating criticisms of those, even penitent and confessor apparently, for whom absorption in endless talk of the details of religious practice, especially the minutiae of liturgical ceremony, becomes a cozy, self-enclosed world to their own moral detriment, eliciting the sharp Anselmian rebuke nondum considerasti quantum pondus sit peccatum!, in idem (ed.), Objections to Christian Belief, pp. 26–28. MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 298. Ibid., p. 293, where MacKinnon notes that ‘even the ultra-montane for whom the Church in Bossuet’s phrase is “the mystic Christ” has allowed that Christ stands over against his church, as judge of her stewardship of the sacraments in his abiding presence as one who is her Lord and servant’. A. M. Ramsey, An Era in Anglican Theology, pp. 142–43.

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Charles Gore’s doctrine of the church by prescinding from the notion of the church and sacraments as ‘a system to be defended and commended as a thing in itself’ in favour of a description of the church, known by faith, as ‘the place where sinners are humbled under the cross, and know thereby the glory of the resurrection, witnessing, obeying, but never propaganding, apologizing, or self-commending’.226 As we have seen in MacKinnon’s case, the shift was away from an over-determined ecclesiological application of the ontological categories of the doctrine of the Incarnation towards a vigorously dynamic soteriological account of the origin and preservation of the church which took the form of a kerygmatic and sacramental actualism by which the way of the church, generated and renewed by the Holy Spirit, is to be conformed to the way of Christ. Nonetheless, Ramsey maintained that in the work of these theologians the basic structure of their ecclesiology remained intact although it had passed ‘through a kind of dark night into a new day’.227 Ramsey attributed this ascetic disciplining of Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology to a number of factors, foremost of which were the impact of Edwyn Hoskyns’ biblical theology, the shock occasioned by the dissemination of leading ideas from the early writings of Karl Barth228 and the corresponding attempt to reformulate in their wake the relation of church and gospel, as well as the practical application in parishes of aspects of this theological shift under the auspices of the Liturgical Movement.229 This led to the displacement of the typical apologetic concerns of Anglican Catholicism and, among some, a new openness to the fruits of theological engagement with Protestants, both Lutheran and Reformed, as well as from Roman Catholics.230 In MacKinnon’s hands, however, these influences were 226 228

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227 Ibid. Ibid., p. 143. For a discussion of the reception of Barth among English Anglicans see Richard H. Roberts, ‘The Reception of the Theology of Karl Barth in the Anglo-Saxon World’, pp. 115–71. For an impressive example of this Anglo-Catholic liturgical ressourcement set within the context of an ecclesiology showing strong Mauricean affinities similar to those animating Ramsey’s work, see A. G. Hebert, Liturgy and Society: The Function of the Church in the Modern World (London: Faber and Faber, 1935); idem, The Form of the Church (London: Faber and Faber, rev. ed., 1954); and idem (ed.), The Parish Communion: A Book of Essays (London: SPCK; New York: MacMillan Co., 1937). A. M. Ramsey, An Era in Anglican Theology, pp. 144–45. See also J. A. T. Robinson, ‘Kingdom, Church and Ministry’, in The Historic Episcopate in the Fullness of the Church: Six Essays by Priests of the Church of England (ed. K. M. Carey; London: Dacre, 1960), p. 13: ‘The work of Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and his school was welcomed as grist to the Anglo-Catholic mill. But of greater significance in the long run will perhaps be the question which this biblical theology has put against the whole Anglo-Catholic sequence of priorities’. For recognition of the positive aspects of this ‘trans-confessional trend in theology’ in ecumenical perspective, especially its refurbishing of a primary theological vocabulary, see Oliver S. Tomkins, The Church in the Purpose of God: An Introduction to the Work of the Commission on Faith and Order of

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not as ecclesiologically benign as Ramsey’s remarks suggest. On the one hand MacKinnon was alive to the inexhaustible fecundity of the gospel and its regenerative purchase-hold on the church’s being and self-understanding, its worship and the exercise of its ministry. On the other hand, he had been prepared, with Ramsey and Hoskyns, to insist on the specified external structures of the Lambeth Quadrilateral as necessary to the being of the church. As MacKinnon’s reception of their construal of the cross and resurrection deepened, however, this gospel which continuously constitutes, shatters and reconstitutes the church was seen to elude, even defeat, attempts finally to synthesize it with any definitive pattern of Catholic order.231 To this point, then, we have first outlined the trajectory of MacKinnon’s early ecclesiological thought in the direction of an objective doctrine of the church grounded in the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. MacKinnon clearly insisted that it is the gospel which generates and sustains the church and impels it into the world to bear witness to the mighty acts of God by which the world has been redeemed. We have also noted his resistance to ecclesiologies which fail adequately to distinguish Jesus Christ from his church on the basis of his objective presence over against it yet mediated to and within it by word and sacrament. At the same time we have noted his emphasis on Christ’s active presence to those forms in the power of the Holy Spirit as both judging and forgiving, constitutive and transformative. In this way MacKinnon brought to the fore and sustained the pronounced tension between the transcendent Lordship of Jesus Christ over his church and his presence within it, a tension by which its relation to the world in

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the World Council of Churches, in Preparation for the Third World Conference on Faith and Order to be held at Lund, Sweden in 1952 (London: SCM Press, 1952), pp. 42–44. This is the point of separation between MacKinnon and those Anglo-Catholics who argued for and attempted precisely this kind of synthesis, notably Gabriel Hebert, Lionel Thornton and Michael Ramsey. The classic text in which a precisely focused and succinct treatment of this point to which these and others contributed can be found is E. S. Abbot et al., Catholicity, especially Section IV entitled ‘Fragmentation and Synthesis’, pp. 42–48. Here the method of synthesis is described as a work of ressourcement and retrieval, a going behind contemporary systems in order to ‘strive for the recovery of the fullness of Tradition within the thought and worship and order and life of each of the sundered portions of Christendom’ (p. 45). Further, of these sundered portions it is said that ‘the only motive that can truly unite them is a common conviction about the truth of the Gospel and the Church’ (p. 47). When one looks back at the treatment of the ‘primitive unity’ or the ‘wholeness of Tradition’ in the first section of the report it is clear, however, that its ‘first principles’ are clearly not open to revision because they are held to enshrine a divinely constituted ontology (pp. 15–17). For a remarkably irenic and mediating account of these issues advocating an opening towards evangelical thought and practice see A. E. J. Rawlinson, The Future of Anglicanism: A Lecture Delivered on the Charles Gore Memorial Foundation on 12 November 1948 in Westminster Abbey (London: SPCK, 1948).

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which it is set is also marked. Second, we have also begun to map out one implication of these claims in the form of MacKinnon’s post-war attack on avenues of retreat from this context into a constructivist doctrine that proceeded along an anthropological–ecclesiological axis which construed the church as the projection of varieties of inner or spiritual experience in the form of an on-going stream of ecclesial life. This critique, expressed consistently from the immediate post-war writings right through to the end of his career, fastened on the danger of an ecclesiologically grounded relativism. In registering a series of MacKinnon’s ecclesial discontents, attention has been drawn to his attempt to anchor the church in our field of vision, to enable us to see it as it is in all its brokenness. There is a steadfast refusal here of any reductionism in ecclesiology to an ideal, abstract, invisible church. This rudimentary description must now be balanced by an account of his sustained criticism of its polar opposite, the Anglo-Catholic phenomenon of ecclesiological fundamentalism by which the givenness of the church, including its doctrinal, ministerial and liturgical forms, is said to provide a secure basis for Christian thought and life. Given an ecclesial context in which the possibility of adequately distinguishing Jesus Christ from the formed experience of the church had been called in question, if not supplanted by a narrowing emphasis on theological anthropology or ecclesiology, an account must also be offered of MacKinnon’s realism and of its notion of correspondence which not only funds these critiques but also underpins his re-description of the ecclesial forma Christi. It is to these tasks which we now turn.

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It is a curious feature of Donald MacKinnon’s assessment of his theological development, as Paul Wignall relates it, that by the 1960s he had come to reckon as far too positive the ecclesiological account which he had furnished in such early texts as The Church of God despite the rigorous dialectical determination of the church by the Incarnation, understood primarily in terms of the event of Christ’s death and resurrection, on which that account was constructed. Consequently, Wignall states, he identified his 1968 Gore Memorial Lecture, ‘Kenosis and Establishment’,1 as a surer indication of the outlines of his mature doctrine of the church.2 When one notes alongside that judgement MacKinnon’s apologetic justification for his renewed venture into ecclesiology in his prefatory remarks to the collection in which that lecture was published,3 as well as his admission in the lecture itself of ‘a deep scepticism concerning the value to be assigned in this present to preserving the external life of the church, at least in forms easily recognizable as continuous with those which we know and take for granted’,4 it is clear that the task of furnishing anything like an adequate doctrine of the church no longer found a place among his most-pressing theological concerns. Yet what is readily apparent in any close reading of his post-war writings is a thorough intensification of the critical thrust MacKinnon’s early ecclesiology achieved, as Wignall himself hints, through the clarification and refinement of leading ideas already present in those early writings on the church.5 The Gore Lecture to which MacKinnon now directed his readers is but one

1 2 3 4

MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 13–40. Paul Wignall, ‘D. M. MacKinnon: An Introduction’, p. 87. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 7. 5 Ibid., p. 28. Paul Wignall, ‘D. M. MacKinnon’, p. 88.

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of a series of texts which document a decisive repudiation of all forms of Tractarian ecclesiological triumphalism as well as a critical distancing from attempts like that of Michael Ramsey to secure the principal features of this Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology by means of a positive construal of the external features of the church, including such elements as Scripture, creeds, sacraments and the historic episcopate, as the given, ostensive or epiphanic forms of the gospel.6 Granted the Gore Lecture’s programmatic character, it cannot be read in isolation from other work of this period in which, preeminent among a number of interrelated themes, MacKinnon acknowledged his ‘besetting concern with issues of Christology’.7 Nor when everything which MacKinnon had said about the church’s relation to the world is recalled can its context in the crisis of institutions which came to a head throughout the Western world in 1968 be overlooked.8 On the theological front, however, the Gore Lecture and other associated essays which still treat ecclesiological themes to some degree set in bold relief a fundamental direction in MacKinnon’s thought which sets it off from both Charles Gore’s liberal Catholicism and expressions of Anglo-Catholic modernism: ecclesiology is to be construed essentially as a function of Christology. This emphasis is certainly not new, and it cannot be taken to mean that fundamental theological reflection on the church does not have its rightful place nor that the forms of ecclesial existence are merely adiaphora. Rather it is a characteristic feature of his writings from at least the 1960s that where MacKinnon begins by taking up ecclesiological themes, his thought is primarily set in motion by Christology which is both its source and its goal. So, too, in writings in which he engages primarily with various issues arising from a critical meditation on the mysterium Christi, he almost always signals, if in somewhat rudimentary fashion, the implications for his understanding of the doctrine and practice of the church. His goal in both realms, however, is thoroughly critical. His express intention in the ecclesiological essays of 6

7 8

See the critical discussion of this aspect of Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church in Rowan Williams, ‘Theology and the Churches’, in Michael Ramsey as Theologian (ed. Robin Gill and Lorna Kendall; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995), pp. 13–17. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 21. As Richard Roberts points out, ‘Donald MacKinnon taught those who came under his influence that the impact of morality and ethics upon the individual should never be ignored or overridden, and that, furthermore, there can be no easy marriage of – or divorce between – the ‘moral’ person and the ‘immoral’ organization.’ See idem, Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 88. MacKinnon noted that if the Church of England had been only too willing throughout its history to benefit from the prestige of Anglo-Saxon institutions, themselves the beneficiaries of the period of British industrial and political supremacy, it should not be surprised to share in their crisis and decline. See idem, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 79. For his recognition of the relation of this problem to ethics and the problem of metaphysics see idem, A Study in Ethical Theory, p. 225.

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the 1960s was to sit loose to Anglican preoccupation with, and premature stabilization of, ecclesial structures so that out of the ferment unleashed by the act of letting them go ‘a new, more objectively significant form of Christian presence to the modern world’ might emerge.9 As far as the Gore Lecture itself is concerned, MacKinnon’s theology now took a more radical turn in that his approach to the mystery of the church found expression as a negative ecclesiology at the heart of which lay his advocacy of the extension of his particular reconstruction of the Christological concept of kenosis to the doctrine of the church. MacKinnon had begun to grasp in the light of a more profound and biblically rooted Christological meditation what extensive reformulation ecclesial self-understanding and practice must undergo if the church were in any way appropriately, if indeed at all, to be described as the ‘extension of the Incarnation’. In what follows, then, three tasks are in view. First, a close reading of MacKinnon’s kenotic criticism of the Anglo-Catholic ecclesiological traditions of his day is offered in which what was summarily described earlier as the indictment of the Church of England’s ecclesiasticism and ecclesiocentrism is filled out and set in context. Second, the lineaments of MacKinnon’s realism and his version of the notion of correspondence which informed this critique of the tradition are sketched in. Third, the material alterations to several key aspects of MacKinnon’s doctrine of the church under the impact of a kenotic discipline are described.

I. The Gore Lecture and Kenotic Ecclesiology MacKinnon’s Gore Lecture stands at the head of a collection of ecclesiological essays published under the evocative title The Stripping of the Altars which to Anglo-Catholic minds can only recall both the traumatic upheavals of the age of Reformation and the liturgical rites of Maundy Thursday which mark the inexorable progress of Christ from his self-oblation in the Last Supper and self-abasement in the foot-washing to his agony and arrest in Gethsemane. In this context, the basic issue two decades on from the early ecclesiological writings is still the reformation of the church’s belief and practice under the gospel, hinting even in this title at the means by which a critical reconstruction might be undertaken, namely ‘a kenosis in close connection with a theologia crucis’.10 All of the essays, MacKinnon tells us, treat aspects of a common theme: the challenge and opportunities thrust upon the churches by their emergence from ‘the age of Constantine’.11 Constantine’s conversion, he liked to say in an aphorism attributed to 9 10 11

MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 9, emphasis added. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 67. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 7.

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R. M. Benson, was the greatest disaster ever to befall the Christian church.12 Constantinianism he construed rather generally as establishment, namely the variety of ways in which the church sought through its various relations with structures of power, internal and external, to secure its life and place in the world.13 Without minimizing the impressive achievements of the Christendom church, MacKinnon underscored the tragic cost at which they had been attained, especially the corrosive effect on its doctrine of God, its pastoral relation to the individual, its mission to the world and its patterns of authority. As the church became infected by imperial styles of government, its understanding of the ways of God with humankind underwent a corresponding distortion such that ‘by (presumably) the most damaging anthropomorphism of all Christian intellectual history, the creator and governor of the world had been invested with the quality of an absolute, human ruler, the savage exactions of a Henry VIII (to take one extreme example) were received as parables of the Lordship of him who was among 12

13

Ibid., p. 15. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 35–36; idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 112; and idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 97–98. MacKinnon’s ecclesiology had several aspects in common with the theology of the founder (1824–1915) of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist. R. M. C. Jeffrey identifies as fundamental to Benson’s ecclesiology the theme of discipleship expressed in the claim that ‘the essential nature of the Church was to follow Christ and be like him’. Benson held that collusion with worldly power inevitably involved the church in a denial of the gospel, its adaptation to the culture of the age and an evasion of the cross. See R. M. C. Jeffery, ‘“When All Are Christians None Are”: Church and Mission in the Teaching of Father Benson’, in Benson of Cowley (ed. M. L. Smith; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 120, 125. Martin Smith, ‘The Theological Vision of Father Benson’, in Benson of Cowley, pp. 27–53, describes Benson’s aversion to Anglo-Catholicism’s typical nostalgia for past ages and its preoccupation with structures: ‘He had a strong sense of the relativity of the forms in which the Church has been constituted and its need to be ready to abandon structures and methods sometimes regarded as indispensable’ (p. 48). Further, Smith notes Benson’s claim that if the church is to be the extension of the Incarnation it must be weak and conform its manner of life to such features of its Lord’s incarnate life as vulnerability, homelessness, and poverty (p. 49). It must be recognized that MacKinnon’s references to ‘Constantinianism’ are highly rhetorical, lacking in historical nuance and deployed thematically to critical ends. In this context MacKinnon lamented that the numerical success of the Constantinian conversion of the church and its worldwide extension had served to put both the conversion itself and the spiritual appropriateness of the ‘in hoc signo vinces’ beyond criticism and suggested that the attempt to secure similar ends through a secular translation of the gospel and its ends, namely a great temporal success by means of a cult of effectiveness, might be taken in changed circumstances for a manifestation of a new Constantinianism. See idem, ‘La communication efficace et les tentations du Christ’, p. 376. By contrast, MacKinnon’s denunciation of this debased pragmatism is rather sharp: ‘The naked blasphemy of Constantine’s slogan ‘in hoc signo vinces’ remains an outrage as disastrous in consequence as it is spiritually repulsive in underlying inspiration’ (idem, Themes in Theology 5, p. 105).

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men as their servant’.14 The manner of its ministry and mission was wrested to the degree that ‘from Caesar the Church of Christ learnt to speak with the accents of Caiaphas, learnt how often it was expedient that one man should die for the people, how often it was a luxury to be indulged only by the irresponsible to leave the ninety and nine sheep in eager quest for the wayward stray’.15 Alternatively, MacKinnon charged that where the church did not overtly adopt this imperial style, it all too often acquiesced in the face of civil power, ‘finding in acceptance rather than revolt, the discipline of a somewhat macabre via crucis for its members’.16 Again, in this context, he charged that the church managed to secure its traditional values in its relationship with the world ‘only at the cost religiously of a profound deformation of the ultimately radical faith of the incarnation through its conversion into the underlying spiritual tradition of a supposedly supremely excellent civilization’.17 Equally troubling to his mind was the way in which an evasion of fundamental questions of belief was compensated by ‘a deep, unyielding commitment to the historical forms of institutional, ecclesiastical existence’.18 In this context ecclesial renewal and a corresponding reconstruction of ecclesiology became an urgent challenge since, as he claimed, ‘the crisis of belief through which we are living . . . inevitably affects and is affected by the actual situation of the churches’.19 Establishment, then, in all its various manifestations, inhibited the church from coming to ‘a properly existential realization of the actual, present Sitz im Leben of the Christian community, of its perils and opportunities’.20 The application of a kenotic discipline to ecclesiology carried with it its own imperatives of metanoia, the relinquishing of all fixation with structures and the testing of all beliefs, even to the point of destruction, in order to strip away everything that might hinder the Holy Spirit’s leading of the churches ‘towards a new birth which must touch the most fundamental forms of their existence’.21 The corresponding openness to the world 14

15

16 17

18 20

MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 8. See idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 36. Ibid., pp. 7–8. MacKinnon had lamented that in the 1960s in Britain, ‘we do have to reckon with those whose zeal for the status, repute, the orderliness of the Church (as they misguidedly conceive it) eclipses their readiness to receive the Son of Man when his call is apparent in the needs of the least of his brethren’(idem, Objections to Christian Belief, p. 30). Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pp. 8–9. See also D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Autorité et conscience’, in L’Herméneutique de la liberté religieuse: Actes du colloque organisé par Le Centre International d’Etudes Humanistes et par L’Institut d’Etudes Philosophiques de Rome (Paris: Aubier, 1968), p. 426; idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 36–37; and idem, ‘Theology as a Discipline of a Modern University’, pp. 172–73. 19 Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 7. 21 Ibid., pp. 7–8. Ibid., pp. 9–10.

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which MacKinnon counselled the churches to adopt, an engagement with, but not assimilation by, the context in which they are set, brought with it a set of imperatives and opportunities from which they must not turn away, namely: to seek the forms of post-Constantinian existence both in respect of inter-Church relations and in respect of presence to the world; to purge out of the collective and private imaginations of Christian people the last vestiges of their eagerness to approach the believer de haut en bas; to welcome the many possibilities opened in a new situation radically to rethink such ethical problems as those raised by the methods of modern warfare and by men’s rapidly extending mastery over their environment; (most fundamentally) to liberate our basic theology from the inherited infection of centuries of acquiescence in an objectively false situation vis-à-vis public authority.22 MacKinnon thus summoned the churches to leave behind their protected enclave and move out along the way of engagement with the world, a way which he affirmed to be also the way of promise.23 In the Gore Lecture, the way of ‘the Rabbi from Nazareth’ and the way of the ‘Constantinian’ church are set side by side in stark, schematic contrast. At the heart of this address stands the claim that if it is indeed the case that an understanding of the relation of God to humankind is ‘obscured by the radically distorted image presented in and by the institution supposed to convey its sense to the world’, then ‘theological progress may be dependent on the criticism of the Church’s institutional experience, even the rejection of long tracts of that experience as fundamentally invalid’.24 Among the conditions of such ecclesiological criticism, ‘the liberating dynamic of a purely theological idea’ might, in MacKinnon’s estimation, play a significant role.25 Kenosis is put forward as one such liberating theological idea. MacKinnon found an example of its fruitfulness in this regard in a book by the Dutch Augustinian prior Robert Adolfs in which the image of the way of the prodigal into the far country is used to describe the Constantinian captivity of the church and his return to his father as the symbol of hope of a recovery of ‘a genuinely Christian way’ which Adolfs designated the way of kenosis.26 MacKinnon construed Adolfs’ critical deployment of the concept of 22 24 26

23 Ibid., p. 10, MacKinnon’s emphasis. Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 18. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 14–15. See Robert Adolfs, The Grave of God: Has the Church a Future? (trans. N. D. Smith; London: Burns & Oates, 1967), p. 109. Although MacKinnon situated this work in the ferment of Roman Catholic theology in the period of Vatican II, it is also significantly indebted to John A. T. Robinson, The New Reformation? (London: SCM Press, 1965), especially Adolfs’ chapter ‘The Church and Kenosis’ which MacKinnon singled out for study. Robinson’s work advocated the stripping away of ecclesial vestiges

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kenosis, despite his reservation that Adolf’s account of the church’s history had put ‘far too bland a construction on a long history of compromise and betrayal’, as a plea for a comprehensive renewal of the church’s concept of its mission and manner of presence to the societies in which it is placed, its self-understanding and the faith by which its life is defined.27 MacKinnon’s interest in the concept of kenosis in the lecture is in line with the attraction to its moral force exhibited by Charles Gore and as such his account here simply skirts the varied theories concerning a depotentiated Logos, the probing of the limits of Christ’s consciousness and the various criticisms advanced against them. He claimed to deploy the concept not in elaboration of a theory or doctrine of kenosis but simply as an attempt to articulate that which is suggested by the Christ-hymn of Philippians 2.5-11 and in the pervasive emphasis of the Johannine Gospel on the Son’s dependence on the Father, ‘on an authority affirmed because of and in the context of a supreme humility, an “infinite self-abnegation”’, an authority which may well be found to be ‘intolerable’ by the indirection of its exercise.28 MacKinnon’s kenotic concept is from this point merely adumbrated. He claimed for the notion that it ‘dares to carry back into the initiating act of the whole incarnate life that which is qualitatively similar to what it manifested’, prompting him to ask what light the manner of the ministry and death of Jesus sheds on the divine being and on the nature of its relation to creation, on the essential Trinity as differentiated from the economic Trinity.29 Further, he intimated that the manner of the ministry of the rabbi from Nazareth calls for the reconstruction of the concept of the divinity that is predicated of him and of the attributes which are held to be expressive of that divine nature.30 Thus, for instance, MacKinnon proposed that we learn to speak of receptivity as belonging to the divine being if Christ is understood to be more than a simulacrum of the divine, not merely parabolic of God’s invitation to humankind but ‘its actuality become event’.31 MacKinnon conceded that in attempting to

27

28 30

of privilege and power and yet argued somewhat ambivalently for preserving the constitutional establishment of the Church of England. See idem, The New Reformation?, pp. 29–30. Noteworthy here in terms of MacKinnon’s lecture is Robinson’s claim that the Church of England had emerged from the archiepiscopate of Geoffrey Fisher more fortified against the world than ever (p. 20). Adolfs’ work is much more radical in terms of the extensive structural and sociological reforms which he advocated for the Church of Rome in its pursuit of aggiornamento (idem, The Grave of God, pp. 125–32). Ibid., pp. 15–16. Though the immediate reference here is to Adolfs’ work, the Barthian image of the way of the Son of God into the far country (Church Dogmatics IV/1, §59.1) provides an expanded context for MacKinnon’s extension of the concept of kenosis to ecclesiology, as do the still reverberating echoes of Barth’s discussion of the tribulation and guilt of the church in Chapters 9 and 10 of the 2nd edition of the Römerbrief. 29 Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 17. 31 Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 24.

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speak of ‘the mysterious actuality of the divine self-emptying’ we are brought up short against the limits of intelligible discourse and are thereby plunged into ‘a final and inescapable failure’ to represent God’s presence to the world in Christ, a failure which might well impose the discipline of silence, albeit a silence expressed in action, as the ‘system of projection’ for this rigorously kenotic doctrine.32 All of these points, together with MacKinnon’s avowal of complete commitment to acceptance of the Homoousion and critical scrutiny of the propositions and concepts in which that doctrine had come to articulation, are indicators of work continually to be done, indeed that ceaseless wrestling with those ‘besetting Christological concerns’ which demand ‘the most radical criticism of all our fundamentalisms’.33 If this, then, is what a concept of kenosis grounded in the manner of Christ’s ministry carries back into Christian reflection on God, it is the ‘resolute reformation of ecclesiological assumptions’ which it carries forward, even such assumptions as those ‘to which Gore remained in bondage throughout his life’.34

II. The Attack on ‘Ecclesiological Fundamentalism’ It should be clear from these remarks that the stakes in constructing a doctrine of the church were for MacKinnon rather high. Get the doctrine of the church wrong in any way which disrupts the unity of belief and practice or misconstrues either or both of these dimensions of ecclesial being, and much else in Christian thought and life will go astray. A sure way to get the doctrine of the church wrong, as he then went on to point out at length, was to adopt a fundamentalist temper, adding an ecclesiological strain to the biblical and liturgical variants under which Anglo-Catholicism had suffered throughout its history.35 MacKinnon then took up this theme under the rubric of the Constantinian legacy to the church, moving critically from the particular to the general, exposing the temper of fundamentalism in Charles Gore’s Anglo-Catholicism, then in the Church of England’s desperate adherence to its constitutional guarantees and finally, in the churches’ hankering after a secure life, a kind of sturmfreies Gebiet, in the midst of the world. He began his critique of Gore’s ecclesiological assumptions under the impact of ‘a vivid memory of the failure of the Anglo-Catholic tradition’,36 encouraged to elaborate his criticisms by Bishop John Howe’s remark that 32 33

34

35

Ibid., pp. 35–36. Ibid., p. 24. This statement, which is as fine a thumbnail sketch of MacKinnon’s theological project as can be found in any of his writings, receives detailed attention in Chapters 4 and 5. Ibid., pp. 25, 16. The ad hominem sting of the remark is mitigated somewhat by MacKinnon’s immediate concession that these were also ‘assumptions by which I have myself often been guided’ (p. 16). 36 Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 28.

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the 1968 Lambeth Conference had marked ‘the swan song of traditional Anglo-Catholicism’.37 The standard by which MacKinnon judged Gore’s doctrine accords with the Tractarian insistence on the unity of theory and practice, namely that doctrine must find expression in appropriate moral conduct, both ecclesial and individual. Assessing the conduct which Gore’s doctrine encouraged, MacKinnon censured ‘the presence in that tradition of a temper which, if it cannot be condemned out of hand as imperialistic, none the less embodies in living and destructive form something of the spirit of apartheid’.38 In Gore’s case, as displayed in the exercise of his episcopate, this temper came to expression as ‘that attitude of rigorously exclusive superiority towards members of non-episcopal churches which has been perhaps the most sheerly destructive element in the Anglo-Catholic inheritance’.39 This judgement was not simply an open attack on Gore’s notoriously authoritarian character.40 The charge is that in the public mind such overt triumphalism thwarted authentic Christian presence. What MacKinnon had in view was a built-in defect of the Anglo-Catholic ecclesiological tradition, present, he believed, from its inception, which rendered it insensitive to the rich Christian lives displayed in other churches and hence curtailed its ecumenical reach with tragic consequences for Christian faith in Britain. When he broadened his focus to review the impact of this tradition in the ‘venomous and obsessive campaign’ undertaken by Anglo-Catholics of outstanding ability, spiritual depth and achievement against the then-proposed Church of South India ecumenical scheme, he lamented not only the ‘intransigent bigotry’ of such leaders but also the fact that they sowed ‘seeds of bitter and destructive controversy’ at a time when Britain was mired in the darkness of war.41 In addition, partisans of this tradition, Gore included, heightened the exclusiveness of the Church of England’s Eucharistic life by demanding episcopal confirmation as the prerequisite for full participation, thus rejecting the resolutions of duly constituted ecclesial authority (the Lambeth Conferences and the Convocations) which had counselled relaxation of this requirement, thereby putting the Eucharist beyond the reach of a substantial number of its baptized members. One consequence of this doctrine, MacKinnon feared, was that membership in the church would become a badge of exclusion 37 39 40

41

38 Ibid., pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 20. Positive appraisals of aspects of Gore’s theological work and ministry are scattered among MacKinnon’s writings. See, for instance, idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 62–63; idem, ‘Christology and Protest’, pp. 175–87; and idem, ‘Aspects of Kant’s Influence on British Theology’, pp. 348–66. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 20–21. Among these leaders W. B. O’Brien, then Superior of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist; Dom Gregory Dix; and Kenneth Kirk, Bishop of Oxford, are named. For a thorough analysis of the ecclesiological issues of the projected Church of South India plan, see J. E. Lesslie Newbigin, The Reunion of the Church: A Defence of the South India Scheme (London:

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which encouraged Anglo-Catholics to claim that by such membership they had been placed at ‘the heart and centre of history’.42 Worse, to his mind, was the dismissiveness exhibited towards the non-episcopally ordained ministers of other churches by which the authenticity of their ministry and sacramental practice was questioned.43 Such a doctrine of the church only succeeded to the degree that it effectively distanced and diminished those Christians whose beliefs and way of life as followers of Jesus posed a stark challenge to its own performance. When it is recalled that Gore was attracted to kenotic Christology for its moral force, MacKinnon’s judgement that ‘it would be hard to conceive any attitude more totally alien to an attempted expression in institutional terms of kenosis as of the esse of the Church’44 comes into focus as an indictment of the failure at the level of conduct of that catholicity and apostolicity which were the hallmark claims of Gore’s ecclesiology. More generally, MacKinnon’s complaint in effect is that the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of the church was far too parsimonious in its drawing of ecclesial boundaries and that, paradoxically, its attempts to secure its place at the centre of the world were undertaken only by evading or closing its heart to that world. But such tactics could no longer be defended on the grounds that great principles were at stake, since, MacKinnon now argued, this exclusionary and dismissive temper failed to correspond with the manner of concern for ultimate truth on which, in the Christian understanding of the Church’s Lord, the Father has set his seal: I mean

42 43

44

SCM Press, rev. edn, 1960). Anglo-Catholic reaction to this issue troubled MacKinnon throughout his life. In a late and otherwise laudatory article detailing the theological contribution of Oliver Quick, MacKinnon gently rebuked Quick for his failure ‘to speak words of sane counsel in ecclesiology’ at a time of crisis in which ‘the English ecclesiastical scene was dominated by a remorseless and bitterly fought campaign by the Anglo-Catholic party against Anglican participation in the projected church union in South India . . . in which men of unquestioned spiritual as well as intellectual distinction allowed themselves, by undisciplined indulgence in every sort of crude and totally uninformed bigotry, to bring the characteristically Catholic vision of the Church of Christ into disrepute among Anglicans . . . .’ See D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, Theology 96 (March/April 1993), pp. 101–17 (107). Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 22. Anglo-Catholics were certainly not alone among Anglicans in this regard. MacKinnon indicted the ecclesiological writing of S. T. Coleridge for ‘complicity in what has been since the seventeenth century arguably the worst flaw in Anglican Christianity, namely the bland assumption that the Church of England effectively embodies the authentic norm, not simply of English but of British Christianity. Few if any mistakes of fact in the history of the Christian Church have been more sheerly disastrous both in the perpetuation of unnecessary antagonisms and (more gravely) in encouragement of the uglier forms of spiritual pride, both individual and collective.’ See D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Coleridge and Kant’ in Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies (ed. John Beer; Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), p. 199. Ibid., p. 20.

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that witness to the truth which no more relies on the compulsive power of superior propaganda than it does on that of physical force, but which leaves the issue open, and is receptive, expectant, always seeking to fulfil the law of self-emptying, of kenosis.45 In other words, the Anglo-Catholic ecclesiological tradition had failed to develop ‘a concept of the authentically Christian . . . which will encourage without sacrifice of that which is supposed to be precious truth, a readiness to permit the way in which that truth has been received to win enlargement from those who stand within a seemingly alien tradition’.46 What MacKinnon called for here is ‘an authentic Christian fidelity to tradition . . . always receptive, ready to learn, open to promise’.47 Turning then to a more general critique of a triumphalist ‘Constantinian’ legacy, MacKinnon indicted the addiction of the Church of England to the forms and styles of establishment, all the time bearing in mind that he wrote ‘against the background of a very vivid sense of the decline in prestige and influence of the Anglican Communion’.48 Establishment, whether in the realm of ideas or principles or in the form of constitutional and institutional guarantees, threatened to subvert the apostolic character of the church by envisioning it as ‘the embodiment of an ultimate security’ which, to his mind, already betrayed an idolatry of the institution.49 It operated by cultivating a ‘status of invulnerability’ for the church and its beliefs which in turn encouraged devotion to the ecclesiological and institutional structures that guaranteed their preservation.50 Thus, the ‘deadly evils’ which MacKinnon had identified in the Anglo-Catholicism of the 1940s he took to be ‘part of the built-in inheritance of the Constantinian Church, the Church whose status is guaranteed and which allows the manner of that guarantee (the exercise by the civil power of a measure of external compulsive authority) to invade the substance of her life’.51 More generally, establishment had proved ‘a ground for boasting rather than an opportunity for presence; a status ensuring a counterfeit security rather than a way of assuring that there shall be no withdrawal from the actualities of human life’.52 MacKinnon 45

46

47 51 52

Ibid., pp. 21–22. Contrast MacKinnon’s former willingness to make allowance for the exclusive temper of Anglo-Catholics on precisely these grounds in idem, ‘Some Questions for Anglicans’, p. 108. Ibid., p. 22. MacKinnon clarifies that ‘authenticity’ is meant to replace overworked words like ‘validity’ and ‘orthodoxy’, thus shifting the discussion away from primarily juridical categorizations of ecclesial fidelity yet without collapsing into existentialism. 48 49 50 Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 26. An example from the rise of communist ideology may clarify MacKinnon’s complaint. He noted that it was at the very time that Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, was preoccupied with a busy round of consultations with eminent persons at the heart of the Edwardian establishment that ordinary men and women, gathered

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repudiated the strategy of participation in church work aimed at penetration of the key positions of society as a form of ‘make-believe’ designed to insulate against ‘the sharp pressure of ultimate questions’.53 In designating both ministry and apostolicity as entities in need of kenotic discipline, MacKinnon pointed out that the empirical study of church history showed that the form of ministry and oversight determined by this legacy displayed a ready willingness to sacrifice the individual for the good of the whole, adhering to the counsel and example of Caiaphas rather than Christ, a fact which to him cast doubt upon ‘the highly questionable myth of apostolic succession’ on which the Church of England so insisted.54 There are additional criticisms allied with MacKinnon’s probing of the Church of England’s establishment ethos. First, he pilloried its seductive power by which people of intellectual ability are enlisted in the advancement of its apologetic, deflecting them from their proper work and encouraging a kind of ‘dishonest sophistry’ through flattery and other means in which the first casualties are ‘truth, integrity, openness of mind’.55 Hence, he suggested that those who are called to serve the church through ordination to office or in administrative capacities might find service of the status quo so psychologically satisfying that they might effectively be inhibited from criticism or from even recognizing ‘the need for radical renewal, even for that kind of transformation which can only be described in terms of death and resurrection’.56 Second, he addressed the issue of the alienation of the Church of England’s members from its decision-making processes, especially those concerned with the selection of their bishops. MacKinnon objected that the constitutional arrangements of establishment had taken ‘the most

53 54

55 56

in dingy halls on the periphery of that society, were thrashing out ideas whose catastrophic potential would scarcely have been credited by the social and political elite. What intrigued MacKinnon was that for church leaders it was scarcely conceivable that these two worlds could meet: ‘It was in places into which those who were selfconsciously at ease in our Zion hardly deigned to glance, that the tools which were to shake the world’s foundations were being hammered out. It was in fact in the very humdrum outposts of a consciously godless world’. See idem, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 17, 20. Ibid., pp. 34–35. Ibid., 28–29. The impediment to its work of evangelism and pastoral care from this failure was signalled in idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p 105: ‘if men and women cease to believe, it is, as a matter of fact, less because they find the credenda unintelligible than because their most poignant cries go unheard’. Ibid., pp. 26–27. Ibid., p. 57. He also noted how easily service to the church can become thoroughly self-regarding, noting ‘the high dignity with which the professional ecclesiastic often invests his professional work on behalf of the institution which provides his salary, or even . . . the kind of mock–humble suggestion of self laid on the altar of service, which one has heard highly placed lay servants of the church (often more ‘ecclesiastical’ than

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elementary right’ of Christians to take part in the choice of their chief pastors out of their hands and reduced it to a function of the state.57 Again he had a particular incident in view. When Geoffrey Fisher had given notice of his resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury, the announcement was met immediately by news of the succession of Archbishop Michael Ramsey by translation from York and of Donald Coggan from Bradford to York. By this arrangement the two primatial sees of the Church of England were immediately filled, the first by an Anglo-Catholic, the second by an Evangelical, without any interval for prayer. MacKinnon questioned whether such matters were deemed too important or too insignificant to allow for a period of prayer and pointedly wondered aloud whether the Holy Spirit had been demythologized and replaced by the Patronage Secretary! From this incident MacKinnon teased out two issues. The first is spiritual, namely the effect on the faithful of such a ‘contemptuous public dismissal of the claims of prayer’ in the life of the church and of ‘an answering contempt’ from the faithful for those who comply with it.58 The second is ethical and political. He asked how a church which would not make its own use of power accountable to its members by giving them a say in its decisions could claim the right to commend the ethical value of participation in secular decision-making processes. If the Church of England genuinely stood for democratic values in society at large, MacKinnon argued, it must abolish from its internal life ‘the surviving remnants of structures which first took their shape in a dark age of royal absolutism’.59 An outright gain from the end of constitutional establishment for which MacKinnon longed was a renewed engagement with questions concerning the ethics of war and the hope that ‘episcopal lawn sleeves would cease to flutter in the breeze as their wearer bestowed the diocesan benediction upon the latest Polaris submarine’.60 There is, of course, a Christological point underlying MacKinnon’s attack on these aspects of the ecclesiasticism of the Church of England. Study of the Fourth Gospel, he urged, showed that the subtlest enemies of Christ were those who wanted to make him king, ‘imprisoning him so completely in the structures they would claim to erect on the foundation of their devotion that his work of being lifted up from the earth to draw all men to himself was put in jeopardy by their anxious zeal’.61 There is, finally, a third, more ultimate sense of establishment which MacKinnon brought under scrutiny, a sense arising from his awareness of the church’s involvement in the contemporary crisis of belief as evidenced by the open attack on Christian teaching, clergy and institutions in the public media, ‘the vulnerability of every form of apologetic, and the absence of any kind of intellectual security in believing today’.62 MacKinnon took these

57 59

archbishop, bishop, dean or vicar) use to characterize their lives: “I serve the church.”’ Idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 91. 58 Ibid., pp. 30–31. Ibid., pp. 30–31. 60 61 62 Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid. Ibid., p. 36.

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facets of the church’s experience to be parables of its existential realization in its relationship with the world, of the law of kenosis, ‘the law of the Incarnation by which the manner of its own fidelity is bound’.63 MacKinnon denied that the church simply had the answer to radical unbelief.64 Its confrontation with the world pressed upon it the challenge of eliminating from its articulation of Christian faith every self-contradiction and counter–intuitive element with, however, no assurance that such tasks could ever be successfully and finally prosecuted or that whatever the results, they would be heard and received in a hostile or apathetic culture of unbelief.65 Here his earlier and rather confident expectations for the societal and political impact of ecclesiological renewal give way to the recognition that even a renewed church might well be involved in a kind of defeat as part of its existential realization of kenosis. Still MacKinnon dared to believe that such a defeat might yet be one ‘eloquent of hope’ and ‘suffused by a sense of promise’ rather than received as an argument leading towards an ‘unhealthy cult’ of powerlessness and despair.66 All the same, he eschewed any form of retreat into the ‘ready-made assurance that these conflicts are resolved in a providential order that governs our comings and goings and makes all things work together for good’.67 Turning abruptly at the end of his lecture to comment on ‘the supposed damage inflicted on Christianity by Plato’, MacKinnon summarily depicted any such form of retreat from the actualities of the world, whether in the realm of ideas, institutions, or inherited structures, as the bane of every kind of ecclesiological fundamentalism: The ecclesiological fundamentalist of every school, whether he admits it or not, finds in the actual history of his Church something of the 63 64

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66 67

Ibid. Ibid., p. 35. MacKinnon targets here all forms of self-confident apologetic, but one wonders if this criticism is in large part behind his judgement expressed in the lecture that Gore’s trilogy, The Reconstruction of Belief (London: John Murray, 1926), was a failure (p. 19). In those volumes Gore’s extraordinary confidence that the Christian doctrinal edifice would simply remain intact after the Bible had been exposed to historical criticism and the arguments erected on evidence supplied by scientific advancement of all kinds had been followed rigorously through to their conclusion is everywhere apparent. By contrast, only a generation later Adolfs had drawn attention to the decreasing significance of Christianity to the world, to the presence of disbelief and pessimism even within the church and to evidence of a silent falling away and a quiet indifference. See Adolfs, The Grave of God, pp. 7, 15–16. See MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 36: ‘Of course, that is no guarantee that it is such a moment, no assurance that our speechlessness will issue in the rebirth of faith; here as always recollection of the mystery of the Incarnation should bid us expect uncertainty rather than security, the status viatoris rather than the status comprehensoris’. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 36. Ibid., p. 34. Most provocative in this regard is MacKinnon’s later treatment of the evangelist Luke as an instance of this very temptation, lauding on the one hand the profound

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security the καλλιπόλις sought to offer. He may find this security realized in the form of the ecclesiastical structure; or he may find it through imposing on the questionable contingencies of his Church’s history vis-à-vis civil society, an interpretation which makes bold use of the category of the providential. He finds in the contemplation of that history the sort of drug which he needs to still the interrogative temper, and the obstinate determination to ask awkward questions and to go on asking them; he uses the study of that history as a kind of tranquillizer whereby he can lull himself into supposing the unknown somehow known, the unfathomable somehow plumbed to its depths. The ragged edges are made to disappear; the terrible reality of human waste, to which the Churches have added so much by the ways in which they have dealt with men and women, is pushed out of sight.68 The long, passionate, kenotic criticism of establishment comes down in the end not to a programme of reform specifiable in advance but to what MacKinnon described as an issue of spirituality.69 Inwardness is here given its due but not to the extent of obscuring the fact that Christian faith is

68

69

theological penetration of his meditation on Jesus Christ which shaped his gospel narrative while on the other hand uncovering signs of ‘intellectual, indeed spiritual, apostasy’ in his Acts of the Apostles by which the ambiguities and conflicts of the nascent church are smoothed over by ‘the false comfort provided by a crude apologetic’ which portrays all aspects of the church’s progress as providentially ordered, however morally suspect some of these events may be reckoned to be. The balance is recovered in his account ‘only when Luke’s attention is deflected from the busy life of the struggling institution [and] he is enabled to recall and to present with unchallengeable depth of tragic insight the bitter choices out of which indeed the institution came’. See idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 133–34. In his reading of the incident of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira as recounted in Acts 5 he took Peter’s action to reflect a ruthlessness which, he claimed, has come in successive ages to characterize the dedication of its leaders to the survival of the institutional church at all cost, even adherence to Caiaphas’ counsel that one person (one man and one woman in this case) should die for the good of the people at the expense of the risen Lord’s commission to him to strengthen his brothers and sisters (Lk. 22.32). He thought Luke’s failure here typical of the apologist who ‘always by circumstance the servant of an institution which, however exalted in its direction, must sooner or later find in its survival and extension justification of all that is done in its name’ (p. 134). See idem, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, pp. 175–85; and idem, Review of Resurrection, by Rowan Williams, Scottish Journal of Theology 36, no. 1 (March 1983), pp. 131–34 (133–34), for similar treatments of the ecclesiological ‘contamination’ of Luke’s mind. However MacKinnon’s reading of this text is judged, it is clear that his kenotic ecclesiology does not rest upon an idealization of the New Testament church. Ibid., pp. 38–39. MacKinnon’s reference is to the attempt ‘to establish a world without ambiguity’ in which ‘it was demonstrably blasphemous to query the certainty of “a happy ending”’ (p. 38). Ibid., p. 34.

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primarily a material, visible way of life for, as MacKinnon characteristically pointed out, the stress on inwardness carries with it its own capacity to distort authentic ecclesial existence. Yet as the church was being pushed out of the centre and its members enabled to see its life for what it was, MacKinnon cautioned that they would not find immunity from the tragic but come to understand that ‘it is in weakness that our strength is made perfect: in genuine weakness, not the simulated powerlessness of the spiritual poseur’.70 The Gore Lecture concludes with two summations indicating the stark implications of the extension of the concept of kenosis to ecclesiology. The first neatly encapsulates the dialectic of its fundamental theme: What is cushioned is likely to be invalid. What encourages us to defend the security allegedly bestowed by our traditions puts our Christian understanding in peril. That understanding is imperilled also, of course, by the cult of the alleged autonomy of faith, according to which faith is creative of its own objects. Here too there is flight to a security, albeit an inward security, a withdrawal from accepting the peril and the promise of the Incarnation.71 The second simply sharpens the critical focus of kenosis for Anglicans in thrall to forms of establishment: To live as a Christian in the world today is necessarily to live an exposed life; it is to be stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows. We deceive ourselves if we suppose that we do not seek to hide ourselves away from the kind of exposure to which I am referring. To do so might quite properly be thought the besetting sin of the characteristically Anglican ethos, a cultivated avoidance of extremes. And whether we like it or not we do live in an extreme situation.72 Surprisingly perhaps, the dominant note to emerge from this summons to forsake all forms of external protection was a profound hopefulness which was to imbue both his plea for reconstruction of ecclesiological doctrine and reform of church life, and embrace the promise of ‘a more inclusive, if much more costly, charity’.73 Ecclesial and ecclesiological kenosis thus are grounded in, and hold out the promise of, renewed engagement with what MacKinnon called the laws of authentic Christian existence – ‘that is, laws of existence in dependence on the one whose essence lay in his dependence on the Father’.74 Exposure is both a condition and a consequence of the church’s

70 73

Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 37.

71 74

Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 40.

72

Ibid., p. 34.

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being, understood primarily in terms of mission, a mission originating from and depending upon that mission which is Christ’s own. The direction of thought in the Gore Lecture brings MacKinnon’s exposure of the tragic ambiguity of church life into sharper focus and points to the tension at the basis of his theological thought as it had developed in the intervening decades since the end of the Second World War. The crucial problem for MacKinnon was to spell out in the light of the precariousness of its social location the precise nature of the relation between the church and Jesus Christ and between the church and the world. What the exclusionary ecclesiological performance of Charles Gore and other prominent AngloCatholics had made evident was that no matter how carefully nuanced their theoretical presentation of the ecclesial analogia Christi, in practice it fell back into univocity, prizing the already at the expense of the not-yet, thereby freezing description of the church in a timeless and static uniformity manifesting an already far-too-realized eschatology. The fact that the Body of Christ had in actuality acceded to a life in the world manifestly unlike that lived by the Incarnate One disclosed at what depths the ecclesiological mediation of the analogia Christi had foundered. By contrast, the visible church had been conceived in that ecclesiology in such a way as to abstract it from the contingent condition of the lives of its members with the noted baleful effects for its presence and mission in the world as well as for its claim to know and live by the truth. MacKinnon responded by attempting to bring the church under determination by a Christological limit to which its thought and practice must correspond, all the while acknowledging the disturbance of the traditional Christology by the ‘problem of metaphysics’. By a reassertion of ‘realism’ in opposition both to an inwardly focused, reflexive understanding and its manifestation in an autonomous, ecclesiologically.secured belief in a Christus praesens and to an externally focused, historically determined fixation on set ecclesial form, he set about to probe what might be understood of the determinate direction, the transitivity of Christian faith always oriented upon and corrigible with reference to its object external to the self.75

III. MacKinnon’s ‘Realism’ Fundamental to MacKinnon’s construal of realism and its theological application was an attempt to argue for acknowledgement of ‘the authority of the objective’, namely the fact that ‘the world is as it is, and not as we might want it’.76 This approach led MacKinnon to press the question, ‘How are objects of experience possible?’, in a way calculated to undermine the notion 75

76

MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 27; idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 44. Ibid., p. 139.

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that intellectual activity is ‘a prolonged essay in imaginative or inventive ingenuity’.77 A primary objective of his argument thus attempted to undercut on both epistemological and ethical grounds what he took to be the unwarranted anthropological premise at the heart of idealism, namely the supposition that ‘the autobiographical [is] uniquely transparent to the subject and therefore matter for bold and confident assertion, quite improper where what is otherwise the case is concerned’ on the grounds that ‘we are present to ourselves as we are not to the world around us’.78 As Rowan Williams has aptly remarked, MacKinnon’s resolve ‘to demythologize a free, triumphant, endlessly resourceful, sovereign willing self remains focally important’.79 While a full account of his treatment of the range of arguments from Kant, G. E. Moore and Aristotle, among others, pressed into service of MacKinnon’s realist concerns would take us far beyond the scope of this study, it is necessary to sketch at least their principal elements and overall direction. In matters of epistemology MacKinnon was concerned with the chronic controversies in the history of philosophy between realists and their idealist or constructivist opponents, the former elaborating a theory of truth as correspondence between a proposition and that which is the case, and the latter construing truth as coherence achieved through the exercise of autonomous understanding. If his own bias was admittedly towards a realist position, in his elucidation of this problem he turned repeatedly to Kant as one philosopher whose theory of knowledge MacKinnon construed as a ‘middle way between those two positions’ or one at least which ‘sought to do justice to the insights both contained’.80 In fact, MacKinnon’s exploration of the controversy revealed ‘important areas of border dispute between these allegedly contrasted opposites’81 such that even where the human conceptual constants of learning about the world were concerned, it was ‘most difficult to draw a line between what is imposed from the side of the subject, and what from that of the material with which the subject has to do’.82 Influenced at least to some degree by P. F. Strawson’s ‘austere’ interpretation of the Critique of

77 78 79 80

81 82

Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 78, emphasis MacKinnon’s. See also idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 53–54. Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, p. 77. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Further Reflections’, in The Resurrection, p. 110; idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 138; and idem, Themes in Theology, p. 42. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 139. Ibid., 140. Typically MacKinnon directs our attention to a wide range of examples drawn from everyday life in order to demonstrate the intractability of the world to our own schemes by which he underscores the accommodations exacted from us by the world we inhabit. See, for instance, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 2–6; and Explorations in Theology 5, p. 139.

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Pure Reason,83 MacKinnon’s treatment of Kant’s epistemology centred primarily on elements of Kant’s ‘metaphysics of experience’, his metaphysical agnosticism and epistemological anthropocentrism, while other doctrines more peculiar to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism were relegated quietly to the background. MacKinnon’s account leaned towards the objective side of Kant’s theory of knowledge, and for this reason his own interpretation of Kant might well be described under a designation he employed in a 1947 article, namely ‘objective relativism’, a term which aptly expresses the polar interplay between form and content, subject and object and the fusion of spontaneity and dependence in Kant’s thought.84 By the term ‘relativism’ MacKinnon meant to grant not simply the notion that all human knowledge is perspectival, relative to a point of view, or that what we come to know is selected and shaped by our own interest and is inextricably linked to the form of life or situatedness in which it has come to be known, but that the very conditions of the objectivity of the world we inhabit are determined by the concepts revealed by critical reflection on the diversifications of human cognition.85 By the same token, MacKinnon registered the claim that the human knower wins her way to self-consciousness in and over time by the recognition of the contours of that self-consciousness by contrast with the permanence of features external to the self which serve as markers of change.86 Although the world and the knower are relative to each other, MacKinnon argued that the world is one in which we have to do with things to which events happen according to laws and that these features of the world are the necessary, indispensable conditions of objectively referential statement.87 On the basis of causality a single, public, spatio–temporal order is irreversibly established. The conceptual diversification of human cognition is significant, then, not primarily as belonging to the internal experience of the subject but as the condition for the constitution of that subject’s world.88 Noting that Kant’s account turned repeatedly

83

84

85

86 88

P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966). For MacKinnon’s review article see idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 249–56. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Kant’s Agnosticism’, Blackfriars 28 (June 1947), pp. 256–63 (260–61). See also idem, A Study in Ethical Theory, pp. 61, 65. See, for example, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 242–45; idem, ‘Moral Freedom’, in D. M. MacKinnon et al., Making Moral Decisions: Open Lectures Delivered at Cambridge During the Lent Term 1968 (London: SPCK, 1969), pp. 4, 14; idem, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 139–40; idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 2; and idem, ‘Intellect and Imagination’, in The Weight of Glory: A Vision and Practice for Christian Faith: The Future of Liberal Theology: Essays for Peter Baelz (ed. D. W. Hardy and P. H. Sedgwick; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), pp. 33–34. 87 MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 6. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 141.

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to the subjective side of the matter, MacKinnon, by contrast, often revisited Kant’s claim that the understanding, while spontaneous in its operation, is limited by its inability to posit its matter out of its own resources.89 And although MacKinnon readily granted that the formal threefold synthesis (apprehension in intuition, reproduction through imagination, and recognition by concept) spontaneously renders knowledge in tensed or ‘narrative’ form, shaping and augmenting its sporadic and fragmentary representations towards an ever more completely unified knowledge, he also resolutely insisted with Kant that it is the role of reason to curtail the imaginative flights to which such synthesis might lead by restrictively anchoring it to its perceptual base in experience.90 Echoing Strawson, MacKinnon cautioned that the Kantian emphasis on the unity of experience should not be confused with the experience of unity.91 Thus, his characteristic insistence is that human knowledge is subject to two kinds of limitation. First, since the understanding, unable to intuit its own matter, must await the deliverances of the sensibility, MacKinnon argued that Kant’s epistemology cuts off the route to any immediate intuition of a substantial spiritual self.92 We must win our way piecemeal and intermittently towards a self-understanding always open to continual correction. Second, human knowing is limited by its relatively stable categorial and conceptual reach such that knowledge of a world which does not correspond to the categories and concepts of our thinking would simply not be knowledge of our world.93 There would seem, then, to be no way towards an immediate intuition of anything like an ‘analogically participated transcendental’.94 At its most basic, then, MacKinnon’s construal of Kant’s epistemology is objectively oriented, placing its emphasis upon the receptive character of the sensibility and the recognitional capacity of concepts as that which enables us to ‘make response’ to our world.95 Yet in the background, MacKinnon granted, there is the unconditioned which, though 89

90

91 92 93

94

95

MacKinnon, ‘Kant’s Agnosticism’, p. 258. See also idem, review of Kant’s First Critique, by H. W. Cassirer, Church Quarterly Review 156 (1955), pp. 427–30 (428). D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Some Epistemological Reflections on Mystical Experience’, in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (ed. S. T. Katz; London: Sheldon Press, 1978), pp. 133–34. See also idem, ‘Coleridge and Kant’, p.189; and idem, ‘Intellect and Imagination’, p. 32. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 250. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 4, 7. MacKinnon, ‘Kant’s Agnosticism’, p. 258; and idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 254. That which is new in human experience can be assimilated on the basis of the relative stability of such features of that categorial context as a unified spatio–temporal, causal continuum. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 231. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 209–10; idem, A Study in Ethical Theory, pp. 81, 214–15; and idem, ‘Aspects of Kant’s Influence on British Theology’, p. 362. MacKinnon, ‘Kant’s Agnosticism’, p. 259.

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supplying ‘a kind of context’, lies beyond the reach of the categories and concepts of the understanding and thus outside the bounds of intelligible descriptive discourse.96 On this ‘austere’ account, MacKinnon interpreted Kant’s achievement as ‘the delineation of the condition of a characteristically human experience, especially on its objective side, establishing thereby the illusions both of a dogmatic empiricism and of a confident claim to offer theoretical answers concerning a supposedly transcendent origin and destiny of the world, and its nature, which ignore the duty of assigning sense to our concepts within and not without the framework of experience’.97 Clearly MacKinnon’s hint about the conditions of objectively referential statement indicates the extent to which he has angled his construal of the relationship between the subjective and objective in Kant’s epistemology in the direction of a correspondence theory of truth, suggesting that if it were paradoxical to speak of a correspondence theory in Kant’s work, it might be an ‘enlightening paradox’ all the same.98 He also suggested that Kant’s description of the human knower might be read as offering, albeit indirectly, an ontology of the human subject.99 But if there is to be any theology on this account, MacKinnon surmised that it can only be negative theology.100 It is evident that Kant’s account of the process of human knowing moves resolutely away from the particular towards the universal. What can be said, then, of the particular if Kant’s descriptive metaphysics ruled out knowledge of things-in-themselves? Claiming that epistemology tended to overplay the subjective, MacKinnon turned to analytical arguments from the philosophy of logic, especially to G. E. Moore’s work on external and internal relations, in support of his realist approach and its correspondence theory of truth.101 Moore’s argument took aim at F. H. Bradley’s claim that all relations are ‘intrinsical’, that is, that ‘at both ends the relation must affect and pass into the being of its terms or that a relation ‘penetrates the being of its terms’.102 Clarifying that what Bradley had in view were relational properties, Moore 96

97 Ibid., p. 261. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 251. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 36–37. See his earlier A Study in Ethical Theory, p. 70, where the claim that Kant could be interpreted as holding to a kind of correspondence theory is advanced on the grounds of the ‘necessary complementarity’ of the spontaneous understanding and passive reception of a given in his epistemology. In a 1980 piece MacKinnon again argued that ‘we can and must allow an inconceivable correspondence between the way in which what we experience is temporally and spatially distributed and the way in which things are’. Idem, Themes in Theology, p. 43. 99 MacKinnon, ‘Kant’s Agnosticism’, p. 262. 100 MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 9. 101 D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Substance’, in New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (ed. Renford Bambrough; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Humanities Press, 1965), p. 118. See G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922), pp. 276–309. 102 G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies, p. 276, emphasis Moore’s. 98

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analyzed the ‘dogma’ of internal relations in the form of the proposition: ‘In the case of every relational property, it can always be truly asserted of any term A which has the property, that any term which had not had it would necessarily have been different from A.’103 Moore then unpacked the concept of necessity in terms of logical entailment such that the dogma can be stated in the proposition: ‘To say of a given relational property P that it modifies or is internal to a given term A which possesses it, is to say that from the proposition that a thing has not got P it follows that the thing is different from A.’104 ‘Different from A’ is further analyzed by Moore in terms of both numerical difference and qualitative difference, leading to his rejecting as untrue the proposition ‘if P be a relational property which belongs to A, then P is internal to A both in the sense (1) that the absence of P entails qualitative difference from A; and (2) that the absence of P entails numerical difference from A’.105 Taking the example of a discriminable part of a complex whole, Moore argued that though the whole could not have existed without the part, the part might perfectly well have existed without being part of that particular whole. Yet Moore claimed that this is what the ‘dogma of internal relations’ expressly denied, namely that a term which does have a relational property could exist apart from that property. Moore argued that this was contrary to common sense, claiming that in the case of many of the relational properties which things have, their having them is a ‘mere matter of fact’.106 Moore’s argument may be summed up as showing that some relational properties are not internal, that a term which has them might well not have had them, and that from the proposition that a thing is this thing, it does not follow that it has to other things all the relations which it in fact has.107 MacKinnon claimed that Moore’s argument in some sense established a rather elusive kind of fact about the world.108 The pluralist realism to which this argument was key affirmed the reality of ‘mutually irreducible’, ‘ultimately different’, even ‘isolated’ facts which can be known in their ‘unassimilable particularity’ without waiting upon the totality of relations into which they might enter with other facts.109 That they do enter relations (and leave them) means that things have histories, that is, they are subject to change unpredictable in advance, and hence if they are to be known at all they exact the discipline of concentration, the sustained attentiveness of the knower over time.110 The particular, however, on this account resists final 103 107 108 109

110

104 105 106 Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., 285. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 288–89. Ibid., p. 306. MacKinnon, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Substance’, pp. 99, 112. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 33. See also idem, ‘What Is a Metaphysical Statement?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 41 (1940–1941), pp. 1–26 (17). MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 287. Another way he put this point was that ‘the concept of the thing is the concept of the way in which various sorts of events

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assimilation within any comprehensive explanatory scheme. MacKinnon interpreted Moore’s achievement in the face of the determinism of Bradleian monism as a vindication of the contingent as a feature of the world.111 If it offered a metaphysics, it was only, in Rowan Williams’ useful description, a negative metaphysics.112 Yet it was this argument, MacKinnon claimed, that allowed him to be a realist.113 At the same time he found in it something similar to a ‘rehabilitation of the notion of transcendence’ in the sense that thought had a reference beyond itself, that things existed with which one had to come to terms, that the world appeared as something given.114 He went so far as to suggest that Moore’s argument, despite its atheistic context, unconsciously opened the way for a theology rooted in a doctrine of revelation115 and that, in an idiom borrowed from Hoskyns, it rendered intelligible the claim that ‘the sheerly particular could be “the place where it is demanded of men that they should believe”’.116 One other strand of argumentation on the theoretical side remains to be considered. MacKinnon observed that Moore’s logical argument bordered on aspects of Aristotle’s ontology, particularly his polarization of the fundamental modes of being on substance.117 In the wake of Moore’s work, MacKinnon still found himself hard-pressed to articulate precisely the nature of a thing, and in his probing of this problem he turned to Aristotle in the hope that his explorations of the notion of substance might shed light on the notions of thing and existence.118 MacKinnon pointed out that whereas Kant’s categories were categories of understanding, Aristotle’s categories were categories of being, an attempt to take inventory of the kind of things that exist and of the relations between them.119 At the head of Aristotle’s list of the most fundamental kinds of things there is substance, that which exists of itself or that without which there is nothing and that to which all other modes of being are relative. MacKinnon drew attention to

111 112 113 114 115

116 117 118

are organizable or constructible’ such that the notion of event is shown to be ‘parasitic on that of thing’. MacKinnon here points to a certain precariousness in a thing’s achievement of substantiality or ‘defining quality’ of which he says that it is ‘a Gestalt-qualität which takes time to manifest itself’, noting also that it is by induction that its future is plotted. The atomistic tendency of MacKinnon’s argument is qualified by his acknowledgment that the more that is known about the processes in which things are involved, the more things are seen to be involved in each other (pp. 287–88). See also idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 5–6; and idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 56–60. MacKinnon, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Substance’, p. 112. Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, p. 74. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 62. Ibid., 63. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘And the Son of Man that Thou Visitest Him’, Christendom 8 (1938), pp. 186–92, 260–72 (190). MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 64–65. MacKinnon, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Substance’, p. 100. 119 Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., pp. 118, 98.

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an oscillation in Aristotle’s thought on the question of what it is that renders a thing determinate. One argument identifies the individuating principle as a bare substratum, a vehicle which bears both accidental and essential qualities, even, in MacKinnon’s colourful image, a ‘clothes-horse on which qualities are draped.’120 Primary substantiality is on this view the subject, the underlying vehicle, of change.121 But on this account, MacKinnon suggested, it remains but a formal unknown, even something bordering on steresis, and so lacks the ontological dignity which Aristotle attributed to substance as the pivotal realization of being.122 He identified another argument in Aristotle which identifies the substantial as the concrete thing itself in which qualities have a setting apart from which they are but mere abstractions.123 Primary substantiality is here ‘embodied form’ or ‘existent actuality’124 or ‘the concrete compact of the union of form and matter’.125 While MacKinnon characterized Aristotle’s use of the categories as certainly discursive, that is, as an attempt to sort out, he pressed the point that such sorting is not simply concerned with sorts but with that which exists to be sorted, that is, with the very question of actuality and unreality.126 MacKinnon was concerned to show that ontology for Aristotle went beyond logical examination of interrelated elements in a fundamental conceptual scheme to grapple with the pivotal notion of the self-existent. The benefit of this, to MacKinnon’s mind, was that Aristotle’s doctrine of substance might be employed in such a way as to focus less on the essence of things and more on its capacity to enable recognition of a world in which diverse concrete things exist and of the relations that obtain between them.127 But what status does MacKinnon accord to this kind of ontological philosophizing, especially given his sympathetic treatment of Kant’s metaphysical agnosticism and the ambivalence which he conceded in the face of Moore’s pluralist realism? Doesn’t the move from exploration of logical relations between concepts to an account of self-existent entities involve a metabasis eis allo genos? For one thing, MacKinnon ruled out using it as a prolegomenon to theology, a direct extrapolation of the notion of the self-existent to the transcendent realm. Yet he urged that such a tradition of ontological analysis in which the concrete self-existent and the formal idea of essence are bound inextricably together might be drawn upon and allowed to show in its use the kinds of discoveries it might be able to furnish at the level of ‘the humdrum and the everyday’.128 The ‘aporia’ which remained after Aristotle’s sustained wrestling with the category of substance 120 122 123 125 126 128

121 Ibid., p. 103. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 103–105. See also idem, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 284. 124 Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., pp. 105–106. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 13. 127 MacKinnon, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Substance’, p. 108. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., pp. 115, 108.

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led MacKinnon to acknowledge its ‘openness of texture’ as particularly promising for the articulation of novel problems.129 Though he reckoned its status ‘obscure’, MacKinnon suggested that ontology, if it is ‘a genuine concern with the ultimate’, might allow re-interpretation of the characteristic insight of the realist as a liberation from over-preoccupation with the status and nature of objects of perception.130 MacKinnon’s underscoring of ‘the authority of the objective’ in his probing of these three traditions of argument from Kant, Moore and Aristotle must be interpreted in that context in which ‘our thought about the world and the world about which we are thinking seem to flow into each other’,131 a context in which he acknowledged ‘the hint of an antagonism’ between that which is given as actual and our constructive intellectual activity.132 If Moore’s logical pluralism impelled MacKinnon towards an atomicity which elicited attentiveness to the concrete particular even as it threatened to void the very notion of a world, the countervailing tendency of Kant’s account of the constructive, synthetic direction of our knowing, his ‘hostility to the particular’,133 provided an effective counterpoise. Aristotle’s ontological analysis with its oscillation between the particular and the general, the material and the formal, offered MacKinnon again an opportunity to allow what might be said of the concrete actuality of things to show itself through sustained attention to the notion of the self-existent while avoiding the pitfalls of atomism. MacKinnon’s realism, then, makes space for consideration of what it is that ‘pulls us up short’,134 that resists or disrupts our final assimilation of the particular into ready-to-hand, comprehensive, explanatory schemes, all the while withstanding the temptation to slacken reductively the dialectical interplay by which that objectivity is won. It allowed him to elucidate the way in which something may be said to stand over against us even as it is also present to and in relation with us. The interweaving of these three traditions left its mark on MacKinnon’s rather elusive correspondence theory of truth of which it might justifiably be said that he is able to pinpoint more precisely what it is not than what it is.135 While the claim that truth is correspondence between a proposition

129 130 132 134 135

MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 157. 131 MacKinnon, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Substance’, p. 118. Ibid., p. 116. 133 MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 240. Ibid., p. 25. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 165. The problem is endemic in contemporary critical philosophizing about truth where the notion of correspondence continues to elicit a variety of defences which seemingly fall well short of comprehensive theoretical demonstration. See Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 131, for the remark that such ‘theories of truth’ lack the features a theory ought to have, namely clarity, precision and predictive power. MacKinnon himself reckoned that attempts to define a theory of truth tend to drive one into ‘second-rate poetry’

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and that which is the case is repeatedly affirmed, caution is routinely sounded against seeking anything like the correspondence of the details of a photograph with the features of its original subject136 or an isomorphic relation between ‘atomic propositions’ and ‘atomic facts’137 or even ‘a oneone correlation between terms of propositions and constituents of fact’138 or between the substantives of our language and substantial entities.139 For MacKinnon, correspondence is more akin to the somewhat looser relation that obtains between a composite sketch and the suspect whom the police hope to arrest or to the art of portraiture by which an artist renders the character of her subject.140 Correspondence is urged as a notion which is to be allowed to ‘pervade and control’ the way we understand thinking to relate to that which is the case.141 It is an ‘orientation’, a ‘questing’ in which the ‘right to affirm depends also on an element of external reference, of fit between statement and what is the case’.142 Again in this rather loose terminology we can detect MacKinnon’s concern that thought take forms of expression appropriate to its object.143 At the same time, he recognized with Aristotle that in no discipline can an akribeia be achieved beyond that which that discipline allows.144 The intent of MacKinnon’s realism on the theoretical side, then, is to anchor constructive thought to actuality and to exact a perduring attentiveness to the individual self-existent thing over against the all-embracing explanatory system. Bearing in mind MacKinnon’s insistence on the unity of theory and practice, it is not surprising that his explorations in moral philosophy should also argue for acknowledgement of the authority of the objectivity of the moral order and at the same time attempt to undercut the rationalist selfconfidence characteristic of idealism. In turning to the latter topic first, we may note MacKinnon’s judgement that reflection on the self as moral agent again entails a discontinuity, a fundamental disruption of any all-embracing theory of the self.145 To illustrate this point MacKinnon often turned to the moral thought of Joseph Butler, throwing into relief the extent to which human beings find themselves at war within, often estranged from

136 137 139 140

141 143 144 145

and suggested as a more modest criterion for the success of a truth theory ‘the extent to which it enables us to enter more intimately upon the way in which the threads of the idea are woven together in our experience’. Idem, ‘The Christian Understanding of Truth’, p. 23. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 73. 138 Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 154. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 12. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 73; see also idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 155–56. 142 Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 154, emphasis MacKinnon’s. Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, p. 76. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 86. MacKinnon, ‘What Is a Metaphysical Statement?’, p. 20.

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themselves, mired in practical and theoretical perplexity before the complex, often conflicting, demands, public and private, of the moral life.146 Signalling Butler’s homiletic treatment of the story of David and Bathsheba, for instance, he probed the problem of moral self-deception, noting the various moral distortions which issued from it, especially those related to self-regard.147 Damage to self and others, failure, despair and irreparable loss, even that which arises despite the most rigorously interrogative selfscrutiny, point not only to the dialectical structure of the moral life itself but to the tragic character of the discontinuities which engulf human behaviour. MacKinnon’s suspicion that even the life depicted in the Beatitudes could be warped towards self-glorification may perhaps lie at the root of his reticence towards the theology of the ‘servant church’ which was just gaining momentum in the 1960s among Anglicans: ‘The most searching, demanding plea that a man put himself at the disposal of others, may provide the means whereby he imposes upon them a dominion which by its very spirituality avoids recognition for what it is, and is quickly imbued with a sheerly demonic quality.’148 Even in the context of acts in which such self-regard is seemingly absent, MacKinnon suggested that at a deeper level the motivation might well lie in an ‘unacknowledged egoism’.149 MacKinnon’s investigation of a variety of styles of moral philosophy also mirrors the ‘objective relativism’ of his descriptive metaphysics in an attempt to uncover ‘some kind of analogy between our commerce with the transcendent, and our commerce with the world about us’.150 Among the principal concerns here are MacKinnon’s exploration of the relation between the ethical and the factual, the moral life and that which is the case and the question on what grounds it might be said that we are the authors or originators of our own actions. His account takes shape in the perplexing overlap between the metaphysical and the ethical, that context in which the conflicts between freedom and determinism, creativity and receptivity, autonomy and grace are 146

147

148 149

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MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, p. 200; and see idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 38–39. See also Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation upon the Nature of Virtue (introduction, analysis and notes by W. R. Matthews; London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1949). MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 91–92, 136–37. Also idem, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, in Prospect for Theology: Essays in Honour of H. H. Farmer (ed. F. G. Healy; Welwyn, UK: James Nisbet & Co., 1966), pp. 176–78. See Butler, Fifteen Sermons, pp. 150–63. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 128. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 140. Compare Kierkegaard’s skewering of human compassion in idem, Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse Which Accompanied It (trans. with introduction and notes by Walter Lowrie; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 61–65. For MacKinnon’s comparison of Kierkegaard and Butler in terms of an ‘idiom of protest’, see idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 124–25. Ibid., p. 39.

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found to be particularly acute. While in the execution of this task primarily Kantian concerns guide and inform the discussion at a formal level, they are not allowed ultimately to set its term. MacKinnon claimed in Butlerian fashion that the richly complex, many-levelled ethical commitments of an individual life called for a corresponding model of ethics in which both the receptivity of faith and a creative moral autonomy could be held together in embodied form, even if such form might seem a ‘marriage of incompatibles’ in which very real discontinuities prove intractable to final reconciliation.151 MacKinnon eschewed any approach to ethics which would reduce this tangled complexity to a neat formula, such as the utilitarian doctrine of interest, and likewise rejected out of hand any theory of unconstrained moral inventiveness. Instead, MacKinnon put Kant in conversation with those, such as Plato and Butler, whose ethics intended to lay bare the structure, the ontological lineaments, of the moral order, accentuating the extent to which their moral philosophy argues for a kind of correspondence between the moral order and a particular form of life.152 And insofar as MacKinnon was concerned to articulate a Christian theological ethics under such categories as the contemplative and the apostle, he underscored recognition of the degree to which St. Paul’s ethics, again grounded in a determinate and particular form of life oriented upon an ontology, can be said to ‘contradict’ Kant.153 MacKinnon’s interest in correspondence in his account of ethics has its source in a realism which honours the authority of the objective in the moral realm, namely that what the agent attempts ‘to affirm in conduct, to seek through self-discipline, is there to be affirmed or to be sought’.154 At the formal level Kant’s influence on MacKinnon’s discussion of ethics is unmistakable. With Kant (and Butler), MacKinnon gave full value to the intrusive and peremptory authority of the moral order.155 He saw the transcendent therein disclosed as both ‘something that presses on us with a directness and immediacy which requires no argument to convince us of its reality’ and of its supreme significance in human life and that towards which we are thrust by that same moral experience, the sense of being under an 151

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MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, pp. 272–76; and idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 150. Ibid., p. 198; and idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 37. Comparing Plato with Bentham’s followers, for example, MacKinnon argued in his Gifford Lectures that ‘the way in which we live our lives, even the sharpness with which the question how we should do so presses on us, imposes a veto on any sort of light-hearted disregard of questions concerning the way in which things are. Morality is not a matter of arbitrary choice; it is in some sense expressive, at the level of human action, of the order of the world’ (p. 38). Of Plato’s treatment of Socrates’ life MacKinnon remarked that in his life and death ‘there was to be found a concretion, one might say a mimesis, of the way in which things ultimately are’ (p. 110). 154 MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, p. 265. Ibid., p. 261. Ibid., p. 169; and idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 54.

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absolute moral obligation.156 Thus, in the midst of our everyday life we are said to stand in constant relationship with the transcendent which breaks in upon us and with which by a ‘relentless urge’ or ‘besetting nisus’ that belongs to our nature as inherently metaphysical beings we engage and are engaged at the level of the will absolutely.157 It is in choice, decision and action that ‘we are projected into commerce with the ultimate’.158 But even to speak of the ‘reality’ of this relationship defies the limits of intelligible descriptive discourse which it had been the purpose of the first Critique to establish. Kant’s solution was to discipline this preoccupation by arguing for the primacy of the practical reason, emptying ethical language of all discursive and referential content such that it derives from no indicative but rather is imperative in mood.159 The form of the good life for Kant is the moral law expressed as an immanent categorical imperative grounded in the rational will under whose sovereignty the personal is subordinated to the formal and universal, demanding, MacKinnon argued, a kind of disinterestedness, even self-forgetfulness, on the part of the moral agent through the cultivation of an ‘austere objectivity’ in fulfilment of its demand that we do our duty.160 Thus, MacKinnon speaks of being ‘pitchforked willy-nilly from the level of the conditioned to that of the unconditioned’ under the imperative of the moral law.161 While this construction grants that there is a problem of metaphysics with which it is eminently worthwhile to engage, its insistence on the peremptory character of the moral order rivets attention on moral response as a faciendum, exacting again the discipline of concentration by underscoring and cautioning against the intellectual and moral danger of fruitless preoccupation with speculation about the theoretically all-embracing.162 The antinomy which is exposed here lies in an awareness of being, in Kantian terms, ‘phenomenally determined but noumenally free’,163 of knowing ourselves to act under the compulsion of a particular inheritance, historical, cultural, social and personal, and yet also to be the initiators of our acts such that we can properly call them our own.164 Yet MacKinnon was at odds with the formal, abstract quality of Kant’s account and objected that it was far too narrow to do justice to the experience of moral perplexity in the face of competing goods or conflicting duties and that it overlooked the linguistic 156 157 158 159 160

161 164

MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 55, 57. MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, pp. 79–80, 81, 109. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 62. Ibid., p. 55. MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, pp. 85, 104, 106–07; and idem, ‘Coleridge and Kant’, p. 201. Under the moral law, he argued, human beings are ‘almost bondslaves by nature’ of the claims of an impersonal objectivity in terms of their own affairs. See idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 145. 162 163 Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., pp. 111–13. Ibid., p. 133. See MacKinnon, ‘Moral Freedom’, pp. 16–19, where he speaks of the moral agent as both standing within the context of causal continuities and at the same time over against

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character of moral endeavour, the fact that the context of our moral acts is a ‘form of life’ that comes about through relationships forged between the self and others through various kinds of discourse.165 Kant’s stress on the peremptory and uncontrollable character of the unconditioned was welcomed, however, as a repudiation of all attempts at ethical self-realization which mute the note of responsibility in favour of unconstrained creativity. Of primary importance for MacKinnon in all this was the possibility of an account of human moral agency in which the compatibility and complementarity of freedom and determinism in human moral agency might be rendered intelligible. To this end he repeatedly instanced Albert Camus’ reference to those Spanish Roman Catholics imprisoned in Franco’s jails following the Spanish Civil War, who, all the while believing in ‘the supreme significance’ of the ecclesial mediation of grace, resolutely refused to receive the Eucharist since it had been coercively enjoined on all prisoners against their consciences at the dictate of the state.166 In these prisoners the way of faith and the way of conscience, receptivity and autonomy are said to interpenetrate to the illumination of both. MacKinnon thus held in tension the materiality of ethics and the corrigibility inherent in the open horizon of the moral order arising from the imperative of a ceaseless, flexible form of self-scrutiny which may issue in moral growth and discovery and the concrete action of revolt. A theological ethics must be thought, then, in relation not only to the mystery of the ecclesial communion in which Christian life is to be lived but also in terms of its submission to a Christocentric askesis to which the example of Paul and indeed of Camus’ Spaniards is held to correspond.167

IV. MacKinnon’s Kenotic Ecclesiology Revisited It might be said in summing up this excursus that MacKinnon has made great play with the notion of a recognitional ‘context’ in order to describe

165

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it, ‘transcending’ the ‘total environmental context’ of genetic inheritance and other traditions of influence. Paul Murray correctly judges that in MacKinnon’s account ‘the note of Kantian deontology is subordinated to a concern for the particular truth and the particular good that is Christ’, in idem, ‘Theology in the Borderlands: Donald MacKinnon and Contemporary Theology,’ Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (July 1998), pp. 355–76 (366). MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, pp. 134, 273–74. Key here is MacKinnon’s repeated engagement with the Platonic dialogues. For one highly significant extended discussion see idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 17–30, 94–103. Ibid., pp. 271–72. See also idem, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 60; idem, ‘Moral Freedom’, p. 5; and idem, ‘Autorité et conscience’, p. 429. See Camus’ remarks about this ‘folle générosité’ which comes to expression as revolt, a costly love for others which repudiates injustice and oppression, in Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 375–76. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 72. On this notion expressed in terms of Christian marturia, see idem, ‘Introduction’, in John Henry Newman, Newman’s

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a polarity in which an awareness of something external to ourselves that impinges upon us and of our manifold and besetting preoccupations with that something interpenetrate in such a way as to invite a liberalized inventory of the kinds of thrust beyond the limits of human knowing which may serve, however incompletely and indirectly, to disclose its nature, the kinds of exploration of the transcendent common to the literary and plastic arts, for instance. He argued that the intrusive presence of the transcendent continually demands ‘that we transform our understanding of its content more and more rigorously, as if every articulation of that content were precarious and necessarily incomplete, in order that we may begin to grasp what we seek to refer to’.168 Knowledge of the world and ethical conduct are both forms of response in characteristically human (i.e., contingent) ways to what is given with the result that both fundamentalism and unconstrained creativity are ruled out. Within this context a critical dialogue concerning the discontents of opposed traditions of thinking and acting is continually to be engaged.169 Controlling his understanding of this theoretical and ethical response is the elusive notion of correspondence, that thought and conduct must somehow give appropriate expression to that which is the case, that they must be brought repeatedly under the discipline of the actual. This ‘context’, then, is inherently dialogical and self-involving, compact of a datum and a dandum, a factum and a faciendum.170 But as MacKinnon’s confession of a realist bias leads one to expect, the prominence throughout his account of a constellation of terms, of which receptivity, dependence, response and objectivity are among the most significant, expresses the gravitational pull on human knowing and doing of that which posits or generates this context. As we have seen, MacKinnon’s appeal to the discipline of ontology serves in this context to rivet attention on the concrete particular. In this way MacKinnon’s theological realism unremittingly orients Christian faith and practice not on abstract principles but on the setting or context of an all-inclusive mystery, the mysterium Christi. That which is the case, the reality to which Christian thought and moral practice conform or correspond, is given in Jesus Christ. Ecclesial life is from first to last a life lived by faith in that mystery, and for all the emphasis on the noetic dimension in our account, it must be underscored that the prevalence of such concepts as receptivity and dependence indicates the inwardness and relational basis of faith. Ecclesiology thus

168 169 170

University Sermons: Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford 1826–1843 (introductory essays by D. M. MacKinnon and J. D. Holmes; London: SPCK, 1970), p. 17: ‘it must surely include the eager restless energies of reforming spirits, men who find their way to obedience in a kind of revolt against the institution which they serve in the name of those realities which give that institution its significance’. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 157. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 41–43, 46, 49. MacKinnon, ‘Moral Freedom’, p. 15; and idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 157.

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cannot content itself with prescriptive accounts of historical forms, streams of life or realms of inner experience. It must, in MacKinnon’s estimation, precede descriptively in relation to Jesus Christ without however bracketing the ontological claims rightly made on behalf of the church. The cumulative nature of ecclesial and ecclesiological traditions is corrigible by disciplined attentiveness to Jesus Christ around whom re-imagination and re-enactment of the being and action of the church are always to be organized. Yet by linking faith with dependence and dependence with the notions of receptivity and creativity to form a ‘community of orientation’171 within which Christian understanding and moral practice takes shape, he proposed that it is almost as if we have here a kind of dependence that deprives us of the sort of security that we tend uncritically to associate with a dependence for which we claim ultimacy. We are left asking questions in a process of interrogation that is partly, though not entirely, self-interrogation, to which we see no easy end; but this may be as it is because the mysteries that set our inquiring in motion have their authority over us, thus continually to disturb our minds, only because they do touch what is ultimate, which is at once within and yet wholly beyond our comprehension.172 Recognizing that this account of faith perhaps overemphasizes ‘following after, or corresponding with, something antecedently given’, MacKinnon yet linked its ‘simplicity of direction’, its ‘discernable constancy or orientation’,173 to concentration on ‘a publicly observable state of affairs in the spatial and temporal world, not disclosing, nor containing, but still pointing towards . . . that which is . . . necessarily unique and creative’.174 The lack of analytic sharpness in MacKinnon’s elucidation of the concept of correspondence now becomes clearer. If the actuality of the mysterium Christi takes precedence over what is thought about it, there can only be, as he once put it, ‘some sort of correspondence’ between thinking and a being confessed to be at one and the same time truly human and truly God.175 The resonance of that epistemic tension, the ceaseless oscillation between finding and fashioning, determines faith as ‘an activity or a disposition that demands continual reference to a perceptually definite occasion’.176 For instance, MacKinnon’s own treatment of the claim of Jesus Christ to universal significance treats the latter as a dispositional category, neither fully ontological nor merely epistemic, arguing that, although such significance must be construed objectively as God’s gift to Jesus, ‘the ways in which successive generations of believing 171 172 173 174 175 176

MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 449. MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, p. 85. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 449. MacKinnon, ‘Further Reflections’, in The Resurrection, pp. 111–12. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 69. MacKinnon, ‘Intellect and Imagination’, p. 34.

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men and women define its content for themselves are relative, even if we can distinguish an objectively valid relativity from the product of a merely capricious fantasizing’.177 Granted that the church lives always in the mode of receptivity and dependence, authentic Christian thought and action are never an exact correspondence with, repetition or recapitulation of their human yet transcendent ground and thus can never be worked once for all into theoretical resolution or patterns of action predictable in advance. If MacKinnon’s first word in this ecclesiological context is negative, there are also hints and intimations, sketched with reference to particular examples of authentic performance, of a second, more positive word which might be articulated in description of the church. The overall ascetic thrust of this line of thought, however, decisively deflects MacKinnon from any attempt to lay out a full doctrine of the church. Instead, all forms of ecclesial thought and practice are to be conceived in submission to ‘laws of existence in dependence on the one whose essence lay in his dependence on the Father’. Authentic ecclesial existence is oriented by an imperative which demands a reversal of direction away from individual and collective self-regard towards self-abandonment under a simple Christological imperative ‘that must be repeatedly obeyed across one’s entire life-span, and that not only in theoria but in praxis’, namely to look again and again to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.178 To MacKinnon’s mind, the forms of ecclesiological fundamentalism and ecclesiocentric modernism to which English Anglo-Catholics were all too often prone in their conventional apologetic betrayed a lapse in the discipline of concentration which that very law of dependence required. Thus, MacKinnon’s formulation of a ‘kenotic law’ as ‘the law of the Incarnation’ which binds the manner of the church’s fidelity179 is part and parcel of the Christocentrism which funds both the pervasive critique of the sin and failure of the church and the possibility of its repentance and reform. As he put it rather pointedly in a late essay: Jesus, in the reality of his self-giving, in the mystery of God’s self-giving in him, in his movement from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee, in his 177

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MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 214–15. On these grounds, MacKinnon was prepared to accept Sobrino’s Christology at the Crossroads as perhaps ‘permanently valuable’ while noting that it could only have been produced by one whose spiritual formation was indebted to the Society of Jesus on the one hand and his life situation exposed to the daily emergencies of life in El Salvador on the other. See idem, Review of Christology at the Crossroads: A Latin American Approach, by Jon Sobrino, Scottish Journal of Theology 33, no. 2 (April 1980), pp. 171–73 (171–72); and idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 450. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, pp. 177–78. Along with the allusion to Heb. 12.2, MacKinnon cites Gore’s almost homiletic appeal at the conclusion of his Jesus book to consider the mystery of Christ yet again. See Charles Gore, Jesus of Nazareth (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929), p. 253. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 36.

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life, death, and resurrection, remains the only valid raison d’être of his Church. Insofar as that Church in any of its existing forms diminishes its fidelity to that sovereign inspiration, it invites mistrust, repudiation, contempt even if it seeks to justify that infidelity by reference to historical necessity or even pastoral opportunity.180 Second, then, the law of authentic Christian existence is indicative. Christian thought and practice, individual and ecclesial, are continually driven back upon and emerge renewed from their proper context in Jesus Christ whose reality is glimpsed through sustained attentiveness to his wayte from Galilee to Jerusalem, that ‘publicly observable state of affairs in the spatial and temporal world’ which yet points beyond itself to which MacKinnon so often referred. Third, the law takes shape in response to the question which Christ puts to the church: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Jesus Christ is no passive object of our knowledge, for it is the mystery of the Incarnation which supremely and centrally sets Christian religious interrogation in motion, the concrete actuality of the Rabbi of Nazareth, his teaching and ministry, his works, his strange and terrible controversy with those to whom he came, his way of sorrows, his rejection, pain, dereliction and death, the mysteries of his origin and consummation, and beyond these of the role in the created universe of the Word affirmed as manifested in him.181 Christ himself sustains the context of an authentic Christian response through his ceaseless interrogation in the Caesarea Philippis of today, the place where Christ’s mystery still encounters us, a place where judgement and redemption overtake the church on the way.182 Here the formal continuity with the emphasis on the disturbing mastery of the via crucis in the early ecclesiology stands out, but the material developments in the doctrine are significant. We may describe them by taking up briefly MacKinnon’s treatment of apostolicity, catholicity, sacraments and scripture on which the impact of his philosophical deliberations in the theoretical and ethical realms and of a Christologically oriented kenotic discipline will be plainly evident.

V. The Reconstruction of Apostolicity In place of the conventional account of a formalized, quasi-mechanical apostolic succession in the historic episcopate MacKinnon offered descriptions 180 181 182

MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, pp. 186–87. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 114. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, pp. 185–86.

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of various lives lived in fidelity to the way of Jesus Christ beginning with Paul the apostle and including such notable Anglicans of his own day as G. K. A. Bell and Trevor Huddleston. It is remarkable that, for all his criticisms of the episcopate, MacKinnon’s sterling examples of contemporary apostolic fidelity among Anglicans were drawn most often from among the bishops of the church. From his descriptions of the particular witness of such individuals a composite portrait of authentic apostolic fidelity emerges. Apostolicity is variously conformity to Christ’s mission, ‘a living and sustained essay towards an authentic fidelity’ to Christ,183 even ‘a long and painful apprenticeship to which the individual knows himself constrained by that which will not let him escape’.184 Despite his emphasis on travail or distress, MacKinnon’s conception is non-heroic, for the mark of genuine apostolicity is identified as strength made perfect in weakness.185 Nor does the stress on radical self-abandonment which is the mark of kenosis entail the annihilation of all that goes to make up the rich inheritance of the personal endowment and the social and religious environment of an authentic apostle.186 Bishop George Bell, for example, is characterized as a figure awkwardly straddling two worlds, that of the English establishment, at home in the House of Lords, Lambeth Palace and the Athenaeum, and yet also that of the German Church struggle, devoted steadfastly in prayer for Bonhoeffer in his prison cell, thus exhibiting an ‘Anglican fidelity’ shot through with an ambiguity that ‘irritates the more direct Christian spirits about the characteristically Anglican thing’.187 Of Archbishop Huddleston he noted that his costly engagement with issues of social justice was informed by his academic studies in modern history, his extensive reading, and his long years of priesthood rooted in the monastic spirituality and liturgical tradition of the Community of the Resurrection.188 Above all, MacKinnon noted that Paul stood in a particular tradition and that his self-understanding as an apostle cannot be grasped apart from the source of the notion of apostolate in Rabbinic tradition and its background use by Peter and the others, nor from the Johannine meditation on Christ’s own apostolate, his sending and authorization by the Father.189 Yet at its heart, Paul’s apostolic self-understanding rests in a sense of Christian mission achieved through seeing it under the aspect of the cross, even by means of ‘the refraction of

183 184 185 188 189

Ibid., p. 187. MacKinnon, ‘Theology as a Discipline in a Modern University’, p. 172. 186 187 MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 87. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., 90. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 177. MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, pp. 258–59. John Milbank substantially underplays the importance in MacKinnon’s ethics of being at once rooted in a tradition and also open and able to transcend it when that tradition stagnates or fails. See John Milbank, ‘“Between Purgation and Illumination”: A Critique of the Theology of Right’ in Christ, Ethics, and Tragedy, pp. 175–77.

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that mystery in the arcana of his own spiritual life and suffering’.190 Though Paul may engage in a rigorous self-scrutiny by which he claims as his own achievement his endurance in service to Christ, he knows that in so doing he is not self-made but that through God’s work in him his life has become conformed to the way of Jesus Christ, somehow rendered transparent to that which has taken hold of him, even an ‘effective parable’ of the event of Christ’s death and resurrection which is at work in him as a kind of law.191 Here MacKinnon argued that in Paul belief in this salvific event has functioned constitutively, fusing receptivity and activity so that conformity to Christ in thought and act can be grasped as truly liberating even though it is something received.192 Correspondence here expresses the extent to which the ‘spiral movement’ of Paul’s thought and teaching are set in motion by an ontological background.193 MacKinnon’s understanding of authentic apostolic fidelity fuses aspects of the theme of discipleship with the imitation of Christ, the imperative with the indicative, contemplation and action. What was achieved in Paul, as the examples of Bell and Huddleston are meant to reveal, can thus be realized in other contexts. There is said to be a defeat, even a kind of death, involved in Bell’s courageous witness in the House of Lords late in the war against the Allied strategic bombing of German civilian populations. This prophetic protest, MacKinnon pointed out, cost Bell the Primatial See of Canterbury and rendered him suspect as pastor within his own diocese of Chichester to many who served in that and related campaigns of the Second World War.194 MacKinnon thus edged his discussion of Bell’s apostolic fidelity towards the theme of the imitation of Christ, suggesting that he was more appropriately honoured by the gift by Bonhoeffer’s parents of the copy of Imitatio Christi which was with him in his cell than by any further ecclesiastical preferment which might have been granted him.195 His gloss on the scene in the third act of Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldaten in which Bell’s protest against the policies of Bomber Command is argued into silence before Churchill’s imperious rage clearly delineates a correspondence with Jesus’ silence under interrogation by Pontius Pilate.196 Equally, Huddleston’s vulnerability to the powers that be is acknowledged in MacKinnon’s condemnation of Archbishop Fisher’s failure to give

190 191 193 194

195

MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 80. 192 MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory, pp. 259, 261–62. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 262; See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 80. MacKinnon, ‘The Controversial Bishop Bell’, pp. 84–85, 88. MacKinnon refers here to the Dean of Chichester, A. S. Duncan Jones, to whom fell the unpleasant task of informing Bell that he would not be a suitable preacher at the 1943 celebration of Battle of Britain Sunday in his own cathedral and asked him to withdraw because of hostile reaction to his war-time protest. See R. C. D. Jasper, George Bell: Bishop of Chichester (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 276–77. 196 Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., pp. 88–94.

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unqualified support to his struggle against apartheid in South Africa.197 It must be noted that while all of these exemplars of authentic apostolic fidelity are men, MacKinnon in a late article registered his support for the ordination of women to the priesthood, repudiating sharply any theology of orders that conjoined an iconic status of priesthood with maleness. Signalling the contributions of prominent women theologians to the ministry of the word, he advocated a like complementarity of women and men in the ministration of the sacraments, proposing as a criterion for such developments in church tradition the degree to which they extend the reach of the Incarnation.198 Finally, in generalizing the concept of a kenotic apostolicity, MacKinnon argued that humility is of the essence of apostolic presence, suggesting that an apostle can teach only so long as he or she continues to learn and insofar as all vestiges of de haut en bas communication, within and without the church, are eradicated.199 It was his contention that where such authentic apostolicity takes hold of the church, its life is marked by a steadfast determination to stand under the sovereignty of God in Christ alone.200

VI. Catholicity Reconstrued If kenotic apostolicity is characterized by a sustained, creative responsiveness in thought and action to the saving deeds of God in Christ and a corresponding vulnerable presence in service to the needs of a world embraced by Christ’s mission, kenotic catholicity in MacKinnon’s handling embodies a Christ-orientated generosity of response among all Christians extended to all people everywhere. There are side by side here a sustained plea for a mutual welcome and acceptance among Christians which might unleash such generosities of understanding and charity201 and criticism of much official ecumenical activity which claimed to be directed towards that very goal. Indeed, such criticism effectively conceals the depth of MacKinnon’s own ecumenical involvement, particularly in the theological activity of the Faith and Order Commission in its preparations for the 1954 Evanston Assembly of the World Council of Churches202 and overshadows his conviction that 197 198

199 200

201 202

MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 67. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘The Icon Christi and Eucharistic Theology’, Theology 95 (March/ April1992), pp. 109–13 (111–12). MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 54–56. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 184, where attention is drawn to the Barmen Declaration. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 62. MacKinnon’s service in these endeavours is commended in Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda: An Autobiography (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1985), pp. 131–32, 139. Not to be overlooked is MacKinnon’s participation in The Christian Newsletter, a periodical founded by the distinguished ecumenist J. H. Oldham as the

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desire for Christian unity at the grass-roots level was particularly potent.203 The criticisms follow from his polemic against idealism. Much ecumenical endeavour to his mind manifested an intellectualism which abstracted from the everyday situations of separated Christians, evading the dark legacies of religious strife, especially their economic and political consequences. While he therefore applauded C. H. Dodd’s salutary reminder to the 1952 Lund Conference on Faith and Order that ‘non-theological factors’ often are at the root of entrenched theological differences, he quarrelled with the constriction of the theological realm which that term betrayed and countered that theological differences cannot be understood apart from ‘the substance of Christian life as it is received and lived’.204 Is dialogue which is an imperative binding upon all Christians to be regarded, MacKinnon asked, ‘as an end in itself in which its end is somehow immanent’, an instrumental process creative of its own objects or as a ‘seeking together’ which may perhaps lead only to the ‘humanly intractable’ in religious conflicts?205 Neither words nor ideas alone can overcome the deep hurt that cries out for healing, but concrete action, MacKinnon hoped, might open a way.206 On the matter of the Eucharistic koinonia of separated churches MacKinnon argued that attention must be averted from ideas about the Eucharist to the actual communicants who are to participate and to the objectivity of the sacramental action itself. MacKinnon honoured fidelity to the diverse traditions of divided Christians to the extent that they moulded behaviour, checked indifferentism and were parabolic of receptivity to God’s grace. But if catholicity enacts in embodied form the mutual giving and receiving of gifts in the context of the inclusive gift of God in Jesus Christ, MacKinnon urged that separated Christians learn to receive from the ‘abundant life’ of traditions other than their own, even at the deep level of sacramental communion.207 What is advocated here is simultaneous respect for what each tradition of Christian faith has received and openness to learn from each

203

204

205 206

207

organ of the Christian Frontier Council, a lay institute whose focus was the relation of Christian faith to the realities of everyday life and to the state. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 75; and idem, ‘Christology and Protest’, pp. 184–85. Ibid., pp. 65–66. For the contents of Dodd’s letter first discussed at the 1949 Chichester meeting of the Faith and Order preparatory commission, see Oliver Tomkins, The Church in the Purpose of God, pp. 79–81. See also MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 163–64. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 163. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 74. MacKinnon’s approach is in concert with Henry Chadwick’s counsel under the rubric ‘solvitur amando’ that ‘a new sensitivity and a gentleness in dealing with one another’ is a necessary prelude to communicatio in sacris. See idem, ‘Charles Gore and Roman Catholic Claims’, Theology 78 (February 1975), pp. 68–75 (75). Ibid., pp. 66–67, 69.

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other, yet setting everything that all Christian traditions convey ‘under the judgement of Christ’.208 MacKinnon’s emphasis on truth claims must not be forgotten here lest his plea be taken for an ill-disguised pragmatism or even an indolent indifferentism. Rather he advocated a kind of ‘ecumenical confronting’ in which diverse generosities of response to the radicalism of the cross are given precedence in determining the ecumenical way forward.209 MacKinnon pleaded for a new beginning which might enable Christians to engage together with ‘the utter precariousness of the structure of belief by which in some sense they live’.210 At the top of the agenda, however, he placed reflection on the inward ministry of the Holy Spirit in response to which the churches might begin to make the effort to overcome their divisions.211 He was deeply suspicious of any ecumenical process that smacked of a negotiated or contrived institutional arrangement, cautioning that the resurgence of ‘party conflict’ in the twentieth-century Church of England should remind Anglicans that imposed settlements, even those vested in liturgical uniformity, cannot suppress ‘deeply opposed theological convictions’.212 He once signalled the extent to which the battles of the past remain alive within people and claimed that although they must ultimately commit to one side of a dispute, they must be open to letting the other side sort them out such that even memory itself can be imbued with an ascetic quality.213 The challenge put to Anglicans by a kenotic catholicity was to go beyond the reception of theological ideas and insights from other Christian traditions, already long a feature of their ecclesiological context, to a more generous acceptance of other Christians themselves, not only by welcoming them to full sharing in Anglican celebrations of the Eucharist but by taking opportunities to receive the sacrament from the ordained ministers of those traditions. This should not be construed as a merely instrumental deployment of the Eucharist as the engine of church unity. Rather such dialogical openness is centred in and disciplined by a simple catholic confession: ave crux, spes unica.214 What is envisioned is certainly not an ‘ecumenism of return’ unless it be a repentant return again and again of all faithful Christians to communion with God and each other in the sacramental mediation of the fontal act of their redemption in Christ. A catholic church is on this account one in which mutual acceptance together with shared theological and moral deliberation and practice are crucial to its orientation on Jesus Christ’s reconciling embrace of all humankind in his death and resurrection. 208 209

210 211 213

Ibid., p. 70. D. M. MacKinnon, Review of La vie en Christ, by Théo Preiss, Scottish Journal of Theology 5 (1952), pp. 306–09 (307–08). MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 71. 212 Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., pp. 78–79. 214 MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 165. Ibid., p. 81.

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VII. Baptism and Eucharist If a kenotic catholicity is realized in the concrete action of mutual welcome and acceptance under the sovereign discipline of the cross, the two gospel sacraments are conceived primarily as objective actions by which Christ’s judgement and mercy enfold our lives. Baptism, MacKinnon argued, thrusts us back upon the way from Galilee to Jerusalem, upon that way which is Christ himself, a way defined by its end ‘in the creative and inclusive mystery of the Paschal night’ yet which is also the living communion of saints.215 The heart and ground of that communion is the Eucharist, the setting in which the cross and resurrection of Jesus take hold of the lives of men and women, the act in which religion and life, ritual and action, are fused. Basic to MacKinnon’s Eucharistic theology was the claim that liturgy is always thing done rather than thing said, action drawing its sense and power from the action of God in Christ, and by its very character as action preserving for the individual the sense that it is by deed that he is saved and held in the truth. It is by the action of the eucharist that the life of the individual is, in its daily movement, rooted in and held to the source of its redemption, the action of Calvary and the empty tomb.216 Indeed MacKinnon argued that the Eucharist is the place where Christ gives himself to his own and in so doing constitutes Christian life, for the church itself is simply ‘men and women brought with all that they are and will be into the context of the action of Christ’s passion and resurrection whereby the world is renewed’.217 When MacKinnon tells us that the heart of Christian askesis lies here and that ‘we do not fight to preserve a pattern but to be recovered of a way’, the sacramental grounding of his approach to catholicity is clarified.218 Only in receiving the Eucharistic sacrament, and receiving it together, can separated Christians begin to penetrate its meaning as the one who is both Alpha and Omega lays hold of their lives.219 So, too, his emphasis on presence to the world is clarified. Eucharistic faith is worldly because ‘the sign of the resurrection is over men and women where they are’ and it is ‘the sign that history has been grasped and possessed by God’.220 MacKinnon’s writing on the Eucharist tries to find a balance between openness to the world and the religious element proper to the koinonia of the baptized, probing whatever relation may obtain between the sacrament 215 217 219

220

216 Ibid., pp. 69, 75. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, p. 246. 218 Ibid., 248. See also idem, ‘The Sacraments’, pp. 133, 137. Ibid., p. 254. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Sacrament and Common Meal’, in Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot (ed. D. E. Nineham; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), p. 207. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, pp. 254–55.

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and both the common meals which Jesus ate with sinners and the ritual of his self-consecration in the Last Supper. One line of his Eucharistic thought focused on the latter ritual, treating the Eucharist as the eschatological incorporation of the church’s prayer into the prayer of Christ’s self-consecration. Again communion with the cross of Jesus is the place where meaning is given by Christ to daily life, yet meaning glimpsed only fitfully now and not to be fully known until the fullness of Christ’s sacrifice is revealed.221 A second strand of argument in exploring the relation of Jesus’ common meals with sinners and the parabolic impact of the messianic banquet motif in his teaching isolates at the centre of Jesus’ calling of sinners to eat and drink with him an acceptance that is itself redemptive.222 Yet here, too, MacKinnon underlined the dialectical interplay in the Eucharist between the sacred and the human, the religious and the moral. Fearful that the historic churches had isolated the sacred and given it ‘triumphal authority’ over the human by making the Eucharist an end in itself, he countered that the context of Jesus’ ritual action in the upper room was itself ‘desperately human’, passing abruptly from glory to pain and defeat. The authentically sacred, he argued, must preserve the human by opening it to the dimension of contemplation in which ‘the unexpected intrusion of the transcendent’ impinges upon us. MacKinnon focused attention on the life of Jesus as the pattern in which we see the relation of the sacred and the human worked out for us.223 The Eucharist is not, then, a matter of special experience in which by self-induced reverence the reach of the transcendent is restricted to ‘an area of life that we can fence in and preserve inviolate’224 but an action in which the sacred opens towards and embraces the rich complexity of human life in order to draw it into the healing ambit of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this sense, MacKinnon’s construal of the sacraments ties the church’s apostolicity and catholicity to the oscillating centrifugal and centripetal impetus of the gospel, spilling out over its boundaries to embrace and gather the world in faithfulness to Christ.

VIII. Scripture and Tradition In riveting attention on Jesus Christ, MacKinnon’s kenotic construal of the church exhibits the pervasive influence of the New Testament. His treatment of apostolicity and catholicity demonstrates how deeply his theology breathed the atmosphere of the Pauline epistles, especially Second Corinthians, from which he sketched the themes of correspondence and mutuality in the Christian life. The concentration of his thought on ‘a publicly observable 221 222 224

MacKinnon, ‘Sacrament and Common Meal’, pp. 206–07. 223 MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 176. Ibid., pp. 178–79. Ibid., p. 180.

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state of affairs in the spatial and temporal world’ is oriented upon that same ‘deeply significant spatial and temporal armature of the Gospel narratives’ described in the device common to the Synoptics of the journey of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem and of the Johannine conception of his ‘hour’.225 These gospels are construed, each in its own way, as responses to ‘the overwhelming fact of the ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus’, ‘compact of factual record and interpretation’, ‘a vital testament’ to what his followers had experienced in Jesus Christ.226 The narrative devices of a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem and of Christ towards his ‘hour’ are thus described as ‘the index of an all-inclusive setting’ in which not only the ways of believing are disclosed but historical and philosophical problems are to be engaged.227 Thus MacKinnon portrayed the evangelists, for example, as reshaping the tradition by re-narrating it even as they were also constrained by it, standing under it as something which they must hand on.228 Duly acknowledging the difficulty of separating historical fact and creative witness in the gospels, MacKinnon underscored their community of orientation upon Jesus, claiming that ‘if we cannot extract an historical Jesus who is, as it were, overlaid by interpretation . . ., we can see standing behind them, shaping, controlling, almost twisting the direction of their individual experience of his fullness, the figure to whom both, in the fellowship of the one community, strive to bear witness’.229 While the gospel identity descriptions of Jesus take precedence for faith, they are vulnerable to historical challenge which must not be evaded; but here, MacKinnon warned, historical certainty is not synonymous with faith nor does it render faith less problematic or mysterious.230 Neither can interpretation of Scripture be restricted to a religious enclave. It is not only, as David Ford has remarked, that MacKinnon often engaged in a conceptual re-description of Scripture, putting the Fourth Gospel in conversation with Kant, for instance, on the matter of the perceptual basis of knowledge and of faith, thereby rescuing the evangelist from the condescension often served up by modern commentators on classical texts;231 but also, within that ‘all-inclusive setting’ MacKinnon opened a conversation between literary authors, ancient and modern, and the evangelists in the hope of elucidating the relation of the transcendent to the tragic and the parabolic in a context where the approach of fides quaerens intellectum

225 226 228

229 231

MacKinnon, in Themes in Theology, p. 181. 227 MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 64. Ibid., p. 78. D. M. MacKinnon, Review of The Idea of History, ed. R. G. Collingwood, Journal of Theological Studies 48 (July 1947), pp. 249–53 (252). 230 Ibid., 252–53. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 79. David F. Ford, ‘Tragedy and Atonement’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, pp. 117–18. MacKinnon does not elaborate a theory of inter- or intratextuality but rather locates the reading of Scripture in that public context in which its availability to exchange with other writings reflects its primary character as witness to the mission of Christ.

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engages and is engaged by that of intellectus quaerens fidem.232 Thus, to cite but one example, MacKinnon’s reading of the parable of the two sons (Lk. 15.11-32) is informed by Shakespeare’s treatment of the aged Lear’s tragic relation with his daughters.233 If there is a Christological concentration in biblical interpretation here, it is matched by an unrestricted openness to a wide range of literary descriptions of the human condition as well. This primarily thematic approach to Scripture trades on the use of the gospel narratives as a kind of canon within the canon by which interpretation and doctrinal construction are organized. At times, it must be conceded, MacKinnon’s reading of Scripture appears idiosyncratic, divorced from rigorous exegesis and highly selective yet, positively, it always gives precedence to the narratives by which the apostolic communities bore witness to Jesus Christ and to the New Testament’s exemplifications of a subsequent authentic fidelity to his way. His approach to doctrine adheres to the same pattern. If issues of Christian faith are not resolved once and for all by the ‘sterile parroting’234 of the creedal tradition, it is also the case that creeds and confessional statements cannot simply be set aside without seriously imperilling reception and understanding of the faith. Enough has already been said to indicate his insistence upon the ongoing, critical re-reception (‘mucking-in’ or dialectical renewal) of the tradition in changing circumstances. MacKinnon directs that all Christian doctrines be constructed in response to the narratives which render the identity of the crucified and risen One. In this sense doctrines orient ecclesial attentiveness upon the all-embracing mystery of Jesus Christ, thereby holding before the faithful the problems which faith sets for understanding. If MacKinnon’s material doctrinal interests are in this sense rather truncated, formally for him the core doctrines of the church function to rivet its confession to this point of contact alone. Ecclesiology feels the decisive gravitational pull of the doctrines of salvation, Christology and the Triune God. That is, if despite the church’s participation in the history of sin and failure its mission yet attests and mediates God’s salvation to the world, it must be described within the category of real relatedness to God, that ‘all-inclusive setting’ of which Jesus Christ in his cross and resurrection is the sole ‘index’. If finality is ascribed to Jesus Christ alone doctrines are thus corrigible in terms of enlarged understandings of that finality. In this sense, scripture and tradition are enmeshed in the same contingency as the incarnation to which they testify, a contingency which yet does not overthrow their authority. The Gore Lecture and related writings thus mark a development in MacKinnon’s doctrine of the church characterized by considerable reticence 232

233 234

MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 82–83. See Patrick Sherry, ‘Modes of Representation and Likeness to God’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, pp. 35–36. MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, p. 79. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 32.

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about the church as it is portrayed in two primary traditions of twentiethcentury Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology. This critical and censorial registering of his discontent with both Gore’s ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ and Catholic ‘ecclesiocentric modernism’ cleared the way for a kenotic reshaping of the doctrine in its practical and theoretical orientation under the form of a tensive correspondence of all aspects of the church’s life with the mission of Jesus Christ, the ‘all-inclusive setting’ of his way from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee. If Gore at times had tended to conceive the relationship between Jesus Christ and the church much too narrowly such that it threatened to collapse into identity, Anglo-Catholic modernists risked jettisoning the Jesus of history altogether in favour of a relatively unconstrained creativity of spiritual and liturgical experience oriented upon the Christ of faith. In response, MacKinnon argued that the gospel has already emplotted the trajectory of the church along the way of Jesus and determined the nature and quality of its life in terms of his death and his having been raised from the dead. Given the radical orientation of the doctrine upon Christ who grounds the context for ecclesial repentance and renewal, its own adherence by faith to the pattern of dying and rising, MacKinnon’s extension of kenosis to the doctrine of the church takes the form of something akin to a set of regulative ecclesiological remarks ordered to sustaining individual and ecclesial attentiveness in thought and conduct to Jesus Christ. The modesty or reticence towards the church grounded in this ascetic marks MacKinnon’s decisive retreat from the kind of positivist ecclesiological mediation of a ‘Christocentric metaphysic’ characteristic of Gore’s doctrine and of a great deal of Anglican ecclesiological writing in the first half of the twentieth century. This kenotic discipline can be summed up, then, in his own words as a protest against confusing ‘the substance and core of Christian fidelity with the forms in which we have received the same’ and as an ascetic demand which ‘bids us fearlessly seek, in situations relatively novel in the demands they make upon us, new ways of fidelity to the order of Christ’.235 Authentic ecclesial fidelity to Jesus Christ, however, requires institutional forms, but MacKinnon reminds us that these share in the provisionality of discipleship, its radical participation in the sheer contingency of Jesus Christ, and that there is in the lived reality of the church much that inhibits rather than promotes conformity to his way. Moreover, if a kenotic ecclesiology frames an authentic response at the level of theory and practice to the mysterium Christi, it cannot be constructed in abstraction from the total human context in which through faithfulness to the missio Christi it has been placed. It is fairly clear, however, that MacKinnon had now decisively turned his back on the corporatist or organicist leanings of Christendom Group ecclesiology. The blurring of distinctions between individual and ecclesial fidelity to

235

Ibid., p. 202.

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this mystery and mission, as well as the ever-present journey motif, suggest that MacKinnon’s kenotic doctrine of the church has been subsumed under the broader category of Christian discipleship, underscoring the dynamic character of life lived in conformity with the way of Christ and giving precedence to its constitutive sacramental koinonia in which fidelity to Christ is continually reconstructed. Recalling his prophetic imperative that the church in theoria and praxis must look to Christ and look again, to MacKinnon’s account of the way of Jesus Christ and its determination of authentic discipleship we now turn.

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4 from galilee to jerusalem to galilee i: kenotic ecclesiology, salvation and atonement

In arguing for the extension of the concept of kenosis to the doctrine of the church, Donald MacKinnon not only laid bare the many ways in which the church fell short of its task as faithful witness in the world but also pointed to what the church ought to be and the manner of life which conformed to its concrete identity as disciples of Jesus Christ. His proposal was that by extending the concept of kenosis to the ecclesiological context the church might come to embrace an authentic fidelity in thought and practice to laws of Christian existence formulated in dependence on Jesus Christ whose essence lay in his dependence on the Father. In other words, he sought to bring Christian ecclesial existence under greater scrutiny by and responsibility to a Christocentric theological and moral vision which opened up into a profound meditation on the mystery of the Triune God. In his later works especially, the trajectory of his thinking decisively underwent the gravitational pull of the mystery of Jesus Christ as the all-embracing context in which this kenotic ecclesial life is to be lived and by which it is to be judged. The material austerity of this account clearly expresses MacKinnon’s conviction that theoretical construction of the church’s life of dependence on Christ always waits upon and is interrupted by description and re-description of Christ’s dependence upon the Father, and that the form of its presence to the world must always be broken and reconstituted by ever more authentic and perhaps unexpected appropriations in changing circumstances of the pattern of Christ’s mission. Authentic Christian existence is a dynamic response that has to be worked out, individually and collectively, step by step, in a relation of humble, free and creative obedience to Christ. As MacKinnon 129

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once argued, finality in the life of faith is located in the ferment unleashed by the mysterium Christi and which always has that mystery as its focus.1 The ecclesial structures which mediate this unity of thought and practice are thus deemed provisional for, as MacKinnon bluntly counselled, ‘it is by faithful witness to the mysterium Christi, through word and teaching, through worship and sacrament, that those very structures must be judged, and if found wanting, swiftly rejected’.2 The ascetic thrust of this kenotic ecclesiology insists, then, that whereas much of the history of the institutional church has obscured Christ, ‘we can still claim that Christ is greater than any institution claiming monopoly of his secrets, and that it may in the end be made plain that in his faithfulness unto death is the healing of our human hurt, and in his mystery the secret of our ways’.3 While utterances such as these demonstrate MacKinnon’s persistent concern for the church, the overall impact of this kenotic trajectory is a profound disturbance under the impact of the gospel of the settled patterns of Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology, albeit a disturbance always open to the repeated summons to renewed authentic ecclesial faithfulness to Jesus Christ. It is to the source and goal of that faithfulness which MacKinnon’s thought in his later work resolutely turns. In this chapter, in accordance with that imperative which drives the extension of the concept of kenosis to the doctrine of the church, namely MacKinnon’s directive to ‘look to Jesus; consider him’, our task will be to work back towards his understanding of kenosis as it is developed in his description of Jesus Christ as disclosed through the words spoken and deeds done which comprised his life lived obediently towards the cross in absolute dependence on the Father. Our first step along this trajectory is governed by the recognition that MacKinnon’s deployment of the concept of kenosis involves the interplay of soteriological and incarnational–Trinitarian concerns.4 Having seen what the concept carried forward into ecclesiology, we must now heed his reversal of direction and describe his understanding of the doctrine of salvation and its implications for a reformulation of his conception of the Incarnation under that same kenotic discipline. As our account of the itinerary of MacKinnon’s thought has already shown, his kenotic ecclesiology gives expression to an indirection which drives the church back in the form of lived conformity through critical reflection, sacramental worship and missional service on to the way of Jesus Christ from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee as the New Testament attests it. Mention of 1 2 3 4

MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 115. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 6. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 10. See MacKinnon, ‘Further Reflections’ in The Resurrection, p. 112, for the claim that analysis of the notion of dependence plunges one into ‘the ethical intimacies of soteriology’ as well as into the abstractions of the philosophy of logic which, as we shall see, MacKinnon pressed into service alongside ontology in elaborating a doctrine of the Incarnation.

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this last movement, however, leads us first to anticipate an objection that might well be raised against the ascetic cast of MacKinnon’s doctrine of the church, namely that its constant doubling back on the way of Christ betrays a curious reticence in the face of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead that perhaps seems to undermine the fact and the extent of Christ’s victory over sin and death and effectively curtails elaboration of the church as extension of the incarnation.5 Is the resurrection not the effective sign of the already realized negation of the discontinuities of human life itself? It may be pointed out by way of response that MacKinnon certainly had no intention of denying or downplaying the victorious fact of the resurrection. Indeed, he acknowledged that the ‘extremely complex and elusive resurrection narratives’ are to be read as ‘the literary projection of a victory, even of a victory that is conceived as absolute and final, where the human condition is concerned, in which “death is swallowed up”’ and stripped of its sovereignty.6 Further, the resurrection is the very ‘heart of the matter’, ‘the ultimately decisive mystery’,7 even ‘the locus stantis vel cadentis fidei’.8 MacKinnon’s reticence, however, arises from the way in which, to his mind, that victory is often represented in the guise of a ‘facile teleology’ which abolishes the tangled complexities and contingencies of Christian life by appeal to a smooth, linear progression from death to life.9 Here there is first his abiding suspicion of a triumphalism which he attributed to an interpretation of the relation of the church to the resurrection of Jesus Christ in which the way of the cross had, as it were, safely been put behind it. In the Gore Lecture, for instance, he had questioned the way in which the vulnerability of a church called to discipleship along that very way was often denied by a 5

6 7

8 9

The austerity of MacKinnon’s kenotic doctrine might be compared with Gore’s robust metaphysical confidence which posits an ontological ecclesiological extension of the communicatio idiomatum by which the risen life of Christ is mediated to the church even as our humanity is taken up into relation with God in him. See Charles Gore, The Holy Spirit and the Church (London: John Murray, 1924), p. 110. Compare also the kind of historicizing biblical schema like that of Hoskyns which speak of an Old Testament promise in Israel, followed by a Christological constriction in which that promise comes to fruition, and then culminates in an expanded fulfilment in the church. For the ‘hour-glass’ shaped pattern of this promise-fulfilment theme see E. C. Hoskyns, ‘Jesus, the Messiah’, p. 89. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 194. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, pp. 249, 254. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 24. Ibid., p. 194. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 151; and idem, ‘Teleology and Redemption’, p.105. Reticence is arguably appropriate to a mode of discourse grounded in hope, a mode of discourse which does not foreclose on historical contingency by confident assertion of a metaphysics of the resurrection, a form of flight from the factual which, as we have seen, MacKinnon stubbornly resisted. See in this regard, Nicholas Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986), p. 208.

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conventional apologetic which saw in ‘the stabilities of a so-called Christian order’ a kind of ‘public confirmation’ of Christ’s victory over death: ‘There is no deeper misunderstanding of the mysterium Christi than that which insists, against all the evidence, in construing the resurrection as a descent from the cross, publicly and unambiguously visible to all standing around, but made the more overwhelmingly effective by a thirty-six hour postponement’.10 Or as he lamented in a late essay in honour of Archbishop Huddleston: ‘We crave security: we flee from the reality of crucifixion–resurrection, impatient of the indirection of Christ’s resurrection, wishing that he had come down from the cross that so we might have believed by a faith finally corrupted by its object’s betrayal of his mission’.11 The pressure which MacKinnon identified here is that of having to find in the resurrection a resounding success which immediately follows upon and thoroughly swallows up defeat in victory, a success which in turn both legitimates ecclesial forms of practice and belief and denies the prevalence of tragic suffering. By contrast, MacKinnon held that the crisis of Pilate’s judgement hall was still unfolding in the present, and then boldly traced a line from Golgotha to the death camps of Nazi Germany in the twentieth century.12 But to interpret the resurrection as providing a kind of mundane security from the tensions, challenges and responsibilities of the human situation, MacKinnon had long asserted, was to turn one’s back on the crucified and risen Lord.13 Further, he argued that there is nothing in the example of Jesus to suggest that success, at least as the world defines it, should follow from living a life determined by the practice of love.14 He hinted, however, that the temptation to think so was abetted by a tradition of reading the gospels as narratives oriented upon a happy ending, finding in the resurrection a reversal of the catastrophic events which had befallen Jesus.15 Under stricture here is the way such tendencies may contribute to a docetic understanding of the person and work of Christ. Second, MacKinnon argued that the resurrection does not supply an immediate solution to the problem of metaphysics. Although MacKinnon accentuated the resurrection as the prius of Christian thought and action, he found that the indirection of the gospel resurrection narratives cut off any understanding of the resurrection of Christ as a kind of springboard along the way of eminence from which a speculative metaphysics might be 10

11 12

13

14 15

MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 36–37. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 95; and idem, ‘Autorité et conscience’, p. 427. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 187. The idiom here is Hoskyns’. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on Balthasar’s Christology’, p. 166. See idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 96. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘The Tomb Was Empty’, The Christian Newsletter 258 (1946), pp. 7–12 (11–12). MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 128. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 101.

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unfolded.16 The point which MacKinnon insisted upon is that the resurrection is first and foremost an object of faith. He protested in this regard that the revelation in us of the new birth achieved for us by Christ’s crucifixionresurrection is not a means ‘to secure us in the pursuit of our ordinary ways’, or ‘to serve the purposes of our traditional politics or immediately to advance our comprehension of the natural world’.17 We are not thereby privileged to see things from a divine standpoint.18 MacKinnon invoked the discipline of a metaphysical agnosticism here on theological grounds, reasoning that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is confessed to be God’s act and that therefore to speak of the resurrection of Christ under the category of event or act is actually to speak by analogy of that which in its sheer uniqueness is more than event or act.19 Indeed, MacKinnon noted that the gospel narratives of the first Easter attested the continuities of space and time, the succession of days, even a time before when the tomb was occupied and a time after when it was empty.20 The continuity which they attest, however, was decisively interrupted by an even greater discontinuity of which the empty tomb (to which tradition MacKinnon assigned considerable weight) was by no means ‘demonstrative proof’ but only ‘a “finger pointing”’.21 Thus MacKinnon observed that the life of the risen Christ remained shrouded in ambiguity, defying categorization, for if in one sense by virtue of the resurrection all limitations of time and space have been eradicated, Christ’s intermittent appearances still remained restricted to a small group of intimates who scarcely recognized him.22 Moreover, by their very economy these same gospel narratives impose their own limit, not permitting the reader ‘to be obsessed by thaumaturgical detail or distracted by idle curiosity’.23 Yet 16

17

18 19

20 21 22

23

Ibid., p. 95. MacKinnon was impressed by St. Paul’s refusal to appeal to the rhythm of crucifixion–resurrection in his pondering of the fate of Israel (Rom. 9–11), noting that ‘the fact he does not do so is significant of his continual refusal to carve out of the mysteries of his faith principles of metaphysical explanation’. Idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 153–54. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 251. MacKinnon, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, p. 104. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’, in The Resurrection, p. 68. Also idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 451; and idem, Themes in Theology, p. 77, where MacKinnon cautions that care must be taken in elucidation of terms such as ‘event’ or ‘fact’ when used of Christ’s resurrection because they are being “stretched” to describe that which is ‘sheerly unique’. Ibid., p. 63. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 76. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship and Life’ in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 254. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, in Christ, Church and Society: Essays on John Baillie and Donald Baillie (ed. David Fergusson; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), p. 120. Also idem, Borderlands of Theology pp. 95–96. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’, in The Resurrection, p. 64.

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for MacKinnon they nonetheless indicate revelation making its ‘ultimate claim’, given his avowal that ‘in the presence of Christ’s resurrection we are in the presence of the final things of God, of victory, not as the world knows it, but as God knows it, in the subduing of all things to the purposes of his mercy. What we are met with here we can perhaps only show in a half light; but its claim remains to ultimacy and finality’.24 To call the life that was raised the revelation of God indicates, as MacKinnon pointed out, that in that life God’s relationship with humankind is ultimately focused.25 There is further MacKinnon’s concern that any representation of the resurrection which simply puts the way of the cross behind it betrays an all-too-glib approach to the matter of death itself. It refuses to reckon with death’s finality, the absolute cessation of experience, which the dissolution of the conditions of personal experience in death entails, and fails to acknowledge that here, too, is a mystery that ought to evoke a reverent and profound questioning that issues in no easy answers.26 This mystery is compounded by the New Testament claim that the resurrection marks the death of death itself.27 MacKinnon argued that the point at which previous accounts of the relation of the transcendent to the familiar are transformed in the Christian tradition is ‘an event, a deed, something indeed received by a man when, his life having become “pure pastness” and his body entombed, he is brought again from the dead’.28 MacKinnon’s fear is that to look too hastily away from that transcendent act of the raising of Jesus Christ from death to life to pronounce on such matters as whether Christian faith is basically worldrenouncing or world-affirming is to reduce to an abstraction that which cannot even begin properly to be plumbed apart from attentiveness to the one who so lived and died and was raised.29 Indeed, MacKinnon asserted that in the resurrection ‘the very stuff of Christ’s self-oblation perfected in death is given a universal contemporaneity’ by which ‘it becomes the ultimate context of all our lives’.30 The unpredictability and complexity of Christian life are not then immediately resolved by the resurrection but set in a new context, the context of Christ’s own endurance in which they are transformed.31 Hence neither the metaphysical question nor the theological 24 26

27 28 29

30 31

25 Ibid., pp. 68–69. Ibid., p. 69. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 80–84. See also idem, ‘Death’, in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, pp. 261–66, where the very notion of survival after death is given searching analytic treatment. See also his comments with reference to the work of Hoskyns and F. N. Davey that ‘it is an element in authentic Christian faith to emphasize rather than disallow the finality of death’ in idem, Themes in Theology, p. 2. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 126. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 78. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 31–32, 92; and idem, ‘The Tomb Was Empty’, p. 11. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’, in The Resurrection, p. 65. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 151.

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problem of the relation of Christ’s resurrection to the whole creation is settled or dismissed but rather reoriented upon that point at which the eternal intersects the temporal such that if the resurrection is to be interpreted as the Father’s ‘amen’ to the work of Jesus, ‘it drives us back to find the secret of the order of the world in what Christ said and did, and the healing of its continuing bitterness in the place of his endurance’.32 If Christ’s life ‘no longer moves to the horizon of death’, its substance is that which was expressed ‘in a relentless movement from Galilee to Jerusalem, from life to death’.33 MacKinnon’s point is that though Jesus Christ is now present to us as what he has become through the Father’s raising him from the dead, we cannot know that risen life except by analogy with the life manifested along that way.34 Moreover, the full historical and cosmic extent of the vindication of Christ in his resurrection will only be perceived eschatologically.35 These strictures are not, however, to be construed as the commendation of a joyless agnosticism. MacKinnon insisted that when viewed from the perspective of the resurrection the whole way of Christ from Galilee to Jerusalem, even the deep humiliation in which that way culminated, is seen to be suffused with joy.36 Thus, in memorable words which ward off the attractions of a shallow triumphalism, MacKinnon urged that ‘it is for the Christian preacher to stand himself in the shadow of the Cross, to catch there the music of God’s promise, and joy, of his abiding purpose of love there fulfilled’.37 The agonistic character of Christian discipleship, individual and ecclesial, is not negated by the resurrection of Christ but remains, in essence, dependent upon and in form corresponding with, even as it is taken up into, that faithful endurance which Christ’s life embodied and which was vindicated by God’s raising him from the dead. As MacKinnon remarked, ‘Although the Church looks back to Christ’s death, in the sense in which Jesus looked forwards to it, she looks backwards from within history; she still has Christ’s

32 33

34 35 36

37

Ibid., p. 96. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’, in The Resurrection, pp. 65–66. See also idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, pp. 450–51. Here MacKinnon argued that if the resurrection as Jesus’ return to the Father marks his liberation from the relativities of his individual life, ‘the pattern and detail of that existence help to define the one so liberated’ and that ‘what has been raised is that which has been captured in the outline of his journey’ (p. 451). MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 451. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 114–15. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation, in The Resurrection, p. 68. Again, in addition to the obvious Synoptic reference, the echo in MacKinnon’s thinking of Heb. 12.1-3, especially the injunction to ‘consider’ Jesus through concentration on his endurance and the eschatological joy for which he endured death on a cross, is particularly evident here. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 119.

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death to pass through’.38 And this historical location rules out any evasion of contingency and risk for in the Incarnation there is contingency so sheer and unequivocal that inevitably at all levels we shrink from it, preferring ‘necessary absolutes’, whether abstract values, or institutions, or even spiritual experiences. As the saints have, however, known, the Church herself is involved in that contingency, and the sin of her rulers is always in the forgetting of it. Involvement in its consequences runs right through the whole life of the believer, almost in a kind of downward spiral, in all his relationships; but this burden is laid upon him because he is also partaker of its strange glory.39 The strangeness of that glory is drawn out in somewhat Johannine fashion in MacKinnon’s claim that the resurrection is ‘the raising of the whole life and death of Christ to a place where men can see it, as the merciful act of God’s love’.40 If the resurrection is interpretation, it is also first and foremost deed. It is the ultimate vindication of Christ’s faithful endurance by the Father which MacKinnon, echoing the author of Hebrews, urges us to consider again and again. MacKinnon’s reticence in the face of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, then, is a reticence enjoined by reverence before a profound mystery which ‘pulls us up short’, suspicious at once of the glib acceptance of the credulous and the quick dismissal of the sceptic.41 His austere account thus expresses a construal of that ‘event which is more than event’ which rivets attention on that which was raised, namely the one whose identity had manifested itself through the successiveness of words spoken and deeds done along the way from Galilee to Jerusalem. One way to focus this is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead presses upon the church with renewed insistence the very question which he had posed at the outset of that way, ‘Who do you say that I am?’, eliciting not only the kerygmatic response ‘the Crucified is the risen One’ but also the more overtly theological affirmation that ‘the risen One is the Crucified’.42 The restless oscillation between these two claims underscores the fundamental importance to the structure of MacKinnon’s theology of his appropriation of Hoskyns’ hyphenated mode of reference to the reality of Jesus Christ,

38 39 40 41 42

MacKinnon, ‘Sacrament and Common Meal’, p. 207. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 81. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’ in The Resurrection, p. 67. Ibid., p. 63. So Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, p. 83. See MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 179.

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namely the dynamic polarity ‘crucifixion–resurrection’.43 There are at least three inseparable strands of MacKinnon’s investigation of the identity disclosed in the context of that polarity which must be traced. There is, first, his treatment of the basic affirmations of the gospel narratives, of what was said and done, in the form of a theology of Jesus of Nazareth and, second, aspects of a Christological meta-narrative driven by renewed analysis of the category of substance employed in such traditional doctrinal concepts as the Homoousion and hypostatic union and, interwoven with these two and holding them together, MacKinnon’s concept of kenosis.44 The concept of kenosis is not thematized apart from that which shows itself in the mission of Jesus. What MacKinnon furnishes in his account of that mission is a departure from anything like a two-status kenoticism whose successive phases would sponsor a construal of the ecclesiological context in terms of a post-resurrection status exaltationis which might open the door to a triumphalist divinization of the church. Adhering to the example of the gospel narratives themselves,45 MacKinnon’s approach, without slackening his early emphasis on its telos in the cross, now becomes less pointillistic, directing sustained attentiveness to that which is gradually disclosed in Jesus’ sayings and deeds from the beginning of his mission to its ignominious end. That is, MacKinnon moved to spell out the content of that gospel, ‘object as well as occasion of faith, inasmuch as the reign of God is immanent within it’,46 in terms of an account of the human, historical mission of Jesus in which the transcendent breaks into and is revealed within the contingencies of his words and work. MacKinnon lays emphasis on the entirety of that life as the 43

44

45

46

MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 200-201 and idem, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, p. 121. Alternatively this polarity can be expressed as the bidirectional ‘context’ of Jesus’ movement from life to death and from death to life. See idem, ‘Philosophy and Christology’, in Borderlands of Theology, p. 76, an essay in which both Hoskyns and Barth are under discussion. Kenneth Surin, ‘Some Aspects of the “Grammar” of “Incarnation” and “Kenosis”: Reflections Prompted by the Writings of Donald MacKinnon’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, pp. 96, 103. MacKinnon spoke of the redactional activity of the Synoptic evangelists in relation to the resurrection in these terms: ‘Men saw what they recorded; and the unity which they bestowed on the diverse occurrences we tend to group together as miraculous was one of their setting in the ministry of Jesus, and his movement from life to death. But that movement has undoubtedly assumed its status as the structural framework in which these events have been set by the Synoptists because “the Father raised Jesus from the dead”’. Idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 76. See also idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 83: ‘But the focus and centre is the confession that the Father raised the Son from the dead, the confession of the resurrection. It is indeed in the light of this confession that the tale of Jesus’ ministry is told, that its details are allowed to fall into place. Its profession is the prius of Christian construction, even if events belonging to that construction are its own necessary condition and are so presented’. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 446.

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context established by the movement of God to humankind and of humankind to God by which we are enabled to know, and to act in conformity with, the order of the real itself. The problem of the presentation of MacKinnon’s material at this point becomes acute. On the theological front it is precisely attentiveness to the Christ of the Gospels that plunges MacKinnon into the tangle of epistemological, ontological and metaphysical questions that shape his work. In the New Testament attestation of Jesus’ mission, MacKinnon argued, the dramatic and the ontological interpenetrate, rendering otiose the now conventional methodological distinction in Christology ‘from below upwards’ and ‘from above downwards’ on the grounds that Christ comes before us, or at least it is possible that he is in fact so presented, as one who violates the contrast, or in old-fashioned evangelical language, bridges or straddles the gulf between human and divine: and this he does not by arrogance of assertive claim, but by a strange, haunting alternation, even interpenetration of humility and authority, receptivity and confident demand.47 It is the gospel narratives which MacKinnon aspired to follow which give evidence of ‘the interpenetration of movement from the familiar to the transcendent and from intimation of the latter to the sheerly earthly’.48 As Brian Hebblethwaite has argued with reference to MacKinnon’s work, if the claim is made that the very human action carried out by Jesus is in some sense also the act of God, one must press beyond the dramatic to lay out the ontology on the basis of which such a claim may be rendered intelligible.49 And as MacKinnon himself put it, following the long tradition from Nicaea to Anselm to P. T. Forsyth, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, it is because of the soteriology that Christians are forced to go on to a (re)formulation of the doctrine of the Incarnation and indeed to construction of a doctrine of the Triune God.50 Thus MacKinnon argued that to engage with the doctrine 47 48 49

50

MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 179. Ibid., p. 72. B. Hebblethwaite, ‘The Propriety of the Doctrine of the Incarnation’, in The Incarnation, p. 69. See also the discussion in Nicholas Lash, ‘Up and Down in Christology’, in New Studies in Theology, pp. 31–46. For similar argumentation with regard to the oft-invoked distinction between functional and ontological Christologies, see C. F. D. Moule, ‘The Borderlands of Ontology in the New Testament’, in The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology, pp. 1–11. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, pp. 442–43, 451; idem, ‘Prayer, Worship and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 244; and idem, ‘A Master in Israel: Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God (trans. John Halliburton, foreword by E. L. Mascall, and introductory essay by D. M. MacKinnon; London: SPCK, 1975), pp. 4–5.

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of the Incarnation, with the mysteries of soteriology and Christology, is to be confronted with the ‘extraordinary interpenetration of deed and idea’.51 If the identity of Jesus Christ is discovered by attending to his acts, at the same time such attentiveness to the deeds of Christ manifestly proceeds by taking Christological assumptions into consideration. This emphasis on interpenetration, as we shall see, is crucial to MacKinnon’s kenotic reconstruction of Incarnational and Trinitarian doctrine. At the same time, however, there is at the root of MacKinnon’s work such a strong refusal to allow deed to be subsumed into idea that full weight must be laid on the human historical setting of the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, not in the sense that it falls to the theologian to establish the historical details of that work, nor even to disentangle record and testimony in the gospel narratives themselves. Rather, MacKinnon’s Christological grammar in its interrogative, imperative and indicative modes orients the church upon the mission and person of Jesus as the evangelists recount it. Access to the deeds of Christ is mediated through the witness of the evangelists and through the church’s understanding of that witness down the long centuries of its existence.52 He held that it was necessary by close reading (reading and re-reading) of their narratives ‘to enter into the experience of the Evangelists as best we can, and find beyond and conditioning their diverse presentations, what men were able to grasp of the self-interpretation by deed as well as word, of the central figure of the Gospels’.53 In Christology, as in the theology of the atonement, response is always being made to the prior witness of those whose accounts of the words and deeds of Christ are themselves shaped by faith in the crucified One whom God has raised from the dead. While historical study might serve to disconfirm the authenticity of particular sayings or deeds, it is through description and re-description of what greets us in the central figure of the Gospels that faith seeks understanding and thereby renders an account, always open to correction, of the work and person of Jesus of Nazareth.54 Bearing in mind MacKinnon’s methodological directive and mindful that 51 52

53

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MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 58. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 103. But note also MacKinnon’s caution here that because the gospel texts are the product of the evangelists’ elucidation of the secret of the mysterium Christi, they not only mediate but set a barrier between their readers and their subject. MacKinnon, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 182. Such privileging of the gospel texts does not obviate, as MacKinnon argued here, rigorous attention to such historical questions as why Jesus was rejected, by whom he was put on trial, what kind of trial it was and how it came about that he was condemned, matters that cannot be avoided, he insisted, in an age scarred by the horrors of the Shoah. It should be recalled that MacKinnon duly allowed that historical uncertainty could be corrosive of faith but cautioned equally that historical certainty is not the same thing as faith and does not render faith less mysterious or problematic. See idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 79; and also, idem, Themes in Theology, p. 231.

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in his descriptive metaphysics the schematizing imagination must be disciplined through attentiveness to the concrete particular, we focus for purposes of exposition in the remainder of this chapter on MacKinnon’s account of Christ’s ministry of presence along that way from Galilee to Jerusalem and what he underscored in its achievement as the ground of our salvation. The pressure towards the ontological which this account must invariably feel will lead us to delve more fully into MacKinnon’s Incarnational and Trinitarian theological concerns in the following chapter.

I. The Kenotic Way of Jesus Christ MacKinnon succinctly summed up his understanding of the mission of Jesus, its kenotic trajectory from Galilee to Jerusalem, as the context in which the transcendent is revealed and made accessible to humankind in these words: ‘The Gospels tell of words spoken; but they also tell of deeds of mercy done; and words and deeds alike are held together by the great deed of the Passion, which gives them their final sense and from which the power that is in them derives’.55 We may follow the order of this claim in exploring first MacKinnon’s handling of the sayings of Jesus, then of Jesus’ acts of merciful acceptance of the poor and the marginal, as well as the miracles which are ascribed to him before turning lastly to MacKinnon’s forays into the doctrine of the atonement. First, then, exploration of the parables of Jesus constitutes a major theme in MacKinnon’s work in which he takes cognizance of their worldly Sitz im Leben, their status as vehicles of representation of the transcendent and, in the use to which both Jesus and the gospel redactors bent them, their function as instruments of destabilization designed to bring their hearers up short. In other words, MacKinnon acknowledged a random alternation between a nisus ad extra and a nisus ab extra which meet in this parabolic context in such a way as to pose a fundamental challenge to our thinking about God with no assurance that the disturbance thereby occasioned can be contained and easily reordered.56 In turning to MacKinnon’s treatment of parabolic communication in Jesus’ ministry, the degree to which his preoccupation with the manner of Jesus’ presence to the world of first-century Roman imperial power and those who were in revolt against it, to the conflicted pluralism of Jewish religion and to 55

56

MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 243. Roger White, ‘MacKinnon and the Parables’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, p. 54. White’s study draws attention to three aspects of MacKinnon’s reflection on the parables of Jesus: his recognition that they are not simply initially disconcerting but remain deeply disturbing, even offensive to the pious imagination; that they exhibit an intense human realism and that they demand an attention to detail which subverts the notion of their inherent simplicity.

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the very ordinary folk who inhabited the margins of those worlds remained constant must not be lost from view.57 Jesus belonged to these worlds even if it must finally be said of him that he stood in revolt against the corruption of religious and political power manifest within them and that he undermined by his teaching and acts of service the ideological distortions to which they had succumbed. Also in the immediate background Barth’s prophetic attack on religion in the Romans commentary and Bonhoeffer’s aspirations towards a ‘religionless Christianity’ expressed in his prison correspondence continued to exercise their pull on MacKinnon’s theological imagination.58 His inquiry into the parables thus centres on their capacity to furnish theological insight in the context of quite ordinary settings in secular life: they are not forms of ‘special experience’ in which people come face to face with God apart from the stark complexities of human reality.59 He thus underscored their ‘desacralized idiom’, their freedom from any ‘quasinuminous quality’ or the absence of that cultivated religiosity evident in the pious imagery that, so he charged, often adorns preaching today.60 Yet he also brought out the inherent ambivalence in the ways in which parables are at once revelatory and subversive of the way things actually are.61 That is, MacKinnon drew attention to the way in which, as forms of representation, some parables extend the familiar as a description of the unfamiliar – for example, in the way in which an ‘obsessive preoccupation’ with finding a lost sheep or a lost coin discloses the urgency of the divine compassion, while others, notably apocalyptic parables like that of the sheep and the goats (Mt. 25.31-46), illuminate the ultimate by juxtaposing the fantastic and the familiar.62 Although MacKinnon held that Jesus’ parables are meant to inform, to induce to action and to transform belief, he ruled out any approach in which they might be reductively summed up by abstracting a simple lesson or a hard and fast moral maxim or a proposition offering purchase-hold on the divine. Parables resist such treatment because they operate indirectly, hinting elusively at or pointing suggestively to, and thus conveying intimations of, the transcendent in concrete terms which cannot be restricted to a field narrower than human life itself.63 57

58

59 60 61

62 63

See MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 243; and idem, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 179. See especially, MacKinnon, ‘Parable and Sacrament’, pp. 166–70; see also his reflections on the tentative attractiveness of this move in idem, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 24–25. See also idem, ‘Autorité et conscience’, pp. 427–28. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., pp. 171–72. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, 79. For a discussion of MacKinnon’s critical negotiation of issues in parable interpretation arising from the work of Adolf Jülicher and Eberhard Jüngel, see Roger White, ‘MacKinnon and the Parables’, pp. 49–54. Ibid., pp. 79–80. Ibid., pp. 80–82, 88.

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MacKinnon argued that the truth of a parable is revealed in its capacity to undermine bias, ‘to break the cake of stale intellectual and moral custom’, or to ‘give purchase-hold on disturbance’.64 He maintained, however, that, along with their capacity to throw light upon the ways of God with humankind, they seem to carry with them a ‘built-in peril of misapprehension’.65 Highlighting, then, the ‘context of common interrogation’ to which they belong, MacKinnon offered readings of several parables which by underscoring their ambivalence or deceptive simplicity deconstructed the straightforward analogies with the divine often furnished by a more conventional exegesis.66 For example, sustained meditation on the details of the parable of the two brothers (Lk. 15.11-32), MacKinnon mused, might suggest that the father had acted rashly in freely welcoming home his younger son, treated the elder brother coldly and rather unfairly and that perhaps amid the rejoicing all is not resolved, as the prospect of even more tragic consequences within the bosom of the family looms.67 Similarly, while noting that in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector (Lk. 18.9-14) the worth of a real self-knowledge is shown to be greater than that of a carefully cultivated, religious discipline of life, he suggested that this might lead to its reception as ‘the validation of a certain sort of emotional selfindulgence, supposedly presented in it as somehow superior to the moral energy and initiative displayed and achieved through self-discipline’, a generalization which would certainly falsify it.68 Or again, he draws out the sharp irony with which the parable of the sheep and the goats warns against the restriction to an exactly circumscribed agenda and group of persons of what may count as valid service of the Son of Man by pointing out that the bewilderment of those commended for such service indicates that they have effectively performed it spontaneously and unawares.69 The aspect of the

64 65 66

67 68 69

Ibid., pp. 81–82. Ibid., p. 143. See John Milbank, ‘“Between Purgation and Illumination”: A Critique of the Theology of Right’, p. 178, where it is rightly suggested that in MacKinnon’s approach, the absolute is hinted at in the parables by a ‘finitely irresolvable hesitation’ which leaves the impression that their bias might almost run in the other direction. However, it must be pointed out against Milbank’s criticisms in this essay that MacKinnon’s reading of the parables arises out of his conviction that Jülicher’s contrast between the parabolic and the allegorical cannot be maintained, but rather that the parabolic is an ‘open-textured’ concept under which various kinds of short fiction can be subsumed. See MacKinnon, ‘Parable and Sacrament’, pp. 167–68; and idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 78–79. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 137–38. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 84. See also idem, ‘Parable and Sacrament’, p. 172; and idem, ‘The Son of Man: A Comment’, Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 11, no. 2 (1990), pp. 89–92 (91): ‘The missionaries of the Son of Man pass unrecognized by those who have thought

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tragic lying just beneath the surface of these fictions, the ambivalence and incompleteness which disorient reception of their lessons, their unravelling of the web of self-deception and the irony which disrupts achievement of a final moral security are taken by MacKinnon to be hints of the transcendent, indicative of a fundamental nisus ad extra. But the ‘desperately human’ setting in which they are given, a setting which compels by the very recognizable ordinariness of its patterns of daily life, also hints at a nisus ab extra, the ‘unexpected intrusion of the transcendent’, the total context of the pervasive, urgent, sovereign movement of God towards God’s people.70 That movement comes to ultimate expression in ‘the paradigm reality’ of the deeds of Jesus, and it is in relation to these acts that the parables find their interpretative context.71 The parables as MacKinnon construed them clearly thwart metaphysical construction by overthrowing conventional notions of God, refusing a ‘facile’ teleology or a happy ending, and yet in so doing they thrust attention back on the one whose teaching found, and continues to find, resonance in the context of ordinary daily life. Thus MacKinnon shifted attention from the subjective impression made by the parables to the historical actuality of the supreme parable of Jesus’ life. He was acutely nervous in the face of any tendency to construe Jesus as merely the bearer of a message or the incarnation of a principle. In fact, MacKinnon argued that we give attention to the parables of Jesus because there was a remarkable congruence between his teaching and his acts, even to the extent of his being broken in the service of the love he proclaimed.72 Yet neither is there here a basis for speculative metaphysical construction, since what his mission discloses is a mystery of redemptive action in the shape of a particular human life conformed by the utmost obedience to God’s will.73 The paradigm of the movement ab extra, of God towards humankind, is a life ‘whose movement expresses the intensely human story of a retreat from the broad highways of success and assurance to the narrow defiles of failure and bewilderment’.74 The telos of this way is the cross, and the way itself is marked with such perplexity and conflict that MacKinnon warned that to present Jesus ‘as a serene heroic figure, always the confident master of the situations which confronted him, always sure and certain of touch in his handling of them, is to trivialize his ordeal, and diminish his significance, to belittle his mystery, and to render inauthentic his humanity’.75 MacKinnon’s account of

70 71 72 73 74 75

themselves appropriately zealous for churchly causes, who have made their own sharp and rigid prescription of appropriate subjects of their service’. MacKinnon, ‘Parable and Sacrament’, pp. 169, 173, 180. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 143. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 127. Ibid., p. 67. MacKinnon, ‘The Tomb Was Empty’, p. 8. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 127–28. MacKinnon never tired of reminding his readers that the endpoint of that journey is marked by the cry of

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the deeds of Christ enacted over this long endurance thus underscores, in concert with the evangelists themselves, the ambiguity which shrouded his actions, the tragic outcome of the one who said that he was among human beings as a servant and the deep irony of an omnipotence broken in that very service of God and humankind. As with the precariousness to which the parables admit us, it is almost as if interpretation of Jesus’ actions could, in Milbank’s phrase, ‘run the other way’ as the agonistic character of the journey to Jerusalem and his ultimate rejection by those to whom he came so clearly demonstrate. MacKinnon turned repeatedly to two gospel accounts in particular in elucidation of the character of Jesus’ ministry: the Lucan narrative of the triumphal progress of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem and the Johannine theological meditation on the ‘hour’ which the Son received from the Father. There are several moments along the Lucan representation of the way towards the cross which to MacKinnon’s mind revealed the paradoxical nature of the victory of Jesus Christ in relation to his ministry of presence to people in humble and merciful servanthood. He was struck by Luke’s redactional reordering of the account of the temptations of Christ in the desert at the very outset of his ministry and the repetition in some sense of the third of that series in the self-interrogation in Gethsemane and in the taunts of the onlookers at his death who challenged him to come down from the cross.76 In this regard MacKinnon underscored in these three moments Jesus’ resolute refusal of a ‘bloodless victory’ achieved through an abuse of spiritual power. MacKinnon noted that for Luke’s Christ the climactic temptation was that of the testing of his status with the Father by means of a miraculous descent from the pinnacle of the Temple upon that central site of devotion and worship in Jerusalem, an act by which Jesus’ identity would have been decisively and publicly secured. The result, he suggested, would have been alignment with the establishment, the spiritual elite whose authoritative leadership was invested in the cause of religion and morals and, as a consequence, alienation from those whom he called ‘the lost sheep of Israel’.77 Similarly, in the agonized self-scrutiny in Gethsemane, MacKinnon saw Jesus as one unsure of the final step of his journey, moving there, as it

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dereliction, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’, inviting them to find in it ‘the supremely revealing and supremely authoritative moment in human history’. See idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 81. For consistent treatments of this theme see MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, pp. 78–79; idem, ‘Autorité et conscience’, pp. 427–28; idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 127–33; idem, ‘La communication efficace et les tentations du Christ’, pp. 377–80; and idem, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, pp. 177–81. MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, p. 79. MacKinnon had in view the Sadducean priesthood and ‘the morally superior Pharisees in their less admirable aspects’. Idem, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 179.

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were, into dark and uncharted territory, exposing his horrified perplexity before the Father that the disaster of the cross should be its outcome and yet his willingness despite his doubt even at this depth humbly to obey his Father’s will.78 Then also he noted that Luke presented Christ as having at his disposal even when nailed to the cross means by which to extricate himself from his predicament and yet refusing to use them, staying in his place and thereby maintaining solidarity with the penitent thief who in extremis confessed his guilt and appealed to Jesus for mercy.79 All of this indicated, MacKinnon argued, Jesus’ refusal to prove himself, to press for a public vindication of his claims which would have had the effect of completely subverting his mission.80 MacKinnon recognized in this refusal the very ground of Jesus’ mission of presence, claiming that ‘so hidden from the open perception of Jesus himself, it admits him to the intimacy of the outcast, by his own acceptance of unbearable ambiguity at once their judge and their advocate, their healer and their fellow’.81 In a similar vein, MacKinnon underscored those aspects of the Johannine tradition which centred on the faith of Jesus, his life of dependence in prayer upon the Father and his patient awaiting of his ‘hour’, as indicators of Jesus’ self-interpretation.82 Hence, Jesus’ claim that he spoke and enacted only what the Father gave him to say and do is said to reveal a total receptivity, a complete abandonment of himself to the Father which comes to expression in a fidelity which shapes his mission, ‘perceived as laid upon him, yet never clearly grasped as a whole, rather successively received as a series of tasks’.83 MacKinnon thus identified the manner of Jesus’ relation to his Father, his dependence and receptivity, as the source of his freedom for a ministry of presence which he detailed primarily from Luke’s presentation of Christ’s mission.84 Here he fastened on Jesus’ resolute manifestation of a profoundly compassionate readiness to serve, welcome, accept and forgive, a ‘mysterious and awful patience . . . which yet seems big with inexhaustible mercy and compassion’.85 The great surprise, even outrage, of this gracious gift is that it was granted persistently and unconditionally to unrepentant sinners. In this regard MacKinnon keyed in on Luke’s ‘almost ruthless’ presentation of Jesus’ preference for ‘the disreputable and the worthless’, suggesting that 78

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MacKinnon, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, p. 116. See also idem, ‘Teleology and Redemption’, p. 109: ‘Christ entered upon the road into the unknown – a way that led to a place of disintegration, where the limitations of human knowledge were suffused by a sense of the ultimately impenetrable’. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 132. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 153. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 136. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 443. Ibid., pp. 444–45. MacKinnon, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 181. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’, in The Resurrection, p. 67.

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he comes close to depicting Jesus’ action in antinomian terms.86 So in this presence to the outcasts Jesus made himself of dubious reputation, tarred with the label of glutton and drunkard, enjoying table fellowship with social misfits and prostitutes, with collaborators with Roman power and those who sought violently to overthrow it, yet spurning the legalistically selfrighteous and self-assured members of respectable society.87 Moreover, what ultimately saves Jesus’ ministry from moral ambiguity or mere emotional self-indulgence is the rooting of his actions in his interior conviction that performed within the context of his steadfast determination to set his face towards Jerusalem where he will lay down his life, they are as such obedient to his Father’s will.88 Yet the understanding of obedience here is edged away from any notion of passive submission to a set of rigid commands towards that of a creative enactment of God’s good will which must be fathomed out step by step in relationship with the Father, a creative enactment that belongs, along with parabolic indirection and the ambivalence of his compassionate diakonia to sinners, to Christ’s ‘painful way of self-interpretation or . . . self-definition’.89 MacKinnon highlighted the way in which Christ’s availability to the needs of sinners reshapes also the meaning of his humility in terms of a refusal of that alienation caused by spiritual burdens placed on the lowly by their spiritual leaders, a confrontation even with the Temple hierarchy (cleansing it as a ‘man in revolt’) grounded again in his singleminded obedience to his Father.90 Oddly, MacKinnon remarked, Jesus only allowed people to put their hope in him when he had announced that he must suffer and had set himself upon the way towards his death.91 It was the same obedience to the will of the Father which withdrew him from the Galilean ministry to offer himself for the healing of the world, which also rendered him wholly available to the human needs met so poignantly along that way to Jerusalem. But if the homelessness which this obedience required of him as ‘the man for God’ rendered him ‘wholly acceptable, vulnerable, disponible’ to the many, it also imbued his life with a tragic element in that

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MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 131. See MacKinnon, ‘Sacrament and Common Meal’, p. 202; idem, ‘Autorité et conscience’, p. 427; and idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 445. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 142. See also idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 128: ‘His teaching is vindicated through his riveting the question of its validity upon himself’. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 445. MacKinnon, ‘Autorité et conscience’, p. 430, where he noted the unsettling, paradoxical character of such obedience and its interpretation by the evangelists as part and parcel of the prophetic tradition he had come to fulfil. It is in that vein that Jesus’ indifference to human judgement of his actions and to the esteem of the spiritual elites is to be understood. MacKinnon, ‘The Tomb Was Empty’, p. 8.

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he was thereby cut off, MacKinnon suggested, from much in his society that was wise and faithful.92 It is across this same movement, then, that MacKinnon draws out the ironic and tragic elements in Jesus’ acts. One aspect of this theme is MacKinnon’s account of the miraculous element in Jesus’ ministry, an approach extraordinarily angular even by his standards but which focuses again on the way in which the overt presentation of the intrusion of the transcendent does not leave the relative behind. Over against his basic claim that the prevalence of miracles in the gospel accounts advertises the movement from God to humankind in the context of ordinary and everyday circumstances, he frankly acknowledged the intellectual and moral problems which they raise in the communicational context of today and then signalled the ‘edginess’ they have provoked in Christian tradition, even in their handling by the evangelists themselves.93 One question which he raised, however, concerns the kind of claims that can be made about the power of Jesus on the basis of the miraculous aspect of his ministry. In looking in particular at one miracle in the Johannine narrative of Jesus’ deeds of power, the raising of Lazarus (Jn 11.1-44), MacKinnon’s exposition set in bold relief the ironic and tragic dimension implicit in this act. He noted that while the Fourth Gospel in very direct terms represented Jesus as having raised his dead friend from the grave, it also depicted that miraculous event as the occasion in which Jesus’ enemies decided that the time had come for him to be put to death. The evangelist’s narrative thus underscored in Jesus the presence of a power over human life and death themselves paradoxically coincident with a vulnerability and destructibility which provide an opening to his opponents for the plotting of his demise. If in his presentation of the raising of Lazarus the fourth evangelist sketches a manifestation of the divine omnipotence in concreto, MacKinnon argued that we cannot interpret that omnipotence as limitless, for Jesus’ act forced upon him inevitably ‘a bitter submission to the harsh realities of human life’, an exposure to the political machinations of Caiaphas and those who conspired to bring him to a tragic end.94 MacKinnon thus found in the evangelist’s presentation an ironic criticism of a concept of omnipotence which might be worked up through reflection on Jesus’ mighty acts, a disciplining of the religious imagination which cuts off the flights of fancy by which one might posit tout court a divine invincibility in Jesus. Rather, his messianic way, the instrument by which such discipline is administered to all our thinking, runs through death and resurrection.95 As MacKinnon put it, 92

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MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, p. 80; and idem, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 184. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 115. Cf. idem, ‘Intellect and Imagination’, pp. 32–33. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 120. MacKinnon, ‘Intellect and Imagination’, p. 33. Here he signalled the way in which in the Johannine narrative the ambiguous faith of those who followed Jesus because of

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‘we must perceive the thing in its strangeness, in order to school ourselves to grasp its ultimate reality in the desperately familiar, . . . in order to learn to see that familiar anew, as indeed finding at its own level, but not out of its own resources, the means of its transformation’.96 In this way MacKinnon fastened on the pervasive ambiguity which attached to Jesus’ manifestation of the reign of God along his trajectory towards the cross, finding its presence as much in unconditional grace extended to sinners as in miraculous manifestations of divine power. Other aspects come to the fore in MacKinnon’s elucidation of the historical form of the life of Jesus Christ in terms of this ordinary strangeness. He was struck, for instance, by the evangelists’ representation of the difficulty which Jesus’ enemies had in picking him out from among the ordinary people with whom he associated, by the starkness of the contrast with his ‘flamboyant forerunner’, John the Baptist.97 He drew attention to the depth at which Jesus was enmeshed within the contingencies and perplexities of human life, shaping the contours of his way by the choices he made, vulnerable himself to their outcome and powerless to control their impact on the lives of others. In this way he highlighted the burden of temporality, the sense of limitation and incompleteness, which belongs to the substance of Jesus’ life revealed along that way: What it was for him to be human was to be subject to the sort of fragmentation of effort, curtailment of design, interruption of purpose, distraction of resolve that belongs to temporal experience. To leave one place for another is to leave work undone; to give attention to one suppliant is to ignore another; to expend energy today is to leave less for tomorrow. We have to ask ourselves how far this very conformity to the complex discipline of temporality, this acceptance of the often tragic consequences that spring from its obstinate, ineluctable truncation of human effort, belongs to the very substance of Jesus’ defeat.98 Indeed, at the culmination of his journey Jesus wept over Jerusalem, his words expressive of a weary futility, acknowledging that nothing could be done to avert the looming catastrophe.99 For Jesus to have withdrawn from the successes of the Galilean ministry to set his face towards Jerusalem,

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the signs and miracles was put to the test by the requirement given in the ‘hard saying’ that they must eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood (Jn 6.53-59). MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 121. MacKinnon, ‘The Sacraments’, pp. 130–31; and idem, ‘Parable and Sacrament’, pp. 173–74. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 93: ‘It is of the manner of the coming of Jesus that he comes so close to the ordinary ways of men that they hardly notice him, that they treat him as one of themselves’. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 162–63. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 128.

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MacKinnon claimed, was to have abdicated responsibility for the welfare of his people whose leaders’ calculated raison d’état had set them irrevocably on the road towards an appalling disaster at the hands of their Roman overlords.100 Here Jesus’ decision to embrace the will of the Father which led him to the cross renders the choice of the good of his people’s survival unavailable. In this rather Butlerian presentation, Jesus’ obedience is shown to be historically, that is, contingently, constructed by the choices between competing goods which determined the shape of his mission. In elucidation of the significance which Jesus himself attached to his acts of self-abandonment in obedience to his Father’s will along the way of the cross MacKinnon looked to the Synoptic account of the Last Supper and to the Johannine representation of Jesus’ ‘high-priestly’ prayer (Jn 17.1-26) for indications of Jesus’ intentions as his death drew near. He accepted that Jesus knew what he was doing, that his impending death did not overtake him as a surprise and argued that ‘it is not mere catastrophe but an action that Jesus goes forth to meet . . . because it is his Father’s will, and the hour something he receives from the Father’s hand’.101 In the ritual of the upper room MacKinnon took the self-referential words of blessing pronounced over the bread and the cup to be indicative of the externalization of Jesus’ total interior self-consecration in an act of self-oblation to the Father by which he imposed significance on the ordeal that he was about to undergo.102 He bolstered this interpretation by appeal to Jesus’ prayer at the climax of the Johannine farewell discourse, particularly the note of the self-consecration of Christ on behalf of his followers that they might also be sanctified in truth (Jn 17.19). But lest this give the impression of a Christ serenely master of the events of his passion, MacKinnon repeatedly fastened attention on the troubling uncertainty and dark terror that overtook Christ as he entered into the depths of his final ordeal in Gethsemane, revealed in the figure prostrate on the ground imploring God that his ‘hour’ might pass from him.103 There are two points, then, that MacKinnon constantly underscored in his probing of the mission of Jesus. The first might be summed up in his claim that the way of Jesus was the way of continual exposure to human precariousness and limit, a fact whose Christological implications do not go unremarked: ‘It is a manifest weakness of much traditional Christology that it has evacuated the mystery of God’s self-incarnation of so much that must take time, that 100

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MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 194; and idem, Borderlands of Theology, p.103. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 187. The point is sustained in a variety of contexts in MacKinnon, ‘The Sacraments’, pp. 132–33; idem, ‘Sacrament and Common Meal’, pp. 203–04; and idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, pp. 444–45. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 94; idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p.195; idem, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 174; and idem, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, p. 116.

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must be endowed with the most pervasive forms of human experience, its successiveness, its fragmentariness, above all its ineluctable choices, fraught equally with tragic consequence’.104 Allied with this insistence on sheer contingency is the stark claim that the fact cannot be avoided or mitigated by appeal to theoretical resolution that the human historical mission of Jesus ended in irretrievable failure and disaster, manifested in betrayal, in abandonment both by his own followers and by his Father, and in death on a Roman cross. If this account of the mission of Jesus with its austere emphasis on incompleteness, ambiguity and failure is in part indicative of MacKinnon’s soteriology, we must now put the question concerning what it is that Jesus Christ has accomplished along this way and its culmination in the cross. What account does MacKinnon offer of the doctrine of the atonement in relation to the historical mission of Jesus Christ? The question has been given some point by Philip West’s charge that by collapsing the resurrection back on to the cross and emphasizing Jesus’ tragic embrace of failure and defeat MacKinnon has succumbed to an ideological distortion of the doctrine of the cross, annexing it arbitrarily to the negative and thereby reducing it to a symbol interpretative of personal suffering in the realm of ideas and attitudes rather than as a critical and transformative symbol that funds action to change the world.105 A detailed look at MacKinnon’s construal of the soteriological achievement of Jesus’ mission will show the main thrust of West’s complaint to be largely unfounded.106 104 105

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MacKinnon, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 181. Philip West, ‘Christology as “Ideology”’, Theology 88 (November 1985), pp. 428–36 (433–34). The charge is initially implausible given the role which Marxist critique in general and the figure of Lenin in particular play in MacKinnon’s thought, especially his fascination with the lengths to which the latter was prepared to go to change rather than merely interpret history. See, for instance, MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 11–29, for his claim that it was Lenin’s incarnation of the Marxist ideal of social transformation that turned his own mind to the incarnation of Christ and the ‘fundamental realities’ of Christology and soteriology (22). See also in the same volume, ‘Absolute and Relative in History’, pp. 55–58. While West treats material from Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays, he surprisingly overlooks MacKinnon’s handling in that same volume of the very issue in question in ‘On the Notion of a Philosophy of History’, pp. 152–68. See John Milbank, ‘“Between Purgation and Illumination”’, p. 178, where a similar charge is formulated in terms of MacKinnon’s emplotment of history within a ‘privileged tragic framework’ which is said to exit the narrative before resolution can be effected. Integral to these criticisms by West and Milbank is the complaint that MacKinnon’s suspicion of a facile teleology or optimism prohibits him from attending adequately, that is, positively, to ecclesiology. On this ground Rowan Williams is prepared to grant with qualifications some house room to West’s critique in ‘Trinity and Ontology’, pp. 85–88, in response extending MacKinnon’s remarks on church and Holy Spirit, whereas Kenneth Surin, ‘Christology, Tragedy and “Ideology”’, Theology

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II. MacKinnon’s Moral Vision of the Atonement We begin negatively, given MacKinnon’s disclaimer that he has not attempted to offer a full exposition of the atonement or even a passably complete treatment of the several biblical metaphors of salvation, each with its extensive range of interpretations, which together comprise the traditional doctrine. What he has sketched, rather, are several aspects of a critical prolegomenon meant to suggest the possibility of a reconstruction of the doctrine on the basis of an element in Jesus’ ministry, namely its moral structure, which points up the constitutive character of his atoning work.107 A number of deficiencies in then-current approaches to atonement theory are accordingly exposed to criticisms rooted in MacKinnon’s polemic against ‘idealism’, namely the retreat from deed into idea. Insistence on the deed means for MacKinnon that the rejection and death of Jesus must be interpreted in ways which do not bypass their setting amid the politico–religious aspirations of Jewish statecraft and the brutal exercise of Roman imperial power. First, he moved to cut off any hint of moralism by invoking the ‘scandal of particularity’ in order to gauge the extent to which the contingent particularities of Jesus’ mission undermined a merely exemplarist soteriology, although MacKinnon still allowed that Christ’s achieved victory carried the ‘inexhaustible suggestion of an example to be followed in utterly different circumstances’.108 If by the nature of his mission Christ was constrained to accept limitation, this was the condition of his fulfilment of the task laid upon him. MacKinnon pointed out that there were many aspects of human life that Jesus did not experience which are among those that try us most. For example, his rootlessness absolved him from the responsibilities, joys and disappointments of marriage and parenthood. He apparently knew nothing of chronic illness. His death in the prime of adulthood shielded him from the ravages of old age on mind and body.109 There are many dark experiences in human life that he did not share. If emphasizing the particularities of his life serves to heighten recognition of the humanity of Jesus Christ, MacKinnon argued, his experience must nonetheless be reckoned ‘in crucial respects too relative and limited to offer a wholly significant guide-post to men and women in all the circumstances of their lives’.110 Furthermore, he

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89 (July 1986), pp. 283–91, offers a strong rebuttal of West’s article on the basis of a detailed, contextualized exegesis of MacKinnon’s work. MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, p. 81. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 194. MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, pp. 73–76. Ibid., p. 76. This criticism arises against the backdrop of the moral life. MacKinnon is not reiterating the kind of charge made against the Irenaean recapitulation theory, as Vernon White describes it, that because God ‘did not take all human experience into his

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held that a purely exemplarist soteriology could only be advanced on the basis of a considerable moral naiveté which overstates human capacity for good and underestimates the intractable power of evil.111 Second, while duly recognizing that the victory motif pervades the entire New Testament, he deemed the ‘Christus Victor’ or so-called classic doctrine of the atonement as retrieved by Gustaf Aulén so patently mythological that it virtually gave carte blanche to its interpreters to translate it into whatever idiom they saw fit.112 He was disturbed by its underplaying of ‘the agony and disillusion, the sheer monstrous reality of physical and spiritual suffering’ which Christ experienced and suggested that the fashionable liturgical symbolization of a ‘superficial cosmic optimism’ which it sponsored hardly sufficed in a world still marked by extremes of terror and hope.113 Third, MacKinnon expressed reservations about the theme of sacrifice, not simply because of the cultural relativity of the term but because of the danger of moral perversion in some interpretations or uses to which the concept at times has been subject. Here MacKinnon adumbrated the kinds of ideas and attitudes linked to the ‘cult of suffering’, namely that pain ennobles the sufferer114 or avails as a school of character-building, extending even to those who witness the patient suffering of others.115 He criticized sharply talk of a vocation to sacrifice, objecting that ‘to sacrifice ourselves is, it is said, to realize the image of the crucified, whereas the self-sacrificing may simply be mutilating himself, purposively destroying the sweetness of existence in the name of illusion, in order to make himself a hero in his own eyes’, and that ‘the ethic of sacrifice indeed provides a symbolism under which all sorts of cruelties may be perpetrated, not so much upon the weak as upon those who have been deceived by a false image of goodness’.116 He expressed deep suspicion of a ‘conservative evangelical’ tendency to describe

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own in Christ . . . he did not adequately equip himself to “help those meeting their test now”’. See Vernon White, The Atonement and Incarnation: An Essay in Universalism and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 64. MacKinnon, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, p. 118. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 98. See Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement (trans. A. G. Hebert; London: SPCK, 1931). It may be that the demythologization which MacKinnon questioned actually tends in some British theology simply to annex the victory motif to a moralization of the doctrine. See, for example, J. N. D. Kelly, Aspects of the Passion (London: Mowbray, 1985), p. 34; and Frances Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (London: SCM Press, 1975), p. 90. For an incisive discussion of this theme which displays sensitivity to MacKinnon’s concerns, see Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), pp. 53–82. Ibid., p. 92. MacKinnon, ‘Moral Objections’, in Objections to Christian Belief, p. 23. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 169. MacKinnon, ‘Moral Objections’, in Objections to Christian Belief, pp. 24–25.

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the notion of penal substitution in such a way as virtually to make retributive punishment for moral guilt the ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’ between God and humankind.117 Further, interpretations of the death of Christ which saw the cross as merely illustrative or declarative of God’s saving activity fell short, in MacKinnon’s judgement, of an atonement.118 Any reading, in fact, which converted the raw cruelty of the ‘judicial murder’ of Jesus of Nazareth, the ugly deed done amid the rough untidiness of human history, into an idea neatly assimilable in cultic or quasi-liturgical terms or within a speculative metaphysical framework fell afoul of MacKinnon’s dogged insistence on the primacy of the actual. If MacKinnon’s treatment suffers by evading a positive theological exegesis of the complement of biblical soteriological motifs, his moral concentration on the way of Jesus saves him from the arbitrariness of the demythologization process and leads him to a more direct engagement with that aspect of the doctrine which touches what is arguably the existential heart of the matter, namely God’s definitive overcoming in human flesh of the moral contradictions which rend the fabric of human lives. His criticisms here may be summed up, then, as a polemic against theories of atonement which by decontextualizing the metaphors of salvation from Christ’s mission as the gospels describe it flirt with the idea that our redemption is the achievement of a deus ex machina.119 Alternatively, MacKinnon objected that a decontextualized understanding of redemption may well abandon the notion of atonement, often by collapsing it into the weak claim that God saves by simply accepting us, a theory which, to his mind, simply underwrites human propensity for moral self-deception and self-aggrandizement.120 Moreover, as we have seen, MacKinnon ruled out the imposition of saving significance on the life of Jesus on the basis of our projection of whatever in our experience we may deem to constitute salvation. It may well be that this spare treatment of traditional atonement theories is a protest motivated by ‘evangelical penetration’ against any tendency to relocate, whether by forensic removal to the heavenly assize or 117

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MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 175. See also idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 159, where, it is suggested that a corresponding distortion of the doctrine of God takes place in which God is made out to be a kind of ‘celestial jailer’. See, for instance, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p.171; and idem, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 163. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., pp. 176–77. See also idem, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, pp. 82–83. As Kenneth Surin points out, MacKinnon rejected the notion of a deity which intervenes to save human beings without identifying with them in the process and consequently those soteriologies which operate without or in isolation from a doctrine of the Incarnation. See K. Surin, ‘Atonement and Christology’, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religions–philosophie 24, no. 2 (1982), pp. 131–49 (133).

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cultic interpretation to the heavenly altar, the actual achievement of salvation in the death of Jesus of Nazareth upon a Roman cross.121 The starting point of MacKinnon’s constructive engagement with the doctrine of the atonement is his unshakeable affirmation of the fact of atonement, that it has indeed been accomplished in the term to which the kenotic trajectory of the gospel itinerary inexorably led, namely the death of Jesus Christ on a cross. The claim is registered in a range of unelaborated assertions in several diverse contexts which form an ontological framework against which his moral concern stands out. The deed of the cross is appropriately construed as an opus operatum, a creative act by which the whole creation was radically affected and a new foundation for the relation of humankind to God established.122 Jesus’ via crucis does not merely illustrate a principle but achieves it and brings it into being.123 It is the act in the midst of history by which God has redeemed us.124 It is a deed that is more than a deed, one that transforms the texture of world history, that brings about irrevocable change in the very substance of the world.125 Second, MacKinnon makes it abundantly clear that this deed is an atonement, the achievement in Christ’s passion of the reconciliation of the irreconcilable,126 a real and decisive resolution in Christ of the ultimate contradictions of human existence.127 Third, alongside its location extra nos he sustained its pro nobis character, claiming that the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is not only the ground of our hope but the very foundation of our being.128 Indeed, he argued that it is in this action of Christ, his obedience to the point of death, that human existence is reordered to its restored patterning.129 The aspect of the forgiveness of sin is signalled by reference to an apostolic absolution made possible by and flowing from Christ’s ‘own achieved absolution of the world’,130 and in reference to his entry into the ‘sad absurdities’ of human failure and his bearing of our sin.131 If, to his mind, 121

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MacKinnon would not countenance the opposite extreme of simply construing the cross ‘as a bare Dass, defiant of any essay in interpretation, however qualified, and therefore detached from any conceivable historical location’, noting within the New Testament the complementarity of ‘various interpretative schemata’ which set out the meaning of Christ’s work, suggesting that even here there are ‘degrees of penetration’. Idem, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, pp. 117–18. MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, p. 76. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 163. See also idem, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’, in The Resurrection, p. 66. 125 MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 22. Ibid., p. 60. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 150. Ibid., p. 88. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, pp. 245–46. 130 MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 68. Ibid., p. 63. MacKinnon, ‘A Master in Israel: Hans Urs von Balthasar’, p. 10. The mere adumbration of these several claims concerning the atonement casts doubt upon Wignall’s

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other approaches tended to prize the interpretation of atonement apart from its historical foundation in the life and death of Jesus by the conversion of deed into idea, MacKinnon argued that attention to the moral significance of Christ’s work is grounded in the conviction that it corresponded with that which is the case, that ‘the work done and the ordeal met in human flesh and blood was something whose outskirts we could genuinely trace’, the gospel accounts of that work being, he claimed, both logically contingent and epistemologically grounded in perception and memory.132 It is clear that in this act of atonement MacKinnon considered revelation and reconciliation to be inseparable. It is also clear that although he thought that religious conceptions of atonement find their sense in the moral context, it must also be said of them that their content is not exhaustively cashable in moral terms.133 Two aspects, then, are fundamental in MacKinnon’s approach to construction of a doctrine of atonement. First, he insisted that it cannot be carried out in abstraction from a phenomenology of moral evil, recurring in his own handling both to Butler’s scrutiny of ‘the minutiae of wrongdoing’ and to the explorations in various forms of tragic literature of ‘the manifold windings of wilful self-deception, the catastrophic consequences of lust and greed, of jealousy and ambition, the ultimate ambiguities of human life which often leave a man, in the end, a riddle to himself and his neighbours, but which certainly destroy our readiness to accept a comfortable and comforting verdict on our motives, when we suppose them pure, or even lofty’.134 Second, as we will go on to examine in the next chapter, MacKinnon vigorously argued that the resources of ontology be deployed in order to probe the identity of the individual who works this atonement, ‘to deepen insight concerning the life itself, concerning what is there and then done for humankind’.135 The ontology rivets attention on the particular while the moral phenomenology delineates its universal, human setting. At this stage, we may confine our exposition to MacKinnon’s insistence, following Forsyth, that atonement must be construed as a deed done at the point where the moral and the historical converge.136 What interpretation of Christ’s atoning work can be rendered, initially at least, on the basis of these ‘outskirts’? MacKinnon defined the task of constructing a doctrine of the atonement as ‘partly (the final secret belongs

132 133 134 135 136

claim that MacKinnon underplays the eschatological, transformative impact of the death of Christ. See Paul Wignall, ‘Professor MacKinnon on the Atonement’, Theology 77 (May 1974), pp. 232–238 (238). MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 99–100. See MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 28. MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 176. Ibid., p. 173. See, for example, P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God: Lectures for War-Time on a Christian Theodicy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), pp. 196–215.

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to God alone) to capture the sense of the passion of Jesus for what it is: this because, although in the cross, to quote the words of Paul, “God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”, and we have therefore to reckon with an action of which he is the author, we have in the crucifixion to do with something which is unquestionably a human act’.137 MacKinnon’s approach thereby set the cross in the context of the words and deeds of Jesus and those words and deeds in the context of the cross, thus exhibiting the continuity between the active and passive obedience of Jesus throughout his entire life across the whole trajectory of his mission. He saw the cross of Jesus, together with his whole life, then, as the actualization and the holding together, and as such the overcoming, of the contradiction between the claims of truth and justice on one side and of compassion and mercy on the other.138 Although MacKinnon clearly favoured the Fourth Gospel in his elucidation of the atonement as an act accomplished in human flesh, fastening attention on the stark ironies of the Johannine representation of the Ecce homo which locates the qualitative finality of judgement within human history and not in terms of an apocalyptic framework, the structure of his account is in line with his entire presentation of the words and deeds of Jesus as we have detailed it earlier. To understand atonement, one must first look to Jesus, to what he said and did and, above all, to what he suffered. In the first place, Jesus’ work of atonement is an act of judgement through the telling and doing of the truth, the exposure of what human beings are at a depth beyond human capacity to bear it.139 MacKinnon adumbrated the way in which by his performance of the truth along the via crucis Jesus laid bare the truth of both people and institutions: . . . the ecclesiastical statesmanship of Caiaphas, the governor’s judicial integrity, and the quality of his intellectual and spiritual perception, 137 138

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MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 174. MacKinnon, ‘Moral Objections’, in Objections to Christian Belief, p. 33. In a response to Alasdair McIntyre in the same year as the Cambridge Lecture, MacKinnon gave this summary of his intentions: ‘I implied that the foundation of a true Christian ethic was the work of Christ. His claim on men is not that He illustrates, but that He effects a reconciliation of incompatibles which lies forever outside their achievement, and so ministers to men not only the ultimately searching judgement . . . but also an equally ultimate mercy’. Idem, ‘God and the Theologians 2: Grammar and Theologic’, Encounter 21, no. 4 (1963), pp. 60–61 (61). See also idem, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, p. 77; idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 149–50, 104. MacKinnon’s anxiousness, expressed in his public lectures at Cambridge in the 1960s, about how the words ‘reconciliation’ (and also ‘dialectic’) would be heard creates difficulties for interpretation of his soteriology. However, it remains clear that he construed Jesus’ way of the cross as determined by his refusal to loosen the tension between justice and mercy, a way actualized by the constitutive force of his identity as truth, way and life. MacKinnon, ‘A Master in Israel: Hans Urs von Balthasar’, p. 8.

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the crowd’s amenability to the moral directives of its spiritual leaders, the withdrawal of Jesus’ intimates from the scene of his ordeal. Of the first we learn the depth of its infection by brutal raison d’état, of the second its precariousness and ultimate weakness, of the third its ultimate frivolity, of the fourth its readiness to follow the road of cruelty and ultimate apostasy (‘we have no king but Caesar’); and in the last we see an absence which is an ultimate sheer self-regard, shoddy, familiar, human cowardice. In the light of the one who is to be sacrificed, these things are shown for what they are.140 Yet woven together in the Johannine account with the heavily ironic portrayal of judgement by the Ecce homo, a figure ‘too ridiculous to be taken seriously’,141 there stands the repeated claim that Jesus laid down his life, neither in passive acceptance nor in ‘ferocious, exultant self-denial’,142 but in obedient self-surrender to the Father and out of love for those whom he had compassionately served. His being lifted up on the cross is at once ‘the ultimate physical and moral ordeal’ of its subject as well as the drawing of all humankind to himself.143 It is to this event, the rejection of Jesus in which he himself is agent, in which are interlaced ‘judgement and love, ordeal and invitation, obedience and tenderness’,144 that one looks to trace the outskirts of atonement. MacKinnon thus interpreted the Johannine account’s location of judgement in the actuality of the cross of Christ as a moralization of the theme of judgement: an innocent man isolated in the act of being condemned is yet in that condemnation disclosed to be the judge such that his judgement is transformed into healing.145 That is, in the moral schematization of the Christian life, ‘Christ is represented as the instrument of . . . judgement, the instrument who also stands himself under its most searching impact’.146 In so doing, he not only plumbed the ultimate triviality and failure of human existence, articulating and enduring to the end its ambiguities, but held together across a painful endurance that justice and mercy, truth and love, enacted throughout his whole life in perfect fidelity to God and generous availability to sinful humanity. Moreover in his dying he makes atonement also, in that the act of those who have tortured and crucified him is not seen for what it is apart from what he makes of it in that transforming act,147 ‘by his death, finishing the work given by his Father and establishing forgiveness and mercy as the telos of the whole affair’.148 If this puts too 140

141 143 144 146 147 148

MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 179. See also idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 446. 142 Ibid. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 152. MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 180. 145 Ibid. Ibid. MacKinnon, ‘God and the Theologians 2: Grammar and Theologic’, p. 60. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 447. MacKinnon, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 183.

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serene a construction on his ordeal, MacKinnon urged reflection on the possibility that Jesus in his supreme hour plumbed the very abyss of unreason, reached that place wherein those who reach it (and that, alone in Christian faith, the pioneer of our salvation has done) are overcome by the contradiction between the claims of truth, the claims of calling things what they are, of refusing, for instance, to cover with the disguise of elaborate euphemism the sort of corruption that, in a sophisticated society, sometimes flourished destructively, but yet unreproved, even on occasion applauded, and the claims of compassion for the individual caught, so it sometimes seems to the eyes of pity, in the toils of circumstance he has done little or nothing to make.149 Consequently, MacKinnon emphasized the fact that in this act the innocence of Jesus, severally attested in the culmination of his ordeal before Pilate, by the penitent thief in extremis and by the centurion at the foot of the cross, was won not apart from but in and through the temptations, conflicts and agonies of one whose indifference to human judgement arose out of his complete self-abandonment to the Father.150 His innocence proved in death demonstrates that his welcome embrace of sinners did not self-indulgently condone the sin in which they were implicated.151 Atonement thus understood, as MacKinnon granted, leaves many questions unanswered. If in the cross mercy and truth are reconciled by deed and not by word, ‘their manner of reconciliation is something that lies beyond the deed of our comprehension; we can only describe and redescribe’.152 Even perception and memory, MacKinnon argued, in the form which the gospel narratives take relate of the ministry of Jesus that ‘the situation is not mastered, nor is it accepted; it is lived through and met by agony’.153 An approach to atonement which lays such emphasis on the empirical discipline of the actual must simply reckon with the perduring intractability of evil and suffering in the world. If in MacKinnon’s approach unelaborated assertions serve to stake out an atonement ‘already’ objectively achieved in Christ’s work, descriptions of the perduring activity of evil place equal emphasis on the ‘not yet’ aspect. This heightening of the eschatological tension within the doctrine prevents foreclosure of a history of redemption in the world. To recognize the fruits of Christ’s atoning achievement, one will have to look and look again. 149 150

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MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 175. MacKinnon, ‘La communication efficace et les tentations du Christ’, p. 382. See also idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 152–53, and idem, ‘Teleology and Redemption’, p. 108. MacKinnon, ‘Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation’, in The Resurrection, p. 80. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 104. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 154.

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Tentatively, then, MacKinnon proposed that if the Christian story includes within its compass the fact that Christ’s service of others was expressed at such depth and cost to himself that he was totally overwhelmed by it and that from his sinlessness there yet flowed a ‘dark inheritance of evil as well as good’,154 understanding of that act and its mode of presentation might well be served by reflecting on it as tragedy.155 His proposal is manifestly not that the understanding of the gospel narratives be annexed to any specific literary theory of tragedy, ancient or modern.156 Rather, MacKinnon had in mind a representation of the story of Jesus in which the tragic sequelae unleashed, as Kenneth Surin puts it, by ‘the historically situated choices made by historically constituted human agents’ be given their place in any attempt to understand what he accomplished.157 He looked to such particular features of the gospel narratives as the tragic portrait of Judas Iscariot of whom it is said both that ‘it were good for this man had he not been born’ and yet that because of his decision to betray Jesus, the Son of Man went his appointed way.158 MacKinnon also pondered the way in which Jesus’ unmasking of the motives of Caiaphas and Pilate plunged those who so decisively rejected him into a deep guilt among whose disastrous historical consequences must be included the terror of the Shoah, funded in part by a persistent ‘Christian anti-Semitism’ traceable, MacKinnon believed, in inchoate form even in the New Testament itself.159 The focus on the tragic here serves as a form of resistance against abstracting reflection on the atonement, and indeed all of God’s dealings with humankind, from their setting in the harsh contingencies of Jesus’ mission and against supposing that the Easter faith had simply ‘obliterated’ the discontinuities of his failure, rejection and defeat.160 It is a refusal of any standpoint from which to view the problem of evil other than the foot of the cross.161 In the martial terminology to which MacKinnon repaired in order to stress the brutality, horror and pain of death on a cross

154 155

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MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 65. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 50. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 100. K. Surin, ‘Christology, Tragedy and “Ideology”’, pp. 287–88. To do so would subsume the gospel under an idea, in effect, to make the move which MacKinnon’s theology everywhere explicitly rejects. Ibid., p. 288. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 50; idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 67 and p. 49, where MacKinnon claims that ‘it would be hard to find anywhere a sharper enunciation of the existence of sheer discontinuity in a world in the same utterance represented as providentially ordered’. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 103; idem, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 50; and idem, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, p. 104. MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 50. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 169: ‘Inevitably tragic perception rejects any method of dealing with the reality of evil by appeal to a facile teleology’.

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and the consequences which linger long after the violence of the act has ceased, this is indeed a victory, but a tragic one whose enigmatic character he evoked in words he attributed to the Duke of Wellington – ‘a victory is the most tragic thing in all the world, excepting a defeat’.162 How then is this tragically achieved atonement a redemption? MacKinnon’s account hangs on the kenotic claim that the dependence of Jesus on the Father extended to a vindication which he could not command but only receive. Having achieved an enduring victory over temptation by holding together the fundamental contradiction between the claims of justice and those of love even at the cost of death, redemption overtook the crucified Jesus in the form of the renewing hand of God which raised him from the dead.163 If in that agonizing death Jesus leaves to God ‘the only final and ultimately valid judgement’ on his mission, the resurrection marks God’s ‘certification and authentication’ of his manner of living and dying.164 By his words and works and by his death Jesus brings the world to judgement. But, MacKinnon points out, he is not only truth, the one in whom the truth of God and of human beings is revealed, but equally way and life.165 If, on the one hand, his coming decisively disrupted the worlds which people have fashioned for themselves and exposed human propensity for self-deception, on the other, in holding truth and mercy together he opened up for us a whole new world of hope grounded in the unfathomable depths of God’s love and compassion.166 The note of hope which has been sounded repeatedly throughout this otherwise sombre account of atonement must not be missed. Christ’s atoning deed makes possible a Christian moral life, ecclesial and individual, which in those ‘new ways that open before us’ must be lived ‘in some conformity with the true pattern of our humanity’.167 Some conformity, MacKinnon argued, because, as his rejection of the moral naiveté of exemplarist soteriology implies, it is not within our power to do what only Jesus in the form of his perfect obedience could do and did. Indeed, it must be said that if the work of atonement is not that of a deus ex machina, it is definitely not mere human achievement either. Yet it is Christ’s objective achievement of atonement that ‘suffuses human actions with their truth by giving them their context in his endurance, by allowing them to find their

162 163 164 165 166 167

See the comments in this regard in K. Surin, ‘Christology, Tragedy and “Ideology”’, pp. 285–86, and the remarks extending MacKinnon’s appeal to the tragic dimension of the story of Jesus by Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, pp. 86–89. Ibid., p. 131; and idem, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 184. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection’, in The Resurrection, p. 69. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 165. MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 181. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 116–17. MacKinnon, ‘Moral Objections’, in Objections to Christian Belief, pp. 33–34; and idem, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 181.

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firm foundation in his overcoming of the gulf between the claims of pity and the claims of justice, of pity for others and justice towards others, of pity towards ourselves and justice towards ourselves’.168 Human beings do not become what they are simply through their own reactions to Jesus’ performance of the truth, but through his taking up their reaction into himself and transforming it.169 If the reconciliation of this fundamental moral schism proves beyond the capacity of human agents, as it must, MacKinnon underscored again that our ways are not ultimately in ourselves but in Christ who is himself the Way.170 Some conformity, also, because if there is now a world of restored, even open, moral possibilities grounded in the actuality of Christ’s work of atonement, there remains, as human experience tragically attests, the prevalence in the world of the humanly intractable, surd element of evil, unassuaged suffering, irrevocable loss, and hence moral limit which human beings are powerless in this life finally to transcend. It must be remembered, after all, that this account grounds the ecclesiological assertion that authentic Christian existence is constituted by dependence on one whose essence is dependence on God. What then can be said about the material shape of such dependence, conformity or correspondence, about the prospective aspect of MacKinnon’s theology of atonement? His basic conviction, one which should serve to allay West’s suspicions, is that ‘recognition of the tragic must not be allowed to inhibit action, even if it must deepen perception and, in consequence purify the motives and intentions from which men act’.171 If in the Crucified, the author and perfecter of our faith, Christians find the truth, that is, the objective foundation of faith, they must be delivered from ‘a false passivity and invalid acquiescence in intolerable evils, a cultivation of obedience for obedience’s sake, when revolt rather than acceptance is a plain human

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169 170 171

MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 228. See also idem, ‘The Christian Understanding of Truth’, p. 27: ‘Ultimately, for the Christian, Christ is the truth, and to be in Christ is therefore to be in the truth, to be at the point of remaking, and of refashioning, and of return’. See also idem, ‘Discussion by D. M. MacKinnon’ in Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (ed. Ian T. Ramsey; London: SCM 1966), p. 83, where, in response to R. B. Braithwaite’s Eddington Lecture, he speaks of the ‘supremely creative’ force of Christ’s endurance in terms of ‘the deed through whose utter purity, and selflessness of intention, the fragile acts of love performed by others are freed from the corroding taint of their own corruption, and given a firmness and permanence, which, if received from without, is still properly predicated of them in themselves’. MacKinnon hints here that such reference to the actuality of the life of Christ as creative must lead on to ontological considerations (pp. 83–84). MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 82. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 151. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on Secular Diakonia’, in Service in Christ: Essays Presented to Karl Barth on his 80th Birthday (ed. J. I. McCord and T. H. L. Parker; London: Epworth, 1966), p. 193.

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duty’.172 Further, there is certainly no commendation of a ‘negative, passive and acquiescent’ acceptance of suffering or evil, both physical and moral, as if Christian faith manifested ‘a kind of vested interest in human failure and disaster’.173 Indeed, MacKinnon’s presentation of Jesus’ way to the cross construed obedience as a form of revolt rather than of submission to what he called ‘human clichés’.174 Moreover, for all his hesitancy about talk of service tied to his fear of a self-regarding moral self-deception, there is a soteriologically contextualized insistence on diakonia in MacKinnon’s work ordered in conformity to the way of Jesus for the benefit of humankind. The root claim is that ‘no one can answer questions concerning the nature of piety, the hidden order of the world, the proper form of government apart from him, apart from what he makes of them by his atoning act’.175 Those called to a life which depends on the cross-resurrection of Jesus ‘cannot find any other way towards realizing the content of that dependence except that provided by a readiness to respond, to expose themselves, to open and not to close their understanding and their pity’.176 Authentic Christian existence in correspondence with the way of Jesus Christ cannot be schematized at the level of details in advance of the particular contexts in which human response is made, a response, as these remarks indicate, which moves out beyond the boundaries of the church into the world. But at the formal level MacKinnon highlighted two aspects of this summons to moral responsibility in and for the world. On the positive side, MacKinnon commended efforts across a wide range of disciplines to serve people in the ordinary, everyday world as parables of the paradigmatic service enacted by Jesus. Of particular significance are those ‘secular parables’ of diakonia, both theoretical and practical, directed towards the just ordering of society and the comprehensive well-being of its citizens, nationally and internationally, especially politics and the exercise of diplomacy, economics, medicine and related forms of peace-making.177 Christ’s diakonia, his truthful yet patiently merciful response to the most fundamental needs of humankind, is thus the norm of service and the context in which Christian 172

173 174 175 176 177

MacKinnon, ‘Moral Objections’, in Objections to Christian Belief, p. 32. The moral ambiguity of the concept of obedience is probed in idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 74, 152–53. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 53. MacKinnon, ‘Autorité et conscience’, p. 430. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 447. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p.181. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on Secular Diakonia’, in Service in Christ, pp. 191–93. While MacKinnon lauded the efforts and achievements of political and economic theorists in these pages, he cautioned that theoretical activity unmatched by practical steps might degenerate into a self-indulgent evasion of the most pressing problems facing individuals in society (p. 195). His allergy to a ‘facile teleology’ here led him to underscore the tragic capacity of otherwise fruitful developments for human flourishing to bring in their wake even greater threats to existence.

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forms of service may be shaped and purified within the scope ‘of that interrogation of all interrogations, of that servicing of all our services’.178 On the critical side, there is the prophetic call, reiterated in all periods of MacKinnon’s theological oeuvre, for protest and revolt, normed by the example of Jesus but grounded in the Incarnation and ultimately the doctrine of the Triune God, against all structures of domination which prevent or erode human thriving.179 The context of MacKinnon’s concern has left a deep imprint on his understanding of the moral life in defence of the place and status of the individual within collective or corporate entities in the face of successive manifestations of Machtpolitik, notably the brutal forms of totalitarianism, the horrors of Auschwitz and of Hiroshima and the terrifying build-up and deployment of nuclear weapons of mass destruction which scarred not only the face but the psyche of the twentieth century.180 The significance of prophetic protest for his ecclesiology is voiced in the hope that service and revolt parabolic of the paradigmatic reality of Christ’s mission might serve ‘to kindle the resolve to seek a new vision of the Church’s being, purged of the irrelevant accretions of centuries of often supine conformity’.181 In this context, pastoral ministry, though it must always correspond to ‘the model of the “good shepherd”’ can never be reduced to ‘generalized caring’ but must always be construed and performed ‘as a strenuous, if always imperfect and mutilated, fidelity to the way of Jesus’.182 There is here, of course, the same rigorous self-questioning of motives, the recognition that revolt is subject to various kinds of sterility, that it can spring from an unfocused, adolescent self-indulgence and that even when well-grounded in concern for human well-being, is never immune from unleashing unforeseen, tragic consequences. Thus, for instance, MacKinnon was prepared to concede that the Christian pacifism of the early 1930s, of which he was 178 179

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Ibid., pp. 197–98. Ibid., pp. 190–94. West’s criticism of MacKinnon’s doctrine of the atonement on this score is decisively refuted by the latter’s argument that the death and resurrection of Jesus is the context in which revolt must be envisioned. See especially idem, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 247. For a penetrating discussion of the urgent need to learn anew what it means to be human in the face of power realities which in turn demand disciplined patience in a context of deep and inevitable risk, see his 1981 Boutwood Lectures, ‘Creon and Antigone’, in Themes in Theology, pp. 110–34. See also the 1979 Martin Wight Lecture, ‘Power Politics and Religious Faith’, in Themes in Theology, pp. 87–109. For reflections on modern technological warfare and calls to revolt by making peace, see MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 188, 190, 203; and idem, ‘Christology and Protest’, pp.179–81, 184–85. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 183. Ibid., p. 187. That is, its adherence to Jesus’ directive to minister to the wayward individual will not be dismissed as irresponsible on the grounds of any principle of utility such as funded Caiaphas’ surrender of justice to the putative well-being of the people.

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a vigorous proponent, may well have played into the hands of the Nazis, making its advocates complicit in a measure in the deaths of those who in Germany had opposed that policy and clamoured for armed intervention. Still, he also argued doggedly for a unilateralist position on the question of nuclear disarmament, underlining, however, the element of risk and the exposure to immense tragedy in which this position potentially involved him.183 The form of the moral life as a life of service, protest and revolt, however, eschews all manifestations of passivity or ‘acquiescent determinism’, corporate or individual, in the face of structures of domination, social, political and economic.184 But in concert with his account of atonement MacKinnon drew a distinction between the way of revolt and the way of redemption. Redemption, he held, may overtake a person along the way of protest, but it is not within human grasp to achieve it. Further, it is remarkable that MacKinnon construed revolt as a sign of Christian hope, arguing that such hope is always to be conceived by analogy with that redemption which overtook Jesus Christ on his way of revolt, namely his resurrection by the renewing hand of the Father in which ultimate significance is imparted to his words and deeds. So, then, Christian revolt against structures of injustice and oppression ‘has its place in the abiding all-embracing work of Christ’ in which it is purified and renewed, being met in the context of that mystery by ‘God’s own protest against the world he has made, by which at the same time that world is renewed and reborn’.185 Congruent with his pervasive emphasis on objectivity MacKinnon also underscored the inwardness and the relational context of Christian faith lived along this kenotic way. If Jesus in his atoning mission is the object of faith to which all Christian thinking and acting must correspond, he is also its subject in that the context of our believing, our ‘contemporary discipleship’, is the ‘continued presence of Christ to his own’.186 That is, Christian faith is always dependent upon and ‘hardly decipherable mimesis’ of the fides Christi, the faith of Jesus Christ manifested via his obedient faithfulness, a response according to both the manner of God’s being and of human need.187 Christian belief manifests the constitutive gift of that faith within human receptivity, ‘the 183 184

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MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 134. See the discussion in D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Natural Law’, in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (ed. H. Butterfield and M. Wight; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), pp. 74–88, especially pp. 84–86. MacKinnon argued here that moral action, which is the enactment of a deliberate human decision, demands responsibility that cannot be evaded by any quasi-determinist counsel such as ‘we must simply learn to live with the bomb’ or appeal to such abstractions as ‘national security’. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 37–38, 184–92. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, pp. 247, 248. See also idem, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 186. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 451. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 136–37.

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resonance in the believer of Christ’s own faith, charity and hope, made possible by his own fidelity, to which it is a response, sustained by the promise to which he himself looked’.188 Dependence here indicates the depths of Jesus Christ’s self-identification with and presence to humankind in the midst of unmitigated suffering, tragedy and death. But it also situates the tragic within the embrace of hope, assuring us that revolt, whatever risk it involves, does not end in nothingness because the cross-resurrection of Jesus Christ is the sign that history in all its darkness and all its promise has been embraced by God.189 MacKinnon’s moralization of the theology of atonement thus arises out of his realist approach to the ‘fact’ of Jesus Christ, a particular life lived in a particular way at a particular time and place but yet to which ultimate significance is attributed, in that through this life’s work a new relationship between God and creation has been established and the foundation of human being and hope restored. While human purchase-hold on the good is inevitably precarious, MacKinnon affirmed that ‘we have to see the work of God in Christ as that which secures against the ever-present menace of their dissolution, our frail, but genuine, human perception and affirmations (in action) of the morally excellent’.190 MacKinnon’s reworking of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic kenotic Christology in this soteriological context is fundamental in setting out the constitutive particularity of Jesus’ atoning deed, ‘the fontally creative stripping and dereliction of Christ’.191 As MacKinnon’s presentation of the words and deeds of Jesus makes clear, kenosis, as he reformulated the concept, is the fontally creative way of Jesus Christ in his historical life, a way of response fashioned by active, obedient dependence upon God, patient acceptance of humankind and self-abandonment in utter self-gift to both. But if the Gospels represent the way of Jesus not as a settled pattern of human communion with God but rather as the ‘paradigm reality’ expressed indirectly via the interruptive impact of words spoken and deeds done, the prophetic criticism of existing political and religious institutions and more adequate intimations of the ways of God with creation,192 they also make it clear that the person and work of Jesus Christ do not stand on their own, subject as he was to human limitation culminating in death. A life lived in this kenotic way along the via crucis, a way which put(s) a question mark against the accepted religious and moral certainties, MacKinnon pointed out, required ‘the definition in actu of the transcendent’ which integrates and imparts sense to it.193 As his 188 189

190 191 192 193

MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 180. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, p. 255. MacKinnon, ‘Further Reflections’, in The Resurrection, pp. 108–09. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 77. MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 173. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 78–79.

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mission approached its end, Jesus’ faith, which freely defined its whole movement, required that perfecting ab extra, that total acceptance by the Father, by which Jesus’ enactment of his identity was converted into an object of faith for his followers.194 Thus MacKinnon argued that we are at this point thrust back again towards the latter pole of ‘crucifixion–resurrection’, for it is ‘as if the significance of his life, his teaching and his actions must always be sought in their term, namely his passage through death to a mysterious life of seemingly universal authority to which his Father brings him’.195 By evoking the concepts of receptivity, dependence, patience and mercy as they are unfolded along this kenotic trajectory, he thereby riveted attention on the concrete particularity of a life and death ‘regarded as at once desperately needing authentication from beyond themselves, and yet in a way paradoxical and elusive, as so receiving that authentication that in them the Logos is properly affirmed as made flesh, the theory or groundplan of the human world at once achieved and raised to a level beyond the reach of possible unaided human aspiration’.196 Atonement, then, can only be described in part in terms of the obedient endurance of Jesus manifested by the manner of his life and death. It must be filled out by patently Christological claims, namely claims of the order that ‘in the Son of God’s acceptance of the ultimate triviality and failure of human existence, whose deeps . . . he finally plumbed, the whole language of perplexity, uncertainty, bewilderment, hopelessness and pain, even of God-forsakenness, was laid hold of and given a new sense by the very God himself and converted into the way of his reconciling the world unto himself’.197 Yet MacKinnon would here underline the constraints upon those essaying an objective account of atonement, namely that ‘there is no escaping the admission that they are thrust towards the acknowledgement of that which in its inmost essence must remain unknown: that is to acknowledge the actuality of a work wrought by God in which the self-limitation involved in creation reaches its ultimate term’.198 In this sense, kenosis is an ontological concept indispensable for the representation of Christ’s self-abandonment to the Father’s purpose and of his consciousness revealed in the obedient embrace of that mission.199 A doctrine of atonement requires precise scrutiny of the identity of the one who so obediently endured and his relation to the One who raised him from the dead. If his compassionate acceptance and humble service are the acts

194 195

196 197 198 199

MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 448. MacKinnon, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, p. 120. See also idem, ‘Coleridge and Kant’, p. 199, where we are reminded that this authority belongs to Jesus’ total receptivity to the Father. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 125. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 81. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 164. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 80.

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by which the Son’s self-definition is freely accomplished, they are also the means by which the Father expressed the definition of the Son.200 In other words, as Kenneth Surin has rightly pointed out against West, MacKinnon’s understanding of atonement is ultimately determined by, and must be elucidated in terms of, an Incarnational and Trinitarian logical grammar.201 If the way of Jesus in the world is said to be in some sense the way of God, MacKinnon recognized that we are thereby set the task of attempting to elucidate the meaning of the ‘factuality’ of God in Christ. A kenotic church, then, looks attentively and unwaveringly to Jesus Christ who ‘for the joy that was set before him endured the cross’. An ecclesiology governed by the extension of the concept of kenosis thus describes a church whose manner of life in the world must correspond with the paradigmatic reality enacted in the words and works of Jesus which culminated in his death and by his vindication at the hand of God. The actuality of the crucifixion–resurrection of Jesus has posited the context in which such authentic fidelity in thought and practice is both exemplified once and for all and now freely made possible again and again. If the church is called to manifest an authentic fidelity to laws of Christian existence formulated in dependence on Jesus Christ whose essence lay in his dependence on the Father, kenotic ecclesiology must press beyond the parabolic aspect of Jesus’ mission to inquire more deeply into the paradigmatic context of that dependence. If salvation is not to collapse into the exemplarist moralism of response to a purely externalized ethic, the claim for the constitutive character of Christ’s agency in relation to the moral order must be grounded ontologically, not only in terms of the identity of the one whose deed founds that moral order but also in terms of the basis of our participation in it. There are, then, two parallel steps necessary to complete the task of a doctrine of atonement and its corresponding impact on the doctrine of the church as MacKinnon conceived it. First, it is necessary, he argued, to enter into a rigorous analysis of the notion of identification with humanity, attested in the actuality of Christ’s condemnation, and therefore to be carried out in the context of the theology of the Incarnation and its relation to the doctrine of the Triune God.202 In the categories of traditional orthodoxy, an account must be rendered of Jesus’ humanity in relation to his divinity and of both to God. And if MacKinnon’s kenotic account of the mission of Jesus anchors discussion of the relation of the transcendent and the familiar, the eternal and the temporal, it presses upon us the question, ‘What sort of God is it that so engages with his creatures in a work that is at once one of remorseless judgement and utterly compassionate redemption, whose ways

200 201 202

MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 445. K. Surin, ‘Christology, Tragedy and “Ideology”’, pp. 287–88. MacKinnon, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, p. 182.

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are declared in this work, the very ratio of his creative purpose discernible in this endurance and agony, this defeat and destruction, this always enigmatic victory?’203 Thus, the second step must clarify what remains to be said about kenosis if the way of Jesus Christ is to be claimed as in some sense the way of God with God’s creatures. To MacKinnon’s probing of these problems we now turn.

203

MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 67.

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5 from galilee to jerusalem to galilee ii: kenotic ecclesiology, incarnation and trinity

We come now to the final step in our account of Donald MacKinnon’s extension of the concept of kenosis to the doctrine of the church. The basic claim at the heart of his construal of the kenotic ecclesiological context is that Jesus Christ, on whom an authentic ecclesial fidelity in thought and action depends, is one whose essence lies in his dependence on the Father. Everything which MacKinnon has said about an ecclesial fidelity which is both apostolic and catholic, determined by Scripture and sacraments and directed outwards in mission to the world, is grounded in that claim. While to this point our account of Christian ecclesial dependence upon Jesus Christ has laid emphasis on MacKinnon’s description of the dramatic aspect of his mission and of its atoning consequences, and led us to probe what he called the ‘ethical intimacies’ of soteriology, its interpenetration by the ontological dimension in gestures towards a Trinitarian economy of salvation led us to acknowledge, if only by anticipation, his insistent plea for more precise articulation of the identity of Jesus Christ, of his person, in terms of the logic of relations and of ontology.1 If the lived reality of the church is marked by substantial ambiguity, if much of its life obscures the gospel and its most essential beliefs are often called into question within and without its boundaries, where can its security in the truth be said ultimately to reside? In setting out MacKinnon’s response to this crucial question we have already traced one dimension of the concept of kenosis, emphasizing that each step of Jesus’ mission was marked by obedient receptivity such

1

MacKinnon, ‘Further Reflections’, in The Resurrection, p. 112.

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that what Jesus said and did are characterized by a humble dependence upon the Father which, however, did not annul the freedom of his creative engagement with the will of the Father in the form of loving service of others and patient and willing acceptance of his ‘hour’. We have seen that MacKinnon called for the church to conform its belief and practice to what was shown in that humble, obedient service along the way of Christ. The task which confronted MacKinnon was to set out the grounds for the real relatedness of the church to Christ as the context in which such conformity might be conceived as both gift and challenge. If the extension of the concept of kenosis to the church is meant to ground MacKinnon’s early claim that a doctrine of the church must have its roots in the doctrine of salvation, a more precise articulation of the identity of the saviour is demanded by the problem at the root of his soteriology, namely the problem of double agency in the execution of that mission. Having ruled out reductive accounts of salvation, whether by means of a deus ex machina or on the basis of epic human achievement, MacKinnon pressed for a closer look at the mission of Jesus in which the identity of its agent is set forth. Following Hans Urs von Balthasar, MacKinnon argued that it was precisely at the place of the agony and dereliction of Gethsemane and Calvary in the culmination of that mission that one must press from drama to ontology, without, however, any diminution or evasion of the dramatic, if the Ultimate which opens itself there to humankind as love is at all to be grasped.2 In concert with patristic precedent, MacKinnon argued that it is the soteriological bearing of the missio Christi which requires a Christology and a doctrine of the Triune God.3 In this chapter, then, we trace the extent to which MacKinnon’s kenotic ecclesiology coheres with that fundamental orientation which he once noted appreciatively in the sermons of Henry Scott Holland, namely that if one is to speak of the foundation of the church, one must speak not only of the particularities of the Incarnate life of Christ but also of the Father who sent him and of the Holy Spirit who mediates those particularities to us.4 An account of ecclesial dependence shaped by the rigorous Christocentrism of MacKinnon’s ecclesiological imperative must be interpreted within the context of an equally relentless theocentrism which he found displayed in

2

3

4

MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on the Christology of Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in The Analogy of Beauty, p. 172. For a typical comment in a late essay, see MacKinnon, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, p. 121: ‘if the ratio of the Son’s coming in the flesh is found in that work, the very ground of its possibility is only approached if we dare to ask: Quomodo Deus homo. And asking that question, we are made to see that the seeking after that ground thrusts us towards the very arcana of the deity itself, revising we know not fully how our anthropomorphic models of God’s knowledge and God’s power’. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 108.

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the Gospel narratives themselves, a theocentrism which, following Forsyth, he saw represented in those narratives as chiefly characteristic of the Son.5 Moreover, we recall that MacKinnon insisted in the Gore Lecture that sustained attentiveness to the words and deeds of Jesus Christ requires in turn reconstruction of the divinity that is predicated of him. That is, as he concurred with Oliver Quick, contradictions in the concept of God must be eliminated on the basis of ‘the actuality of the ministry of Jesus, his way from life to death to resurrection’.6 With this claim MacKinnon signalled a major preoccupation of his theological work, namely the way in which in attending to the mission of the suffering and rejected Christ who is the revelation of the Father, we may begin again on that basis to speak about the relation of the creation to God, of time to eternity, of the familiar to the transcendent, that is, to attempt to ‘utter the unutterable’.7 A kenotic ecclesiology, as MacKinnon conceived it, drives the church back on to the way of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee not simply in order that it may thereby be put in touch with the wellsprings of salvation by which its life and mission are generated and sustained, but also that it may therein be plunged into the perichoretic depths of the triune being of God in which alone its security is ultimately established in God’s unfathomable love. MacKinnon’s basic claim about the place at which that security overtakes us along that way is an ontological claim, namely that ‘in the very weakness of Christ we trace the image of a perfect receptivity and in our relation to him which is the deepest meaning of our lives, we know that we have touched a point of absolute dependence, where we are unable to do more than receive. There and there alone are we set free from the sin of idolatry’.8 It is on these grounds that the extension of the concept of kenosis to ecclesiology must bring understanding of the church under determination by the very inwardness of the mysterium Christi. To render an account of the concept of dependence is only one of the tasks of an incarnational Christology, which is also beset with the complexities of the mystery of the relation of the human and the divine in Jesus Christ and of the relation of his person to the transcendent mystery of the Triune God. For his part, MacKinnon isolated as fundamental to Christology the task of ‘reconciling the use of the category of substance in the articulation of the Christological problem with the recognition that it is the notion of kenosis which more than any other single notion points to the deepest sense of the 5 6

7

8

MacKinnon, ‘Teleology and Redemption’, p. 107. MacKinnon, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, 104. MacKinnon underscored the same point with reference to Forsyth. See ibid., p. 114; and idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 71. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 163; and idem, ‘Prolegomena to Christology’, p. 184. MacKinnon, ‘Mr. Murry on the Free Society’, The Christian Newsletter 310 (1948), pp. 9–16 (16).

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mystery of the Incarnation’.9 MacKinnon’s differentiation of these two tasks is crucial for understanding his thought about the Incarnation and its relation to the doctrine of the Triune God. He construed substance ontology as an analytical instrument useful for delineating the Christological problem, for ensuring that ‘we are measured by that mystery [Christ’s relation to the Father] and not confused by the problems which we have set in its place’.10 The concept of kenosis, he suggested, might be employed constructively to offer insight into the depths of the mysterium Christi itself on the basis of what God has done in the historical mission of Jesus Christ, ultimately grounding that mission in the inter-Trinitarian relations. It would be tempting at this point to suggest that by the use of such ontological categories the epistemological perplexities which are at the heart of MacKinnon’s theological work might be definitively resolved and the problem of metaphysics proved merely ephemeral after all. But MacKinnon’s evangelical imperative – ‘look to Jesus; consider him’ – hardly licences a positivistic laying bare of the depths of the mysterium Christi, let alone of the structure of reality itself. Rather, it orients Christian attentiveness upon a mystery of action disclosed in the crossresurrection of Jesus Christ which, MacKinnon claimed, disturbs ‘the assured constants’ of the traditional metaphysical theology.11 Christology, then, as the centre point, on this account, of fides quaerens intellectum in the face of that mystery is for MacKinnon the discipline that calls forth his theological realism in order to probe what understanding may perhaps be reached of the very notion of the ‘factuality’ and the manner of the presence of God in Jesus Christ. There is certainly no suggestion here that the mystery of the Incarnation can ever be rationalized or satisfactorily reduced to explanation. If the possibility of a metaphysics beckons here, a thrust beyond the limits of language, it will be anchored in a discipline both analytic and descriptive. As we have already seen, MacKinnon deployed his evangelical imperative as a form of resistance against a range of tendencies which he associated with ‘idealism’ broadly construed as the tendency to convert act into idea and thereby impart significance. We have noted the imperative’s impact on doctrinal reconstruction, not only on the doctrine of the church but also on MacKinnon’s moral account of atonement, under the stricture against any pressing of analogies or indulgent elaboration of metaphors which threaten to resituate the locus of our salvation such that the deed of the cross and the human world in which it is set are transcended and left behind. Now again with regard to the Incarnation and the doctrine of the Triune God, the imperative enshrines ‘a refusal to obliterate the unfathomable simplicities of Jesus by the alleged profundities of abstract argument’.12 That is, it 9

MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 297. Ibid., p. 290. 11 MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 67. 12 MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 225. 10

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registers a protest against the way in which first-order claims, ‘the simpler, more direct, more immediately moving Christological affirmations of the gospel’, may be supplanted, rather than complemented, by second-order doctrinal and theological claims.13 There is, MacKinnon argued, no available use of the kind of conceptual analysis to which the ontological notion of substance, for instance, belongs whereby purchase-hold on ‘something more ultimate in the economy of the divine self-disclosure and self-impartation than the person of Jesus Christ crucified and risen’ can be achieved.14 In other words, MacKinnon found in every tendency to look away from Jesus a veiled attempt to leap over the noetic obstacles in the way of faith in order to reduce the problem or penetrate the mystery by, perhaps, constructing a Christ-principle or delineating a role which it fell to the agent of our salvation to play in a grand cosmic scheme, even so to find in him a means rather than an end, to supplant attentiveness to his person and work with ecclesiology, anthropology or metaphysics. As Kenneth Surin has observed, a key concern in MacKinnon’s Christology is his relentless pressing of the question ‘whether the figure of Christ remains determinative for Christological reflection, or whether one resorts to a religious epistemology for a framework with which to “understand” the Incarnation’.15 The evangelical imperative which thus arises from faith in, and thus fastens faith on, the cross–resurrection of Jesus keeps alive the epistemological, logical and ontological concerns which MacKinnon found to be inherent in the understanding and communication of the gospel. That is, to look to Jesus Christ and to consider him is always to find oneself ‘pulled up sharp by a recollection of the mysterious actuality of Christ’s mission and person’.16 It would be equally mistaken, however, to construe Jesus Christ simply as the object of Christological investigation, as a merely passive datum of history or of ecclesial experience, as if by the use of concepts, no matter how refined, one could adequately lay hold of him. MacKinnon reiterates constantly that it is Jesus Christ who is himself the active subject of this on-going, intensifying interrogation, who here and now puts to us again and again the question of his identity and bids us follow him.17 As MacKinnon put it, if we are interrogated by Christ across the centuries, ‘Who do you say that I am?’, in our answer it is our conceptions at once of the

13 14 15

16 17

MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 291. Ibid., pp. 293–94. Kenneth Surin, ‘Some Aspects of the “Grammar” of “Incarnation” and “Kenosis”’, p. 106, n. 1. MacKinnon, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, p. 102. MacKinnon, it must be recalled, argued that what was constant in any metaphysical tradition was a developing programme of interrogation. His point remains that in Christian faith, finality is to be located in the active subject who in interrogating us elicits

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actuality of the divine existence and of the possibilities of human that are brought to the bar of a questioning more devastating, more searching and . . . more intellectually demanding than the Socratic. We are made to be drawn in all directions at once . . . .18 If we must now go on to examine yet again MacKinnon’s understanding of that ‘extraordinary interpenetration of deed and idea’19 which soteriology and Christology seek to elucidate, we do well to heed his warning that Jesus Christ ‘is not our property as our ideas are’.20 The reminder serves to underscore the relational basis in faith at the heart of the Christological task. The renewal of that task, MacKinnon counselled, can only be achieved through the union of ‘a quite new fusion of intellectual and scholarly honesty with practical, personal commitment, of metaphysical thought both rigorous and questioning with sense of human frailty and limitation’.21 MacKinnon’s intention by application of his imperative to focus constructively on the question of who it is that meets us in the mystery of Jesus Christ notwithstanding, there remains accordingly a point of resistance against styles of ontological Christology which proceed as if the turbulent ambiguity of the dramatic could by systematic explanatory schemas once and for all be overcome.22 MacKinnon adhered throughout his theological career to Hoskyns’ insistence that it is in human flesh and blood, at the very point of crucifixion–resurrection, that both the occasion and the problem of faith arise.23 Where it can only ever be a matter of fides quaerens intellectum, the tension of having to find finality in ‘something altogether incommensurable with ordinary human experience, yet at the same time organically one with the particularities of an individual stretch of human

18

19 20 21 22

23

from us a corresponding interrogation, Jesus Christ himself. See idem, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 105, 115. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 179. Our account of MacKinnon’s answer to that interrogation displays at what depth of seriousness he was prepared to take the Petrine response. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 58. MacKinnon, ‘Mr. Murry on the Free Society’, p. 14. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 7. The point is registered in the harsh dismissal of E. L. Mascall’s Christology, contrasted unfavourably with the ‘searching and disturbing’ quality of von Balthasar’s work and, more generally, the writing of Kierkegaard and Barth, as ‘ultimately trivial and sterile’ on the grounds that it does not adequately tie speech about the divine transcendence to Jesus’ suffering and death, in MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 126. See also idem, ‘The Christian Understanding of Truth’, p. 26. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 78. In relation to this claim, see idem, ‘“Flesh and Blood Have Not Revealed It Unto Thee”’, p. 426, where MacKinnon commends Hoskyns’ prophetic insight that theological debate is relative to the question of the nature of the gospel. See also idem, Themes in Theology, p. 153.

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history’24 and to acknowledge the confession of faith as tied up ‘inextricably with the deliverances of flickering human perception and observation’ never abates.25 If Christology serves faith by fastening its attention on the concrete particularity of Jesus of Nazareth, philosophy, so MacKinnon construed Hoskyns, provides theology with tools with which to explore it in terms more general yet but always so as to serve and not supplant the particularities of the gospel narratives with a set of abstract formulations.26 This view of the interplay of Christology with epistemology and ontology in the understanding of faith shaped the way in which MacKinnon pressed into service the theological resources which informed his own approach to the task of Christology and the doctrine of the Triune God. He is thoroughly indebted, formally and materially, to a number of theologians, Anglican, Protestant and Roman Catholic, who identified the person of Jesus Christ as the unique point of contact between God and humankind and who elucidated that relationship in terms of the priority of a movement from God to humanity and its corresponding, albeit asymmetrical, response in a movement from humanity to God, a context which calls forth articulation of a doctrine of the Triune God and welcomes the ad hoc use of a range of philosophical tools in execution of that task. Parenthetically, then, we might note that one of MacKinnon’s greatest services to Anglican theology was to single out in this regard the work of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Barth’s influence is often mediated in contexts in which Hoskyns’ epistemological concerns predominate, and there is a rather curious reserve about direct reference to Barth, apart from the second Römerbrief and other early texts, for all the normative significance in shaping the background context for his thinking which the kenotic themes of Church Dogmatics II/1, §31 and IV/1, §59, to cite but two substantial tracts, clearly hold.27 His hesitancy concerns what MacKinnon once characterized as the ‘relative calm’ of the more ontologically freighted 24 25 26

27

Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., pp. 58–59. See idem, Themes in Theology, p. 234. Ibid., 56–59. MacKinnon cited at length at the outset of this article from the concluding section of Hoskyns, ‘Jesus, the Messiah’, in Mysterium Christi: Christological Studies by British and German Theologians, pp. 67–89. See also idem, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 185. For all his many forthright acknowledgements of Barth’s theological genius, MacKinnon’s hesitancy may well be linked to the acute problems of theological diplomacy facing those all too easily dubbed ‘Barthians’ in an Anglo-Catholic milieu, especially in the environment of a theological faculty in which the very different preoccupations of those such as C. E. Raven continued to exercise significant influence. It must be pointed out that Hoskyns, who was himself a figure of considerable controversy, was recruited for Corpus Christi College by Will Spens to lay New Testament foundations for the latter’s Anglo-Catholic modernism, a project which the former’s translation of Barth’s Romans commentary and the dissemination of its themes in his Cambridge sermons as

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style which he found in the later work.28 But Barth is consistently hailed as the practitioner of a ‘profound Christocentric self-discipline’ by which all abstract generalizations or metaphysical speculations about the being and purposes of God and humanity are set aside in favour of formulations grounded in Jesus Christ.29 MacKinnon’s debt to Barth is overlaid with many references to P. T. Forsyth’s Christology in which Forsyth’s consistent emphasis on the dramatic dimension of the gospel, the theme of kenosis, the cosmic scope of redemption and the moralization of doctrine is warmly commended. Yet MacKinnon criticized Forsyth’s avoidance of ontology, repudiating both his pejorative term ‘Chalcedonism’ and his criticism of ‘Incarnationalist Christianity’, in which Forsyth had claimed that the doctrine of Christ’s person lay ‘embalmed in the current formula of two natures in one person’,30 as ‘ethically inert and morally sterile’.31 The influence of Barth and Forsyth is redoubled and extended in aspects of the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar in which MacKinnon valued, increasingly apparently as he drew near the end of his career, a thoroughgoing Christocentric–Trinitarian trajectory of thought, grounded in a kenotic theologia crucis and deeply committed to probing the epistemological problems which it raised.32 It was the ‘nervous tension’ generated in von Balthasar’s writing by his presentation of God’s engagement with a world

28

29

30

31

32

well as other work in New Testament Christology led Hoskyns to abort. See Gordon S. Wakefield, ‘Hoskyns and Raven: The Theological Issue’, Theology 78 (November 1975), pp. 568–76. For MacKinnon’s reflections on this issue, see idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 196–207; also idem, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, pp. 109–12. See MacKinnon, ‘Revised Reviews: XIII – Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, Theology 45 (January 1962), pp. 4–6. In his 1956 response to R. B. Braithwaite’s Eddington Lecture, MacKinnon commented favourably on Barth’s method as a clarification of the logic of Christian doctrines, while suggesting that Barth had not thereby advanced solution of the problem of their intelligibility as meta-historical statements. See idem, ‘Discussion by D. M. MacKinnon’, in Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, p. 82. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 220. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 70, 68–69. See ibid., p. 220, where he speaks of Barth as ‘that most anti-metaphysical of modern theologians’ on the grounds that the particularity of Jesus and not ‘the gropings of speculation’ is the location of the ‘ultimate sanction and direction’ of his thought. P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London: Independent Press, 1909), pp. 216–17. P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, pp. 110–11. See MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 70–71; and idem, ‘Aspects of Kant’s Influence on British Theology’, p. 356. Noteworthy among the several expressions of indebtedness to von Balthasar in MacKinnon’s writings is MacKinnon’s reference to himself as one ‘having learnt lessons that he has never learnt with quite the same insinuating force in any other quarter’, in idem, ‘A Master in Israel: Hans Urs von Balthasar’, p. 9. He also testified to the powerful effect of von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale and his Theodramatik on his own Christological and Trinitarian thinking. See idem, Themes in Theology, p. 158; and

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scarred by the pervasive reality of evil and his ‘strenuous acknowledgement’ of the cost of human redemption to which MacKinnon confessed himself drawn.33 Among Anglican contemporaries, he commended especially the reworking of the nineteenth-century Anglican conception of kenosis in Oliver Quick’s Christology, especially his stress on the indispensability of the theme of divine ‘descent’ at the heart of the Nicene Creed and his critique of the traditional doctrine of the divine impassibility.34 But it was Hoskyns’ insistence, learned from the early Barth, that the gospel way from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee, the movement of Jesus Christ from life to death to resurrection, ‘constitutes the ground of epistemological problems lying at the basis of Christian faith’, which remained decisive in his reception of these influences.35 And, as we have seen in tracing his theological realism, it was his metaphysical perplexity in the face of this epistemological context that impelled the restless oscillation of his thought between the probing of the logic of relations and of the status of the self-existent. If MacKinnon can boldly claim that ‘theology is ontological or it is nothing’,36 ontology is not thereby a means finally to transcend the precariousness of faith in one in whom the incommensurables of God and humanity are said to be inextricably and uniquely united. If it is by means of ontological concepts that one is enabled to approach the beckoning depths of the person of Jesus Christ, still the way of indirection remains. All of this is summed up in MacKinnon’s claim that if there is to be any progress along the way of eminence through the employment of analogical and metaphorical speech about God, it will come about only through the efforts of those ‘who have put themselves to school on the negative path’.37 If the mission of Jesus himself must be represented in terms of a strange ordinariness, marking, as we have seen, both transcendence and nearness, the familiarity of the latter must not be taken as grounds for domesticating that which must remain ‘altogether strange, alien, inscrutable’ under the

33 34

35

36 37

idem, ‘Some Reflections on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Christology with Reference to Theodramatik II/2 and III’, pp. 164–79. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Christology’, p. 165. See MacKinnon, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, pp.101–17. A perusal of Quick’s The Gospel of Divine Action (London: Nisbet, 1933), to which MacKinnon referred here, reveals much that is congruent with the latter’s thought. See especially the material on the relation of the church to the cross of Jesus, pp. 113–17. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 205. See also idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 451, where recognition of the oscillation between epistemological and theological considerations is made explicit. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Christology’, p. 169. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 1. The point is starkly registered in his 1976 paper, ‘The Inexpressibility of God’, which stands as a kind of monument to the negative way at the head of these collected papers, the first group of which deals with the limits of human understanding. See also idem, ‘The Relation of the Doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Trinity’, p. 161 in the same volume.

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counterfeit security of an idol made to measure.38 As MacKinnon had cautioned the audience of his Gore Lecture and reiterated to the end of his career, ‘aphasia’ as a mode of representation of the transcendent still beckons along this kenotic trajectory and is less perilous to faith than surrender to a crude anthropomorphism, the reduction of the transcendent to the merely suprahuman order of the mythic hero or demigod.39 Nevertheless, of the prospect of such linguistic self-dispossession he suggested that ‘if in such effort we often find ourselves reduced to silence by inability to eliminate apparent contradiction from the concepts we invoke, at least we may hope that this silence reflects disturbed movement towards, rather than comforting escape from, God’s unutterable love’.40 Yet if in fact we are enabled to speak of the transcendent, such speech will arise on the basis of that which has presented itself to us in the mission of Jesus and if it necessarily has the character of a ‘tâtonnement’, it will nevertheless show its epistemic realism, its attempt to establish direction towards that goal.41 The critical reconstruction of concepts through the novel use to which they are put in Christology and the doctrine of the Triune God holds out the promise of at least ‘a beginning along the road that may issue men and women in the end into the abyss of the unknown, never precisely to be measured but discernibly not altogether fathomless, an infinite resistant to, yet not ultimately alien to, the reach of understanding’.42 Having identified that road with the mission of Jesus and thus having underscored the priority of first-order gospel affirmations in its critical description, MacKinnon argued that the use of ontology does not offer us a second account by which the structure of being is revealed. In the attempt to fathom the relation of God to the world, of eternity to time and of the transcendent to the familiar there remains one story to be told, the story of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee, even if the tools required to set forth its meaning as the centre point which embraces the range of Christian doctrines are multiple. MacKinnon’s probing of the Incarnation in relation to the doctrine of the Triune God, then, takes as its point of departure and perduring focus the mission of Jesus Christ. That means, as he once remarked of Scott Holland’s Christology, both that the Logos must be measured by the deep humiliation of the suffering Christ and that ‘we see Christ incarnate through his resurrection: and this because in his glory his work is consummated and made perpetual’.43 It is the actuality of the resurrection, God’s redemption and universalization of the work of Jesus Christ, that invites a second look by which we may be enabled to see, as it were, behind the receptivity, 38 39

40 43

See MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 11. Ibid., p. 69. See also idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 35–36; and idem, Themes in Theology, p. 16. 41 42 Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 1. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 114, 115, emphasis MacKinnon’s.

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dependence and response of Jesus the Father who sent the Son.44 The resurrection fastens our gaze once again on the concrete particularities of sayings and parables, deeds of merciful acceptance, life laid down in humble, patient obedience so as to evoke recognition of that paradigmatic reality as from first to last derivative, the transposition into the conditions of human historical limit of that which in its inner-Trinitarian depths transcends it.45 If, as MacKinnon claimed, Jesus Christ is presented ‘as one in whom the familiar and the strange, this world and that which lies beyond it, are united in a single person’, in fact as ‘that receptivity made flesh which men and women must receive’, there can be no evasion of the task of probing the ‘ontological riddle’ of his person.46 If we follow MacKinnon’s argument that Christology is to be approached on the basis of the soteriology and that the priority and objective character of that saving deed must be maintained without reducing it to an external, exemplarist ethic, that ‘ontological riddle’ holds the key to the question of the constitutive character of the deed and of our dependence upon it, namely how not only our salvation but also our ability and freedom to love, to serve and even to believe and to worship depends on the work of God in Christ. His task now is to set the dynamic polarity of cross–resurrection in its proper relation to the dynamic ontological context of the movement of God to humanity and of humanity to God, that is, in the context determined by the interplay of the ‘inhumanization’ of the divine and the ‘eternization’ of the human. Kenosis, as MacKinnon understood it, must embrace both of these directions or forms of the one mission of Jesus of Nazareth if the Pauline claim that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ is to be sustained. As we have already remarked, MacKinnon was exercised by a tendency in contemporary Christology which sought to reduce the mystery of Jesus Christ by eliminating the problem which the paradoxes of Scripture and their traditional theological elaboration have bequeathed, particularly the suggestion that Christ’s person is an abstraction, ‘the product of the constructive religious imagination’, from the process of ‘immanent and allegedly spiritinspired development’ which his person is said to have evoked.47 Further, he was acutely conscious that it was the difficulty of assigning sense to claims which attribute not only a universal salvific efficacy but also a cosmic, creative role to the historically datable that induced many theologians to retreat 44 45

46

47

Ibid., p. 117. MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’ in Christian Faith and Communist Faith, pp. 243, 253–54. See also Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, p. 84. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, pp. 77–78. MacKinnon once claimed of this riddle that it involves ‘an opening-up of the frontiers of the unknown’, namely ‘the recognition that in Christ we have to reckon with that One in whom uniquely the frontiers of the unfathomable are opened up’. See idem, ‘Theology as a Discipline of a Modern University’, pp. 169, 171. MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 292.

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from traditional Christology and to skirt articulation of a doctrine of the immanent Triune God in favour of accounts of the identity of Jesus Christ which trace God’s dealings with God’s creatures under the economic categories of creation, redemption and sanctification alone.48 MacKinnon could be generous in the face of this reticence, conceding that the use of ontological concepts to attempt clarification of the traditional Christological paradox might accomplish the very subordination of the simpler dramatic affirmations of the gospel to a world of technical abstractions which he persistently repudiated.49 He patiently probed the problem as it presented itself most acutely in the context of the church’s worship and preaching, pointing out the possibility of two untoward developments. On the one hand, apart from the discipline of ontology, liturgical piety might well elaborate an expressive language of praise and thanksgiving to Jesus Christ as cosmic Lord which heightens devotion without serving understanding, promoting thereby a wholesale retreat into an uninhibited and relativistic fideism.50 On the other hand, the apostolic task of proclaiming Jesus Christ and his gospel might be displaced by dextrous intellectual articulation of a tradition of ontological investigations such that reverence before the mystery of the Incarnation is eroded. Suggesting that ‘we are all Antiochenes rather than Alexandrines now’,51 he nonetheless offered a critical sketch of the attempt to ease intolerable paradox in the reductive idiom of the modern preacher: He will speak rather of, for example, a unique, even an absolute openness of this man to the Father (ignoring the fact that absolute is surely a metaphysical concept), or of the expression in this man of God in human terms, almost suggesting to the uninitiated that there has been poured out into Christ Jesus such amount (quantitatively) of the divine being as an individual human nature can conceivably contain, or of 48

49

50

51

MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 150. See also idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 441: ‘But to project as thus ultimate what belongs inseparably to the historically datable and locatable, to situate it as the transcendent ground of being, is to advance beyond the frontiers of the intelligible’. MacKinnon thus sought to reassure his readers that the use of ontological categories was but one dimension of faith seeking understanding. See ibid., p. 158, 174. See also his remarkably irenic response to the ‘myth of God Incarnate’ debate in ibid., pp. 137–44. For the debate itself which provoked a considerable public reaction, see John Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM Press, 1977); the immediate rejoinder in Michael Green (ed.), The Truth of God Incarnate (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977); and the 1978 colloquy between the seven original essayists and a complement of their leading critics in Michael Goulder (ed.), Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued (London: SCM.; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1979). MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 441. See also Nicholas Lash, ‘Up and Down in Christology’, pp. 34–36, for elaboration of this point. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 178.

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the translation into terms of a human life of the ways of God with men, presenting implicitly, if not explicitly, the life of Jesus as an acted parable of the creator’s dealings with his creatures, comparable to the parable of the prodigal son . . . but infinitely more telling because it is acted out and is universal in scope.52 Similarly, in perusing essays in theological exegesis of the New Testament MacKinnon took stock of efforts to eliminate the problem by portraying the work of Jesus as an event in the realm of human achievement, as the product of a unique religious genius, even of a supreme or the supreme religious creativity, noting that the uniqueness which this approach predicates of Jesus is only a relative uniqueness which depends on a comparison with others for its location on a graded scale.53 Again, he questioned the claim that the New Testament Christological titles were to be construed functionally rather than ontologically, finding in this tendency to focus on the role or roles which constitute Christ’s ministry at the expense of attempts to capture the identity of his person, a limitation which, to MacKinnon’s mind, involved a ‘philistine and spiritually distorting amputation of our theological reach’.54 Nor would a related kind of recourse to a personalist construal of faith prove immune to ontological pressures, since, MacKinnon argued, ‘the character of the trust given to that person is determined by belief concerning what he did and who he is’.55 To MacKinnon’s mind, attempts to dissolve the paradox by construing the identity of Jesus Christ within strictly economic categories ended in the same alleged aporia as the use of substance ontology or fell well short of the traditional claim which the church has made in its confession of Jesus Christ as being of one substance with the Father. The consequences of this move to MacKinnon’s mind were equally disastrous for appropriation of knowledge of God and for the prospect of human salvation. As Rowan Williams remarks, by conceiving of the identity of Jesus Christ as parable rather than paradox, that is, as one determinate entity pointing beyond itself to another, they sunder the point of contact between God and humanity to which the Homoousion points, displacing God from involvement in the discontinuities of the world.56 By way of response, MacKinnon urged that if in proclamation and theological exegesis we do not evade the force of the New Testament witness, any analysis of Christ’s 52 53

54

55 56

MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, pp. 279–80. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 169–72, with reference to the work of B. H. Streeter which he yet commended for its efforts to furnish a portrait of the historical actuality of Jesus of Nazareth. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 147–48, 158. In view here is Oscar Cullmann, Die Christologie des Neuen Testaments (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1957). MacKinnon, ‘Moral Objections’, in Objections to Christian Belief, p. 18. Rowan Williams, ‘Trinity and Ontology’, p. 80.

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role or function will impel us towards consideration of properly ontological matters.57 Although MacKinnon’s response was in the first place a vigorous reassertion of the mystery of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the Triune God, he did not make of it what James Mackey once called ‘a mystery too soon’.58 He began his analytic approach on the basis of the scriptural form in which the Christological problem has come down to us.59 He fastened attention on the various expressions of a coincidentia oppositorum observable in the person of Jesus Christ, the ‘haunting alternation’ or interpenetration of humility and authority, receptivity and demand or the ‘strange ordinariness’ manifested in his words and works which, as we have seen, MacKinnon identified as hints of the transcendent, the movement from God to humanity and from humanity to God as the Gospels represent it. Inconsistencies in these narratives were taken as evidence for the unassimilability of the reality of Jesus to usual modes of discourse about God and humanity and as a standing invitation to renewed inquiry.60 In this vein he highlighted the stark contrast between the communion of the Father and the Son in the ‘passing glories’ of the transfiguration and in the ‘pitifully human’ distress of Gethsemane as another way in which the Gospels set the problem of Christology.61 Again, if understanding in the face of the conceptual untidiness of Scripture’s modus loquendi is to retain its importance in confession of faith in Jesus Christ, MacKinnon argued that the apparent contradiction in his self-understanding registered by certain sayings attributed to Jesus by the evangelists indicative both of an ontological identity with the Father and an ontological and moral differentiation from, and even subordination to, the Father – such sayings as ‘the Father and I are one (thing)’ (Jn. 10.30) 57

58

59

60 61

MacKinnon argued that ‘the mystery of Christ’s person sets the believer a near-metaphysical problem, and a flight from metaphysics diminishes Christian understanding and exposes it to dangers greater than those which beset a partial endorsement of ontological concern. On the other hand, any engagement with the mystery of Christ’s person in aversion from the actualities of his teaching, his ministry, his via dolorosa, may fetter one in bondage to abstraction, even as the refusal to be beckoned towards the unfathomable depths of absolute Being by reflexion on the successive, often trivial, episodes of that life is to refuse one’s submission to the discipline of the veritable school of Christ’. Idem, ‘A Master in Israel: Hans Urs von Balthasar’, p. 7. James P. Mackey, The Christian Experience of God as Trinity (London: SCM. Press, 1983), p. 3. In a comment on von Balthasar’s Theodramatic Christology, MacKinnon protested against the notion that ‘the traditional scheme of Trinity and Incarnation’ should be replaced by a tidier, reductive account on the grounds that such an approach manifests ‘a cavalier indifference to the sort of questions thrust on the reader’s attention by the New Testament material’. See idem, ‘Some Reflections on von Balthasar’s Christology’, p. 176. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 180. Ibid., pp. 72–73.

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and ‘the Father is greater than I’ (Jn. 14.28),62 and also ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone’ (Mk. 10.18 and parallels)63 – remains to be clarified. Second, MacKinnon found instructive the rather tensive form in which ecclesial confession of this mystery is entrenched in the second article of the Nicene Creed by means of the juxtaposition of highly abstract ontological propositions with the mythological or meta-historical language of descent and with statements of historical factuality. On this basis he argued that an adequate Christology must probe the complex interpretative interplay involved in these three intertwined modes of speech, the disciplining or demythologizing of the mythological by the ontological, the grounding of the latter concepts in the language of the gospels, in the movement from God to humankind, in kenosis or divine condescension, while grappling with the historical contingency which in naming Pontius Pilate the gospel thrusts into the heart of the creed.64 Clearly here at the heart of Christological confession there is scope for an analytical employment of the concept of substance and a descriptive use of the concept of kenosis in close connection with the notions of temporality and limit. MacKinnon’s analyses of Incarnational and Trinitarian doctrine take up this challenge, oscillating as they proceed between these two ontological modes, thereby seeking to prioritize rather than absorb the Christological modus loquendi of the Gospels such that recognition of the central importance to Christian theology of the mystery of Jesus Christ is secured.65 In so doing, however, they run up against the limits to which such modes of speech are subject. A number of formal claims help to clarify MacKinnon’s meaning here. In particular, he argued that if substance ontology is not an essay in speculation but a part of analytic philosophy, the statements which it furnishes must be read as second-order statements, that is, statements about statements about Jesus Christ.66 Alongside this he developed a descriptive account by means of the first-order concept of kenosis which he deemed indispensable for probing the hidden depths of divine condescension or the movement from God to humankind disclosed in the 62 63 64

65 66

MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, pp. 289–90. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 140. MacKinnon, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, pp. 102–03; and idem, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 440, where ‘the striking juxtaposition of factual, ontological and mythological’ language in the creedal tradition elicits comment. See also idem, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 83. MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 294. Ibid., pp. 288, 291. While arguing for ‘the validity, even the indispensability’ of the use of notions such a substance, MacKinnon always underlined their limited yield. That is, substance ontology grapples with the issue of objective reference when it speaks of ‘the unfathomable ultimates of God’s self-giving in Christ’ in such a way that the ‘simplicities’ of Galilee may be obscured. See idem, Review of Divine Substance, by G. C. Stead, Scottish Journal of Theology 32 (1979), pp. 271–73 (273).

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limits of the human, historical life of Jesus of Nazareth and so at that place alone to begin ‘to lift the veil from the face of the God whom he discloses, with whom he is one’.67 By use of substance ontology he proposed an interpretation of the legacy of Nicaea and Chalcedon in terms of a developing metaphysical tradition of conceptual clarification in which the Homoousion is construed as a second-order concept which has as its primary concern the intelligibility of the relation (quid) while employment of the first-order concept of kenosis has in view the manner (quomodo) of Jesus Christ’s relation to the Father.68 The significance of ontological statements thus lies in their preservation of the primacy of the paradox of Christology by bringing into sharper focus the skandalon which shows itself at the centre of the gospel narratives.69 They administer the discipline of conceptual clarification to mythological or dramatic claims, ontology which borders on the philosophy of logic having as its concern not only the question of ‘the nuclear realization of being’ but also the interrelation of fundamental concepts involved in generalized discourse about any subject matter.70 Indeed, as his survey of alternative contemporary Christological accounts attests, it was the critical use of substance ontology that allowed MacKinnon to probe what was at stake in the reduction of Christology to event language and while appreciating its gain through focusing on the sense in which the life of Jesus as a 67

68

69

70

Ibid., p. 297; See also idem, Themes in Theology, p. 161. As he affirmed in a discussion of von Balthasar’s work, ‘it is only the concept of kenosis which enables us to treat the ministry and work of Jesus Christ as the very standard by which we must test the adequacy of every attempt to articulate to ourselves the concept of God’. Idem, ‘A Master in Israel: Hans Urs von Balthasar’, p. 5. MacKinnon drew the inference from Oliver Quick’s approach to the Incarnation that it was only after having come to terms with ‘the great intellectual achievement’ of the Homoousion that one could go on to reflect on the mystery of the divine self-giving which lies beyond it. See idem, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, p. 103. Note also MacKinnon’s caution that those tempted to essay a treatise quomodo deus homo inevitably find themselves ‘lacking the gifts at once spiritual and intellectual to essay even the prolegomena’. Idem, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, p. 116. Kenneth Surin has duly underscored the heuristic character of its usage in MacKinnon’s hands in idem, ‘Some Aspects of the “Grammar” of “Incarnation” and “Kenosis”’, p. 101. MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 290. Here he wryly remarked that ontological investigations whose effect is to focus attention on the concrete particular serve to show exactly what it is about the central figure of Christian faith that is being abandoned when they are jettisoned in favour of ecclesiology or metaphysics. With reference to the ‘myth of God Incarnate’ debate (1977), MacKinnon suggested that the doctrine of the Incarnation might recover its authority in the face of a reductive anthropomorphism because ‘in spite of all it does justice to the unfathomable paradox of the union of the transcendent and the desperately human (so individually human in victory and defeat) that we find in Jesus of Nazareth’. Idem, Themes in Theology, p. 143. Ibid., p. 281. MacKinnon’s warning about the reification of substance and event in this context is important (pp. 286–87).

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self-continuous subject manifests through movement in time and space a distinct, even unique, pattern–quality to argue, as we have already seen, that if the notion of event is something occurring in the history of a concrete particular, the notion of event must be parasitic on that of the concrete particular.71 Thus, to repeat, MacKinnon’s use of the ontological category of substance, without derogating from the priority of the gospel narratives, provides a conceptual apparatus to probe ‘the truly revolutionary paradox’ affirmed by the language of act and event in the mission of Jesus in order to focus on the person of Jesus Christ and the affirmation of his relation to the Father and to clarify the contradiction between two propositions, one of which asserts equality of the two terms and another which predicates dependence of the first term upon the second of that relation.72 MacKinnon sounded a caution, however, against pushing to extremes the distinction between descriptive first-order and analytic second-order claims for, as he pointed out, they are not merely juxtaposed in Christological confession as it has come down to us from New Testament origins: The heart of the problem facing anyone who essays a treatise de verbo Incarnato is the oscillation, the alternation of language that is abstractly ontological with language that is mythological, crudely anthropomorphic. In part the former provides the means of disciplining the latter, or rendering its use aseptic, proof against corruption of the imagination. But there is more to it than that: for the anthropomorphic is as it were permeated by the ontological styles, bent and twisted till the very concept of God as he is in himself is suffused by its emphases. It is as if a new piety was born, a piety that imagination can find in the Gospels.73 That being said, Christology must come to terms with claims about a singularity or absolute novum, an irreducible uniqueness of relation which is a category of being.74 Because, as MacKinnon reminds us, Christological formulation arises from and is tied to faith focused on Jesus Christ, we begin with his analysis of the ontological structure of Christ’s person. His account interweaves first- and second-order forms of ontological analysis, oscillating to and fro between the use of substance analysis and the employment of kenotic concepts, particularly dependence and receptivity, 71 73

74

72 Ibid., p. 287. Ibid., pp. 290–91. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 185, emphasis MacKinnon’s. See also idem, ‘Reflections on Donald Baillie’s Treatment of the Atonement’, pp. 115–16: ‘If we are to make anything of this submission [to the very substance of human life], the languages of myth and of ontology must jostle each other in the effort to portray a particular human career as paradigmatically indicative of the divine as it is in itself. And that not in aversion from concrete historical detail but in acknowledgment of its deep significance’. Ibid., p. 172.

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at the point at which the former threatens to become unanchored from the affirmations of the gospel narratives and drift off into a ‘ballet-dance of bloodless abstractions’,75 or, in Kantian terms, into wilful indulgence of the schematizing imagination.76 It must also be recalled that MacKinnon laid considerable weight on the vacillation within the tradition of substance ontology itself concerning the locus of primary substantiality and counselled recognition and acceptance of a corresponding tension arising from the use of that tradition in Christology.77 Further, in recognizing the prevalence of the rich metaphors employed in the church’s idiom of praise to the incarnate One he reiterated that ontology serves ‘to achieve in part deliverance from metaphor, in part to secure what can only be metaphorically conveyed’.78 In sum, he claimed for ontology that it allows the question to be put ‘whether we believe that a life has been lived of which we say that what we say of the deeds done in it, the words spoken, the suffering endured, we say of that which belongs to one substantially identical with the Father except that he is Father and the liver of the life Son’.79 It allows investigation of the problem involved in asserting that such deeds are not adequately described except as the deeds of ‘one who is related to the Father, identical with the Father except in respect of this relatedness’.80 As MacKinnon noted, to predicate these acts of the relation to the Father called Son is already to press towards the ever more complex problems of the pre-existence of Christ and of the relation of the economic Trinity to the essential Trinity.81 MacKinnon claimed for the ontological tradition of the Nicene Homoousion that it embodies a sustained exercise in fides quaerens intellectum82 which refuses to abandon the claim that the life of Jesus of Nazareth is in some sense the life of God while at the same time insisting that the faith of the Trinity and of the Incarnation is monotheistic.83 The tradition of the hypostatic union stemming from Chalcedon affirmed of the union of the

75 77

78 79 82

76 Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 176. MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 291. MacKinnon notes here that while J. N. D. Kelly had interpreted the substance of the Homoousion in the Nicene debates in terms of the form or essence which Aristotle categorized as secondary substance, the question of Aristotle’s hesitancy concerning the locus of primary substantiality still had to be reckoned with. In a close analysis of the Homoousion in the decade leading up to Nicaea, Christopher Stead found that the use of the concept of substance in the Nicene debates was less schematic and more open-textured than Kelly’s account had allowed. See Christopher Stead, Divine Substance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 223–66. See the summary discussion of these matters, again alluding to the open or elastic quality of the Nicene formula, in David Brown, The Divine Trinity (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1985), pp. 240–41. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 232. 80 81 MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 296. Ibid. Ibid. 83 Ibid., p. 294. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 176.

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incommensurables of divinity and humanity in the man Jesus of Nazareth that the author is God, not merely that God is the logical subject of the proposition ‘he was incarnate’ but that ontologically God is the author of the act by which an absolutely new relation between God and humanity was established, ‘not by conversion of the godhead into manhood, but by taking of the manhood into God’.84 In an attempt to lay bare the traditional understanding of that relation MacKinnon subjected this claim to an extremely compressed analytic interrogation which threads its way by means of the abstract terminology of the logic of relations and the category of substance between the distortions of adoptionism and monophysitism. He asked what can be said of humanity here and of its relation to divinity and of the ‘establishing’ of that relation: Does it presuppose two finished terms that are to be brought into relation one with another? Or is it claiming that where the humanum of Jesus is concerned, it is created as if demanding the divine as its suppositum, as if all the while finding itself for what it is in that relation: yet not so as to suggest that that to which it is related is itself a craving of the relation. And if it says the latter, what of the divine term? Is it effected by being thus the suppositum, the ὺποκείμενον, of a humanum humanly complete; or is it in external relation as to that which is peripherally accidental to it?85 If the humanum were treated as merely a qualitas of the divine term, MacKinnon concluded that a monophysite Christology could scarcely be avoided. The questions simply tease out the conceivability of the relation of the two incommensurables in the traditional Chalcedonian terms by which the priority of the divine initiative signalled in the logical irreversibility of the subject–predicate relation and thus the asymmetricality of the relation between divinity and humanity are safeguarded. Their dauntingly abstract quality, however, heightens nervousness that they may drift off into a static essentialism, obscuring the very fact of the establishment of the relation they are intended to elucidate. The same aporia opens up when examples of the use of metaphor in traditional hymnody to refer to the establishment of the relation between God and humanity in the act of assumption are scrutinized. MacKinnon observed that such metaphors as the ‘robe of human flesh’ or ‘fleshly mantle’ which the Son of God is said to put on and wear, albeit ‘for aye’, also evoke the ‘sheer externality’ of the relation of godhead to humanity, specifically the notion that there is no ‘infusion’ of godhead into humanity in the act of assumption, no impartation of divine substance (secondary substance)

84

Ibid., pp. 172–73.

85

Ibid., p. 173.

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to the human.86 MacKinnon then put to this claim the question whether the traditional communicaio idiomatum is then only to be construed in a merely nominal sense as an instrument to heighten devotion, or if it does involve proper acclamation, what it might then be said to acclaim.87 When the direction of the relation is reversed and the relation of humanity to God is brought into view, this tradition represented humanity as undergoing a change in the act of assumption. It held that God the Son is the subject of the assumption of humanity and that the humanity assumed by God forfeits its particularity in the act of assumption, although, as MacKinnon duly clarified, the notion does not intend that Jesus of Nazareth is not a distinguishable individual, a man.88 In this veiled allusion to the traditional doctrine of the anhypostasis of the humanity of Christ MacKinnon reasoned that ‘that altogether unique relation to the Eternal that we name hypostatic union is malgré tout internal to the term assumed in such a way that it is constituted by an openness to the divine so uniquely thoroughgoing . . . that it is rendered in itself impersonal’.89 ‘Openness’ with its aspect of receptivity hints at the constitutive priority of the movement of God to humanity while yet preventing the act of assumption from being construed in Eutychean fashion as absorption of humanity into divinity. The humanity remains but as humanity totally dependent on the Son as its divine subject. MacKinnon thus elucidated on the basis of the logical irreversibility of the subject–predicate relation, the conception of secondary substance and traditional metaphor the asymmetrical, non-reciprocal nature of the relation between divinity and humanity in the incarnate One by which traditionally the sovereign, free initiative of God in the Incarnation is preserved and in which also the redemption of humankind is grounded. What can be said of the fruits of this approach? It is the evident non-reciprocity in the relation of divinity to humanity in this tradition that betrays an aporia in its concept of Incarnation on which MacKinnon’s criticism fastens. The traditional formulation of the hypostatic union, he argued, rests to some degree on ‘an uncriticized and even deeply mistaken conception of divine transcendence’.90 While its refusal to surrender the unique point of reference of the union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ and the incommensurability of the two natures united therein must be honoured, he urged that its ‘failure to allow that divine sovereignty might contain within itself the foundation of divine self-limitation’ or to probe ‘how far the Trinitarian conception of God as he is in himself (the doctrine of the essential as distinct from an economic Trinity) compelled transformation of the understanding of transcendence’ must be opened up 86 89

90

87 88 Ibid., p. 177. Ibid. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid. ‘Impersonal’ here clearly does not mean without personality but without independent existence. Ibid., p. 180.

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to scrutiny.91 Traditional conceptions of the transcendent have tended to work with rigid notions of immutable self-sufficiency and impassibility or invulnerable aseity and, as MacKinnon was prepared to acknowledge, for reasons that should not be too quickly discounted. For one thing, God’s aseity, which can be ‘mythologized’ as an ultimate invulnerability, is a matter of logical necessity.92 For another, such notions posit with apt starkness the ‘infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity’ and also God’s ‘immunity’ from increase or diminution of being, from ‘any sort of infection or disturbance ab extra’, and these metaphors, he suggested, are far from spiritually sterile.93 They counsel ‘a proper austerity of thought and imagination’ and also offer the consolation that God’s immunity from pain and suffering and freedom from the realm of flux are evidence not of ‘an icy indifference but rather a ground of security’.94 But the positing of a nonreciprocal relation between divinity and humanity in the incarnate One has its origin in a conception of the relation of God to creation deemed purely notional whereas the relation of the world to God, its absolute dependence, is conceived as real. The notional character of the God-creationward relation was, MacKinnon argued, ‘an attempt to understand the dependence of the world in respect of the resonance of that dependence on the divine being, as something approaching asymptotically the limit of that sheer externality which virtually passes over into a complete absence of relatedness’, almost an ‘ontological indifference’ which is yet posited as the ground of God’s engagement with the world in self-giving love.95 MacKinnon judged this notion ‘radically mistaken’ on these grounds: While seeking to safeguard what may be characterized mythologically as divine immunity from involvement in the affairs of the world, securing an infinite, unaffected resourcefulness in creative design, it achieves such a safeguard only at the cost of rendering the exercise of such resource virtually self-contradictory . . . as if to secure the possibility of the radically self-initiated, one rendered impossible its execution.96 A conception of transcendence by which ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ all too easily passes over from divine self-containedness into virtual separation of God in se from the economy of creation and redemption threatens to overthrow the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation, namely that God has for the purpose of human salvation and the healing of creation inseparably bound Godself to humanity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. MacKinnon 91 95

96

92 93 94 Ibid. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 161. See also idem, ‘Oliver Chase Quick as a Theologian’, p. 106. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 180–81. See also O. C. Quick, The Gospel of Divine Action, pp. 90–94,110.

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tied this misunderstanding to a refusal to allow ‘the Christian reality’ to determine the notion of transcendence and on a corresponding tendency to construe the divine attributes in abstraction from the revelation of God in Christ, that is, from what is revealed in the setting of his words and works along the way from Galilee to Jerusalem.97 If what is seen in the economy of salvation is held to be congruous with God’s very being, God’s invulnerability must be construed as an invulnerability posited in the act of creation as the ground of his vulnerability, and both must therefore be seen as involved in God’s relation to us in Christ.98 By urging the difficult, paradoxical notion of an invulnerable love or of a vulnerable invulnerability MacKinnon hoped to safeguard the claim that God’s nature is not in any way made to be what it is by that which is not God but rather that God’s being is in becoming by virtue of God’s self-committal ad extra in self-diffusive love. At the very least MacKinnon here drives home the point that if the union of the divine and the human in the Incarnation must rightly be conceived as an asymmetrical relation, it must also be conceived as an asymmetrical relation. A second attack on the problem, then, led MacKinnon to ask again in what sense the Incarnation might be spoken of as an act if it were conceived in a more open-textured, dynamic fashion which highlights emphasis on the movement of God to humanity and of humanity to God in terms of substance construed as concrete particular. MacKinnon cautioned that the sense of the term ‘act’ here must be distinguished from that of the particular locatable and datable acts of Christ’s ministry, such as his preaching, healing, cleansing of the Temple and so on. The ‘act’ of the Incarnation in the novel sense in which MacKinnon suggested it be employed designates ‘the provision, the positing and the sustaining of the context within which the individual items of Christ’s biography, whether known or irrevocably lost, fall’.99 Echoing von Balthasar’s conception of theodramatics, MacKinnon described this notion of ‘positing the context’ in terms of ‘the provision of a setting, almost the over-all direction of a play, in which . . . there is a strange oscillation between that which is unexpected and almost random, and that which can be seen as contributing to an immanent design’.100 He affirmed of the Incarnation that the context of these experiences is established through their ascription to the Son of God who is their subject, though they are the experiences which render the man Jesus of Nazareth what he is. The force of the image of stage direction or authorship in this shift in construing the relation from concentration on a suppositum to focus on a positum in terms of the attribution of these experiences to the Son and to the man Jesus, 97

98

MacKinnon once suggested that Kierkegaard, Barth and von Balthasar would insist that ‘no theology of divine transcendence has any right to call itself Christian that does not see the very transcendence of God in terms of the crown of thorns.’ Idem, Borderlands of Theology, p. 126. 99 100 MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 234. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid.

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MacKinnon claimed, is that it emphasizes that ‘it is the Creator, the one through whom all things came into being, who is uniquely at work here: that in the Incarnation, God draws near to men’.101 Here in relation to God’s activity in creation the self-giving of God in the Incarnation is ‘mythologized’ as descent, a movement in space and time, and MacKinnon queried whether apart from such mythologically formulated confession the conviction at the root of the Homoousion would ever have come to expression. Turning once more to the point of departure for Christology in the historical actuality of the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, MacKinnon extrapolated the gospel basis for the notion of the Incarnation as the ‘positing of a context’ to argue that the dramatic itinerary of the mission of Jesus from place to place and towards his approaching ‘hour’ describes a mission from the Father to the world and back again which ‘contains within its design its initiation, its execution, and its end, its settings, its occasions, and its final issue’.102 The problem of Christology can then be delineated in terms of a shift that MacKinnon detected in the New Testament documents, especially the Gospel of John, in which the relation of eternity to time is said to be focused in the person of Jesus, ‘translated into terms of relationships realized in a human career, lying indeed at its very foundation’.103 If this is so, it is also rightly to be said, MacKinnon argued, that ‘it is Jesus of Nazareth who manifests the divine transcendence as present in himself in those places in which his human actuality might be thought at first sight most completely to obscure it’.104 MacKinnon pointed out that this is the point at which Christological concentration joins the theocentric emphasis of the Gospels such that the problem of Christology ‘arises most acutely as the inhumanization of the issue of the relation of the temporal to the eternal, the transformation of that issue into one of the ontological structure of Christ’s person, the interpenetration of these incommensurables in the unfathomably mysterious texture of his being: at once God and man’.105 In other words, of the various expressions of a coincidentia oppositorum manifested in the gospel accounts of this human life it can be claimed that they ‘may be judged rooted in, and expressive of, the way in which he [Jesus Christ] lived uniquely as the frontier of the familiar and the transcendent, the relative and the absolute, and by so standing, demands that our every conception of both alike be revised’.106 A proper theology, MacKinnon argued, will find

101 102

103

Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 181. MacKinnon’s thought here moves in the direction of the concept of Sendung, detailed in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 3, The Dramatis Personae: The Person in Christ (trans. Graham Harrison; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), pp. 149–259. See MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on von Balthasar’s Christology’, pp. 168–72, where he suggests that von Balthasar hoped to find in Sendung an ontological concept more inclusive than that of kenosis. 104 105 106 Ibid., p. 182. Ibid., pp. 140, 143–44. Ibid., p. 182. Ibid., p. 180.

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the ‘point of junction’ between faith seeking understanding and understanding seeking faith precisely at this frontier.107 On this basis he suggested that the interpenetration of mythological and ontological modes of speech in Christological confession expressed in the coincidentia oppositorum of the Gospels might legitimate a construal of the communicatio idiomatum which presses beyond the nominal to embrace the real. Following von Balthasar, MacKinnon grounded understanding of Christology in the triune being of God even as he acknowledged that the latter could be approached only on the basis of the former, arguing that ‘it is one of Balthasar’s deepest insights to find the latter conveyed with the former in such a way that even if the Trinitarian being of God is the ground of the incarnate life of Christ, the former is totally engaged in and with the latter’ and noting that at this point von Balthasar’s ‘unique sense of the interpenetration of the central moments of the Christian mystery is crucially significant’.108 In this light MacKinnon proposed that reconstruction of a theology of the Triune God be essayed as a completion of a kenotic Christology and as such furnish the context in which the issue of the interpretation of the divine attributes, especially divine impassibility, might be transformed.109 This proposal does not legitimate a straightforward order of reasoning from God ad extra on the one hand or from Jesus Christ ad intra on the other, but rather inquires into the possibility of an interpretation arising from their mutual interpenetration. What is at stake, then, in the doctrine of the Incarnation as MacKinnon conceived it? The Incarnation is an act of divine condescension, a unique movement from God to humanity, indeed ‘a wholly unique act of divine selflimitation which discloses in a way altogether without parallel God’s relation to the world He has created’, without parallel because the act of self-limitation is itself the ground of that relationship.110 What is at stake in this act of kenosis is that a human being’s relation to God depends on its accomplishment, its self-gift. MacKinnon’s term ‘inhumanization’ secures both the direction of that self-gift and its locus in the mission, that ‘strange, highly individual yet always desperately human career’, of Jesus of Nazareth.111 The primary issue at the heart of the incarnational notion of ‘inhumanization’ thus involves the way in which the self-historicizing of transcendence, the free self-submission of God to the limits of temporality, is to be understood and articulated. If faith remains focused on the man Jesus of Nazareth and he is the unique reference point of the inseparable relation of the eternal and the temporal, the transcendent and the familiar, transcendence must be thought together 107 108 109 110

111

Ibid., p. 183. MacKinnon, ‘Some Reflections on von Balthasar’s Christology’, p. 178. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 159. Ibid., p. 140. See also p.159, for his description of this unique movement as an ‘irreducible surd’, a term deployed to preserve the uniqueness and absolute sovereignty of this self-gift. Ibid.

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with the conditions of humanity such as the Gospels describe them, that is, in terms of situatedness within creation (substantial existence in time and space), exposure, precariousness or risk, fragmentariness of knowledge and action, submission to agony and glorification, death and resurrection. Kenosis allows for the representation of God as being within time and thus subject to limit. But equally ‘inhumanization’ demands that the humanity of Jesus be conceived not according to the limits of a supposedly secure knowledge of the bounds and texture of the human, a dubious idea which the epistemological and moral force of MacKinnon’s realism was employed to undermine, but as an open-textured concept revisable in correspondence with the witness of the Gospels to the work and person of Jesus Christ.112 MacKinnon does maintain, however, that it is in light of the mission of Jesus Christ that divine transcendence must be conceived as ‘in an altogether unique sense, the actuality of the divine self-impartation to the world’.113 The submission of the Son of God or the Logos to the conditions of humanity grounds self-limitation in the divine self-committal in creation such that ‘a genuine, if asymmetrical, reciprocity in relations of creation and creator’ is secured.114 That is, if God must be conceived as transcendent such that the creation’s dependence on God is ‘totally asymmetrical’, God in Godself must yet be ‘such that the very dependence of the world upon Him is expressive of his eternal relatedness’.115 What is at stake in this relation is a conception of the being and act of God as not only transcendent over the creation but also and especially creatively and redemptively present to it. It is MacKinnon’s second term, ‘interpenetration’, that brings to the fore the reciprocity of the relation of divinity and humanity in the Incarnation and of God’s eternality to temporality in creation while yet avoiding any suggestion of confusion of the two incommensurables or of a symmetrical interdependence. Glossing a remark from the notebooks of G. M. Hopkins, MacKinnon put the matter of the ‘resonance’ or ‘the play upon each other’ of the two realities of the eternal being of God and the historical mission of the incarnate One thus: ‘it is as if the still transcendence of God in his aseity suddenly became vibrant with the energy, the strain, the joy, the grief, the triumph and the failure of the ministry of Jesus and that ministry itself was found in all its tension and incompleteness to catch in a manner wholly unique the very being of the eternal’.116 At this juncture MacKinnon can

112

113 116

The reduction of the scope and meaning of the humanum or of the person to what can be conveyed by a theory of selfhood or to the confines of an institutional understanding, that is, to any description which cannot encompass the richly variegated texture of human experience fell afoul of MacKinnon’s anti-idealist strictures. See idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 140–41, where the twofold problem of saying exactly what a human person is and of authenticating any such denotation is outlined. 114 115 MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 160. Ibid., p.183. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 146.

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no longer evade the bête noire that has assailed virtually all attempts to construct a kenotic Christology. The problem is residual in the post-Nicene tradition, arising at the point in which a doctrine of the Incarnation turns from concentration on the Father–Son relation to reflect on the relation of the transcendent and creation within a Logos-sarx framework.117 In MacKinnon’s formulation the issue may be stated as follows: if the events which make up the history of Jesus belong to the same time order as other contemporary events, that is, to the created order fashioned and continually sustained by the power of the Logos, how is the relationship of the concentrated, datable and localizable action of the Logos in the ministry of Jesus to the continuing activity of the Logos in creation to be understood?118 Typically one criticism of kenoticism as it has been constructed in the context of the Lutheran doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum rests on the complaint that a theology of incarnational self-limitation entails the notion of a ‘depotentiated’ Logos which in turn introduces a duality between the eternal mode of being of the Logos and its temporal manifestation in Jesus Christ such that assertion of a real incarnation of God in Christ is rendered doubtful with severe consequences for the doctrine of atonement. Attempts to specify what has been ‘emptied’ in the incarnation have led, particularly in the nineteenth-century Lutheran context, to various proposals of which some have distinguished to the point of separability the so-called immanent or essential attributes (love, holiness and justice, for example) from attributes deemed contingent vis-à-vis the world (omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience) traditionally ascribed to God and thus posit in various iterations either the outright surrender (kenosis) of or temporary refusal to use (krypsis) the latter during the time of the earthly ministry. Second, kenotic theories in nineteenth-century Anglican guise have been assailed not only on these grounds but also in terms of their inordinate, speculative attention to the developing messianic self-consciousness of Jesus, betraying a psychological inquisitiveness in the fact and extent of the idiotes of the incarnate Word largely foreign to the Gospel narratives themselves. In response MacKinnon attempted to skirt the problematic two-status kenoticism by reconstructing the traditional ontology of transcendence on which

117

118

Alois Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, Vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451) (trans. John Bowden; Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 2nd rev. edn., 1975), pp. 272–73. As Stephen Sykes has pointed out, the earliest versions of what might be called kenoticism were simply attempts to wrestle with the inevitable paradoxes of the two-nature Christology arising from the relation of the form of God and the form of the servant in one and the same Jesus Christ. See idem, ‘The Strange Persistence of Kenotic Christology’, in Being and Truth: Essays in Honour of John Macquarrie (ed. Alistair Kee and Eugene T. Long; London: SCM Press, 1986), pp. 350–51. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, pp. 149–50.

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it rested and then, turning the criticism on its head, argued on the basis of the mission of Jesus that kenosis involved not the diminution, abandonment or temporary setting aside of the attributes of divinity but rather their most consistent and authentic manifestation in the costliest depths of identification with human being in the order of creation. In other words, he insisted on a real incarnation without change in the nature of the Logos but an incarnation so real as to prohibit understanding of the divine attributes, especially omnipotence, apart from their manifestation in the via crucis of Jesus. In other words, he repudiated any naked speculation concerning a Logos asarkos, seemingly inevitable on the basis of a two-status kenoticism, in favour of a concept of kenosis which finds the unique point of reference for what can be said of the movement of God to humanity and of humanity to God in the concrete particularity of the man Jesus of Nazareth. Kenosis, then, does not describe a merely episodic manifestation of God within the economy of salvation, a process of change which God must somehow undergo in order to become humanly present to creation, but rather an asymmetrical yet reciprocal relation of the reality of God as God is in the triune perichoresis of Godself to that which greets us in the historical mission of Jesus. It funds a construal of the doctrine of the immanent Triune God in which divine descent in the economy ‘may be seen as supremely, indeed paradigmatically, declaratory of what He is in himself’.119 In this vein, signalling the way in which the gospel narratives press the claim of the identity of Jesus’ mission with the torrent of the divine love, he contended that Christ’s invitation to the heavy laden and his humble service of God’s creatures are properly conceived not as simulacra, instances or parables of God’s invitation or service but rather as their very substance or concretization in human history.120 Moreover, he asserted that Christ’s dependence on faith and prayer is not construed ‘as something belonging to a simulacrum of humanity that must be allowed to adorn the Incarnate, but rather as something uniquely congruous with the inmost being of God’.121 In that regard, he queried whether the dramatic idiom which speaks of Christ’s invitation to sinners, his humble service and his reliance on faith and prayer as bringing to expression God’s movement to humankind does not approximate to that which has traditionally been asserted by means of the Homoousion.122 Here again in this kenotic context, it should be noted, MacKinnon’s use of metaphor, particularly the metaphor of transparency, also reinforces the asymmetricality and reciprocity of the relation. Hence the obedience of Jesus on which MacKinnon laid such emphasis is characterized as ‘an aspect of his transparency to his Father’ and even, more ontologically, as ‘his Father’s

119 121 122

120 Ibid., p. 160. MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 290. MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 449. MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 290.

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presence in him’.123 Yet this claim is again balanced by the affirmation that ‘there is very clear limitation in any man who has thus to search out for himself the secret of his own significance as something far from immediately obvious or transparent to himself’.124 His mission is shown in this sense to be something not already achieved but a truly contingent, historical event which although expressive of God in se involved real agony of acceptance for Jesus.125 Kenosis, in MacKinnon’s formulation, thus refers to the interpenetration or the resonance or play on each other of the historical mission of Jesus and the perichoresis of the persons of the Triune God. The linch-pin in this conception is the notion of receptivity. Taking as basic the claim that the mission of Jesus, shaped by faith and prayer as forms of his dependence on the Father, received its significance ab extra, MacKinnon suggested that if this can be taken to mean that Jesus is the historical vehicle of God’s address to the world, one might well find the condition of this possibility in ‘the realization in his historical individuality of a total receptivity’, even in a phrase borrowed from W. R. Inge, ‘an infinite self-abnegation’ or ‘infinite receptivity, infinite response’.126 Such ‘total receptivity’ displayed at the heart of the mission of Jesus might then be expressed, MacKinnon argued, by means of the metaphor of transcription, namely that ‘that which is represented as coming into the world in Jesus, as transcribed in the conditions of his ministry into forms of speaking his Father’s words and “doing the will of Him that sent me”, is what he eternally is’.127 The metaphor of transcription is basic to MacKinnon’s insistence that the doctrine of God must be reconstructed such that ‘the form of Jesus’ ministry, his life, his death and his being brought again from death to boundless life, is found in God as He is in Himself’.128 In other words, what is realized in the mission of Jesus and perfected in the Father’s raising Him from the dead is the very unity of God, the consistency of God with himself in relation to his creation. We have to do with a prolonged human action that is grounded in God, that in fact provides the very rationale of creation itself. Yet it is unique because in it the very being of God is put at risk, and by the way in which it thus is put at risk, we learn, as nowhere else, what it is we say of God when we acclaim him all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.129 123 125

126 129

124 MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 74. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 234. If this is not the case, both the temptations and the agony in Gethsemane are mere charade and the humanity of Jesus suspect. 127 128 Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., pp. 151–52. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., pp. 154–55, emphasis MacKinnon’s. The emphasis also makes it clear that MacKinnon here is referring to human ways of talking about God rooted in the particularities of Jesus’ relation with God and not a supposed definition of God which might be worked up on the basis of logical attribution.

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The cross of Jesus is not on this account a brief, momentary eclipse of God’s sovereign power subsequently rectified by the resurrection but ‘its supreme assertion in the setting of a deeply estranged world, an assertion that discloses its very substance, its arcane ground’.130 All that belongs to Jesus’ mission in that realm of risk and estrangement, his patient obedience, the truncation of effort even to the point of defeat and the vulnerability which reaches its climax in the cross, thus ‘can arguably be interpreted as a painfully realized transcription into the conditions of our existence, of the receptivity, the defined even if frontierless, receptivity that constitutes his person’.131 MacKinnon acknowledged that we can never know what that receptivity is in the hidden depths of the Godhead but yet, as he pointed out, it is the task of a doctrine of the Triune God to suggest concerning its manner.132 What is said here, he cautioned, is always said only by way of analogy with the dependence of Jesus on the Father displayed at each step of his mission. The mission of Jesus thus can be said to disclose not only the identity of his being as the one who is sent by the Father but the involvement in time, the ‘boding forth’, of the reality of the threefold being of God.133 Jesus’ dependence on faith and prayer, especially in the struggle and conflict of his temptation and in the agony of Gethsemane, is the climactic point at which the unity of God in the being of the incarnate One is put at risk, a risk which is ‘as it were projection, a resonance in time and space, of that which in fact is the unfathomable actuality of his presence to, and not just over against, the world he has brought into being, is sustaining, is bringing to fulfilment’.134 Again, characteristically, MacKinnon stressed that the temptations of Jesus disclose a relation of Christ to the Father whose shape is received yet precarious in the depth of its exposure, suggesting that ‘it is by no means incredible that the relationship was presented by Jesus as something he had to affirm at the very outset of his mission against every sort of subtly suggested misconstruction, that he had to wrestle himself in his humanity into the counterpart of that receptivity which was the very substance of his being’.135 If on this basis one can push beyond a nominal construal of the communicatio idiomatum to speak of a divine ordeal, MacKinnon argued that it will be on the basis of the hypostatic union, ‘bringing to unforeseeable, spontaneous completion in unimaginable fullness of self-communication that to which in principle at least a tentative commitment has been made in creation, is indeed made all the while’.136 This claim elicits the cautionary remark that there is simply ‘no logical sleight of hand’ by which to conjure out of the Creator–creature relationship ‘the ultimate 130 134 136

131 132 133 Ibid., p. 155. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 235. 135 Ibid., p. 184. MacKinnon, ‘The Evangelical Imagination’, p. 181. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 185. MacKinnon was careful to disallow any notion of a schism or a conflict within the Godhead in terms of God’s presence to creation (p. 184).

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intimacy of divine self-exposure’.137 It must be said, however, of Jesus of Nazareth and the created order in which his mission is set that God as God is in Godself is constitutive of them both. What is manifested, then, on this account in Jesus’ dependence on the Father through the successive moments of his itinerary from Galilee to Jerusalem is the substantial expression of an eternal receptivity, the realization in human flesh and blood of ‘an ultimate gentleness of receiving and of giving back, even of parting asunder and of accepted estrangement’.138 The emphasis on costliness and risk, on the mission of Jesus as a prolonged human action that has to be worked out step by step and on its term in death on a cross indicates MacKinnon’s insistence that our relationship with God in Christ is not something, as it were, worked out over our heads in eternity. But equally his insistence on the priority of the movement of God to humankind leads him to ask in what this bodying forth of the threefold being of God to the world in the mission of Jesus which kenosis seeks to describe is grounded if that prolonged human action is the action of God. Again at this point MacKinnon plunged into the abstractions of substance ontology as it borders on the logic of relations in order to probe what might be said of an analogy of the persons by which are grounded Christ’s person and work in the perichoretic depths of God’s unutterable love. In negotiating the divergent emphases of East and West on threeness and oneness, MacKinnon, following von Balthasar, signalled by means of two patristic Trinitarian maxims the unity of the operations of God in the economy without sundering their ground in the perichoretic relations of the immanent Trinity, namely omnia opera Dei ad extra sunt opera totius indivisae Trinitatis and missiones sequuntur processiones.139 On this basis MacKinnon argued that the missions of the persons ad extra flow from their inner-Trinitarian processions such that the grounds of the roles quoad nos of the Son and the Holy Spirit are found in their processional relations within the Godhead, relations which are moreover to be identified with the individual persons such that the relation of the Son, for example, can be characterized as his eternal generation from and response to the Father.140 MacKinnon broached here, albeit somewhat tentatively, the paradoxical notion of a subsistent relation, suggesting after de Régnon that the ‘I-ness’ of each of the divine persons might be said to be ‘exhausted’ in the eternal relations of each to the others such that the ‘I-ness’ of the Son, for example, is the relation of Sonship in 137 140

138 139 Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., pp. 156, 182. Ibid., p. 156. Compare Herbert McCabe, ‘The Involvement of God’, New Blackfriars 66 (November 1985), pp. 464–76 (404): ‘The historical mission of Jesus is nothing other than the eternal mission of the Son from the Father; the historical outpouring of the Spirit in virtue of the passion, death and ascension of Jesus is nothing but the eternal outpouring of the Spirit from the Father through the Son. Watching, so to say, the story of Jesus, we are watching the processions of the Trinity’.

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which he stands to the Father.141 So also it can be said of the being of the Holy Spirit that it resides in being ‘co-spired’ by Father and Son, posited in and through their mutual relationship.142 If in this heuristic usage the border between substance and relation is blurred, MacKinnon suggested that to speak of the relation as ‘quasi-substantial’ might be reckoned the kind of novel use of a concept analogous to that which he had already affirmed of the tradition’s developing use of the notion of substance.143 MacKinnon is here attempting analytic description of the notion of the eternal receptivity of the Son, trying to indicate what it might mean in terms of the ‘stretched’ logical notion of a subsistent relation as the ground of an unfettered perichoresis of the persons which yet resists collapsing into tritheism, a dynamic notion of otherness-in-relation in divinis. It allows him to say that at the heart of God’s eternal relatedness manifested in the historical mission of Jesus there is the divine humility of the Creator before the creation, which is not only the ground of the divine omnipotence in creation and redemption but a humility which can be identified with the Son as eternal response to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.144 MacKinnon thus proposed that the concept of kenosis allows for the manner of the pre-existence of Christ to be expressed in terms of the inner-Trinitarian diastasis of Father and Son, his setting of himself ‘over against the Father in the power of the Spirit in as much as in eternity He is self-giving response to an eternal affirmation’.145 Kenosis, conceived as the embracing of a self-limitation which makes space for the other to be and to become, indicates the eternal relationship constitutive of the life of Jesus insofar as it points to the pre-existence of a distinguishable person whose uniqueness, he feared, could be lost from view in the ‘torrential energy’ of God, ‘energy that is at one and the same time expressive of a total spontaneity and absolute mutual response’.146 In the context of the

141

142 143 145

MacKinnon embraced this notion only gradually and tentatively. In 1972 he suggested that to speak of the pre-existence of Christ as the pre-existence of a quasi-substantival relatedness was to make oneself look ridiculous, whereas by 1976 he was prepared more patiently to consider this Augustinian-Thomist theologoumenon in terms of a contemporary ontology of relations. See idem, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 296; and idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 156–57. MacKinnon’s interpretation of Aquinas is indebted here to Théodore de Régnon, Études de Théologie positive sur la Sainte Trinité, vol. 1 (Paris: Retaux, 1892) from which he excerpted a lengthy passage attached to this latter paper (‘The Relations of the Doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity’) as ‘Appendix C’, pp.165–67. Nicholas Lash draws out the fundamental point of the notion in his remark that God is simply the relations which God has. See idem, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles’ Creed (London: SCM Press, 1992), p. 32. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 157. 144 Ibid. Ibid., p. 159. 146 Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., pp. 161–62.

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‘totally uninhibited but triadic aseity’ of God, then, MacKinnon argued that one might ponder the actuality of limit or boundary: It is through this actuality that, for instance, the idiotes of the Son as eternal receptivity is constituted, a receptivity that in the manner of the Incarnate life is expressed in his dependence, realized in the form of his human submission in respect of the hour of his agony and his glorification, and also in the role of the Spirit Who within his history is presented as effective in the order of his coming and going, but Whom he is also enabled to bestow upon his disciples in the setting of his glorification.147 If the analogy of the persons can be completed in this way by an analogy of limit, MacKinnon suggested, the ‘essentially human element of temporality, the sense of inescapable limitation’ which was the experience of Jesus of Nazareth, might be shown to have its ground in the mutuality of the perichoretic depths of the eternal.148 If this can be said, the understanding of time itself will have to be correspondingly stretched, especially in the context of reflection on the resurrection which marks, as MacKinnon put it, ‘the eternization of the life of the Son’.149 But not just that. The resurrection must be understood as that act in time in which ‘there has been accomplished not simply the eternization of a particular biography but the constitution of that biography as the way for the insertion of all human circumstance into the tapestry of the eternal’.150 And this raises questions about the relation of the contemporaneous presence of the resurrected One to the particularities of history and to the constitution of the time order itself. It may be permissible to see in the claim something of the reason for MacKinnon’s reticence in the face of the mystery of the resurrection and his nervousness about accounts of atonement which abstract that humble readiness to have mercy and forgive which is grounded in and expressive of the nature of God too quickly from the all-too-human crisis of the cross. Again the issue has to do with the play on each other of the tragic discontinuities of human life, exposure and risk, uncertainty and doubt, unassuaged suffering, irrevocable loss and death itself and of the even greater continuity of God’s humble self-gift in creative and redemptive love for the world. Even in the dark days of the Second World War he had confessed that if Christians walk by faith and faith finds its focus in Jesus crucified and risen, still it is the case that ‘from God to man, from above downwards, there is continuity. Could we view human affairs sub specie aeternitatis we should see an intelligible pattern in what to us now is discontinuous and awkward. But we are men, seeing the

147

Ibid., p. 162.

148

Ibid.

149

Ibid., p. 187.

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150

Ibid., p. 188.

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discontinuities, sharp and clear, sub specie temporis’.151 Clearly something more must be said about the continuity of God’s creative and redemptive acts in Christ in relation to the context of human experience in which those stark discontinuities of human existence are to all appearances not negated or sublated but stubbornly persist.152 What might it mean for MacKinnon to claim that atonement, objectively conceived, is the ‘extrojection in conditiones humanas of the threefold being of God?’153 As MacKinnon came to see by attending to the way of Jesus Christ from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee, the temporal and the eternal, the parabolic and the paradigmatic, discontinuity and continuity, meet and interpenetrate in him. The concept of kenosis allowed MacKinnon to delineate in terms of this interpenetration the polarity inhumanization–eternization as the ontological ground of the free self-committal of God in overflowing love ad extra in the historical mission which culminated in the cross-resurrection of Jesus. Of the depths of this identification he could speak of the way in which God, in whom there is no perplexity, conflict or schism between such attributes as justice and mercy, in taking our human nature in the Incarnation, lays hold of their conflicted status amid the discontinuities of human finitude, deepening them to the level of Christ’s perfect humanity in which they are held together and consistently lived through.154 Here by these words and deeds, in this love for God and humble service of others, in this life and death, that is, in this person, is atonement made. As MacKinnon summed up this line of thinking: ‘Because God is archetypically and immutably self-limitation, and therefore love, He is able to assume into Himself not only the different limitations involved in creation, but the more sombre vulnerability involved in taking to Himself the substance of human history in Jesus of Nazareth’.155 The dependence of Jesus on the Father, which is nothing other than ‘the realization in temporal history of the ontologically ultimate response-moment in the unity of the Godhead’,156 is the ground of all human dependence on God, the place at 151 152

153 154 155 156

MacKinnon, ‘Problem for Pilgrims’, p. 26. In the face of such perduring ambivalence, the threat of a ‘superficial cosmic optimisim’ which drifts off into ‘remote metaphysical chatter’ on the one hand or collapses into an ‘academically precise pessimism’ on the other must be addressed, as MacKinnon indicates, by a doctrine of the cross-resurrection of Jesus which is grounded in the triune perichoresis of the divine persons. See idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 92, 119. That there is an opening here for elaboration of the cosmic dimension of redemption in Christ is indicated by MacKinnon’s attraction to aspects of the work of C. E. Raven and Teilhard de Chardin by which, he thought, a corrective to a narrow ‘theological parochialism’ might be spelled out which yet does not supplant too readily the discontinuities disclosed in the cross of Christ nor neglect the doctrine of creation. See idem, Themes in Theology, pp. 194, 190. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 158. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 149. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 235. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5, p. 68.

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which ‘we receive from God through Christ’s act the manner in which our relation to him is given form, our dependence schematized for what it is’.157 Of the point of deepest humility in that costly identification with humanity in the cross, MacKinnon affirmed that it is the expression in time of the unconditioned meekness of God towards Godself, the fusion of freedom and receptivity which is God’s inmost being such that ‘in the Crucified we see human nature constrained to express at once God’s receptivity towards Himself and his patience towards his creation, which is the counterpart, in his relation to his creatures, of that eternal receiving’.158 Or, once more, of the culmination of that inhumanization in Jesus of Nazareth of an eternal receptivity and spontaneous mutual response he asserted that ‘on the cross in his self-abandon he revealed himself to men as the Son of God, one who is, in the depths of his being, eternally response to the Father and nothing else’.159 Here, then, is the place where God may be known and where human moral agency, corresponding to that fusion of obedient receptivity and freely creative response which formed his mission, is by its actuality in Christ rendered possible now for us. It is in this deed of crucifixion–resurrection, MacKinnon was prepared to say with Hoskyns, that the promise of Christ rests that ‘we may be assured that nothing is ultimately lost’.160 MacKinnon, it must be pointed out, was at his most laconic about the Holy Spirit, an austerity of which he was acutely aware and which is all the more surprising given his urgent plea for the churches to attend precisely to this doctrine in their search for renewed concrete catholicity.161 It is this reserve which in the end forestalls expansive elaboration of an ecclesiology and sustained attention to the material aspects of the doctrine of sanctification.162 There are, to be sure, somewhat perfunctory references to the Johannine texts which speak of the agency of the Holy Spirit in terms of an ever fuller mediation to the disciples of the things of Christ. This approach is, however, limited by its emphasis on the mission of the Spirit in relation to Christ and the church in broadly epistemological terms, namely that the Spirit now clarifies and brings to fruition the revelation of God to humankind which in the darkness and defeat of the cross, the kenotic 157 158 159 160 161 162

MacKinnon, ‘“Substance” in Christology’, p. 298. See MacKinnon, ‘Prayer, Worship, and Life’, p. 254. MacKinnon, ‘The Resurrection: A Meditation’, in The Resurrection, p. 67. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 203. See, for instance, ibid., p. 154. The dominance of the doctrine of justification and sacramental practice is responsible here and has to do with MacKinnon’s anxiety about ecclesiological triumphalism. Joseph Mangina’s comment on this problem is instructive: ‘The best check on triumphalism is simply the discerning application of the doctrine of justification, the critical principle that directs us back to Jesus as the very “point” of pneumatology.’ Joseph L. Mangina, ‘Bearing the Marks of Jesus: The Church in the Economy of Salvation in Barth and Hauerwas’, Scottish Journal of Theology 52, no. 3 (1999), pp. 269–305 (303).

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submission to human limit which marked the Incarnation of the Word, was left incomplete and suffused with ambiguity. Yet it is not entirely restricted to epistemology. MacKinnon, with the Johannine farewell discourse in view, identified the Holy Spirit as the divine agent who will enable the followers of Christ to do even greater things than he. Further, MacKinnon linked the Holy Spirit to that act by which in the resurrection Christ was released from the relativities of his own particularity and universalized in the variegated experience of the baptized. However, as his reticence in these matters underscores, he was nervous about interpretations of the Spirit’s role in Christian existence which might be annexed to an idealist anthropology and hence reminded his readers that if the context of faith is the abiding presence of the risen Christ to his own, there is yet ‘a great gulf between life as Christ lived it in Galilee and Judea, and life as he now enjoys it’.163 As we have already seen, MacKinnon insisted that Jesus’ risen life is to be thought by analogy with the paradigm outlined along that way by which the one whom the Spirit has liberated from the dead is identified. Yet there is a limit to the creativity of faith ‘if we suppose that the ground of Christ’s coming is to be found in the work that he did, that indeed it is from that work that we may least imperfectly approach both the secret of the manner of his coming, and indeed of the One who comes’.164 One might then, perhaps, have looked for development of a doctrine of the Spirit in relation to the church as the means by which the followers of Jesus are secured in the saving and transformative polarity of crucifixion–resurrection and therein conformed to Jesus Christ. We have seen, however, that MacKinnon’s preponderant stress on objectivity led him to limit exposition of this aspect of authentic ecclesial existence within the context of word and sacrament, particularly in his linking of adoptive sonship by which Christians are caught up into fellowship with the Triune God to the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Where pneumatological speech might have been expected in the context of sacramental inwardness in relation to faith by which the Holy Spirit forms the believer in Christ, MacKinnon’s preference was to refer that interiority to the contemporaneous presence of the risen Christ through his own self-gift.165 The kenotic ontology in which the real relatedness of the church to God and by which its security is alone constituted remains in the foreground while MacKinnon left the doctrine of the Holy Spirit hidden and unarticulated. A kenotic church thus depends on Jesus Christ whose essence is his dependence on the Father. It is above all in the Eucharist, understood as the sacramental locus of word and sacrament in worship, that the church rests on the objectivity of Christ’s atonement and is rooted in a dependence which 163 165

164 MacKinnon, ‘Does Faith Create Its Own Objects?’, p. 451. Ibid. But see idem, ‘Intellect and Imagination’, p. 31, for the barest of hints that faith is not merely a question of sense or imagination (in Kantian terms) but the gift of the Holy Spirit.

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is expressive of and constituted by God’s eternal relatedness. It is crucial to underscore again MacKinnon’s recognition that all that is included in the history of sin in which the church by its own unfaithfulness is implicated is reconciled and healed insofar as it is drawn down in the locus of the sacraments into the real relatedness of the Triune God revealed in the cross-resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus, ecclesial and individual dependence is grounded in the intrinsic being of God as self-diffusive love, a love not turned in on itself but freely open outwards in ever-widening, ever-deepening bonds of communion. As MacKinnon liked to reiterate with characteristic evangelical penetration, ‘God so loved that he gave’.166 To this end he affirmed that we depend on God’s self-gift outwards for our very dependence. But such dependence is no infantalizing passivity by which the faithful cling to guarantees of security from uncertainty and doubt and immunity from tragedy and loss, but the very ground of human moral agency, our participation in Christ in the moral order founded on his self-gift to the Father and to humankind. Yet what put this way might seem to be but the offer of a tiresome affliction marked only by precariousness and risk is not in MacKinnon’s account without its proper joyful and confident hope. At the heart of a kenotic church the cross–resurrection of Jesus is the ground and expression of that koinonia in which God lays hold of all our doubts and unassuaged suffering, tragedy and loss drawing them in Christ into the creative and redemptive love which is God’s triune being. The notion of exchange necessary to any adequate theory of atonement is in MacKinnon’s handling rooted in the reciprocal depths of receptivity and response in the intradivine reality of God disclosed in the Incarnation. Its ecclesial expression in the communion of saints, by which MacKinnon meant the transformative sharing of human life in moments of both doubt and faith, is grounded in the triadic perichoresis of God,167the ultimate koinonia into which in Christ the faithful are caught up and held by the power of the Holy Spirit, the bond of love between Father and Son.168 The church therefore manifests in its own being and actions a corresponding receptivity and response which opens in love and service towards God’s world, an openness which for all its dependence is yet parabolic (hence interruptive and disturbing in its impact) to the world of that prior paradigmatic reality of free self-gift which lays hold of the discontinuities of life, even of that stripping off of the church’s ‘institutional carapace’ in its contemporary crisis in so many places,169 and redeems them within the abiding continuity of God’s steadfast love. If the Triune God ad intra is love dynamically shared ad extra in the exposed 166

167 168 169

MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p.83; and idem, The Church of God, pp. 20–21. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, p. 79. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True, p. 78. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology, p. 160.

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life of the ultimate, selfless humility of the Crucified, a church grounded in and expressive in its own life of the triune koinonia ‘must seek to redefine its moyen d’être, and in consequence [be] made receptive of its raison d’être as the embodiment of Christ’s sheerly precarious existence, in the new freedom of its post-Constantinian age’.170 In each particular circumstance of that ‘sheerly precarious existence’ the church can only rest hopefully in the promise and demand that its response to God and to the world and its ordering of its own redeemed relationships be faithfully rearticulated ‘in accord with Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 15.5), that is, in forms whose materiality is always governed by the way of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee. The extension of the concept of kenosis to the doctrine of the Church was to MacKinnon’s mind a means by which that reconstruction of a unified Christian ecclesial self-understanding and practice might be repeatedly carried out in hopeful faith.

170

Ibid.

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In a time of ecclesial and societal crisis it is imperative that Christians seek clarification regarding the identity of the church. When, however, the demand for renewed ecclesiological understanding serves only to thrust into the foreground a wide-ranging series of anxious discontents, it can only be concluded that the church suffers under the effects of a profound failure of the theological imagination. That failure is manifested by the pervasive sense that much of the church’s traditional discourse about its nature and activity now seems patently unreal in the contemporary climate of crisis occasioned by the fragility and incoherence of the church’s ethos. In other words, so many ecclesiologies provide accounts of ecclesial identity which apparently have no home. In the Church of England during the mid-to-late twentieth century, as we have shown, there emerged substantial agreement among a number of its theologians that the crisis can be attributed to a large extent to a widening gap between belief and practice occasioned by the displacement of doctrine, the evasion of theology to the point of ecclesial inarticulateness, the challenge to authority and the erosion of discipline. The usual optimistic appeals to comprehensiveness may in fact reflect a modus vivendi which masks considerable complacency, a desire to keep the peace where there is no peace. This state of affairs has rendered confident Anglican assertions of ecclesial identity suspect and compels recognition of the substantial ambiguity which even now attaches to church doctrines and practices. The prevalence of ecclesiological discontent in the Church of England and in the differentiated traditions which constitute it renders the service of pointing up the problem of how the church might begin again to become what as a community reconciled in Christ it really already is. Yet if avoidance of this situation conduces to a great deal of make-believe in ecclesiological discourse, to concentrate on the crisis or dwell on the discontents brings with it the perils of an ecclesiological self-preoccupation. What may well be occluded in this self-preoccupation is the primary fact of any truly catholic ecclesiology, namely that the church is a people who by the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth in the power of the Holy Spirit have been reconciled to God and who now live their lives in the world in and as the company of followers of the way of Jesus Christ. Our account of one particular strand in the theological thought of Donald MacKinnon has laid emphasis on his persistent attempts to refocus both ecclesial performance and ecclesiological reflection within the all-embracing 206

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context of the mysterium Christi. In thus setting out the trajectory of his thought concerning the church we have described in effect a rather bracing essay in ecclesiological reorientation undertaken from the borderlands of a Church of England in crisis and at the heart of a particular tradition within it upon which MacKinnon saw clearly the signs of mortality. The task which he set himself was construction of an ecclesial ontology which furnishes an account of the transcendent origin and nature of the church without seeking refuge from ‘the empirical discipline of the actual’ which must come to grips with the perduring discontinuities of the life of faith. We have argued that the always intensifying trajectory of his thought moves both from and towards the cross-resurrection of Jesus, proceeding from that context in two directions, the one theocentric and the other through the church towards the world. It asks what we must say about the living God if Jesus Christ lived and died in such a manner that his way from life to death to new life can truthfully be believed as God’s reconciling of the world to Godself. At the same time it also asks how a unified ecclesial thought and practice might be reconstituted in order that the church might bear witness to, even as it participates in, that reconciliation to the world in which it is placed and to which it has been sent. All of these facets of MacKinnon’s theological thought are marked by the conviction that the way of the cross submits the disciples of Jesus to an ascetic discipline in which the first step is always along the negative way. Only then in the light of the resurrection and the knowledge of God it makes possible can one, however haltingly, edge along the way of eminence towards positive theological elaboration. What is of utmost importance, however, is the repetitive movement of his thought towards the ‘heart of the matter’ in the culmination of the mission of Jesus wherein is revealed and effected the costly movement of God to humankind and of humankind to God. In this light, MacKinnon’s critical ecclesiological proposal is to be construed in its totality as a work of evangelical penetration ordered to theological and church renewal. Given MacKinnon’s insistence that theology cannot be undertaken apart from due consideration of the ecclesial and worldly contexts in which it is carried out, we have drawn attention to the significance for MacKinnon’s theology of the highly complex location in which it was produced. MacKinnon’s charge that so much energy in the Church of England of his time was channelled into a kind of ‘church defence’ which insisted upon external institutional features often at the expense of the on-going critical reception of church doctrine led us first to assess the validity of his complaint by turning to other contemporary analyses of this problematic and to conclude that ecclesiological reconstruction in that church is hampered by the displacement of church doctrine and the ecclesial articulation of its theology. MacKinnon’s response was to bring ecclesiology under a rigorous Christological discipline rooted in the heart of Anglo-Catholic tradition and yet open to impulses towards a catholic doctrine of the church from diverse 207

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quarters. Thus, on the one hand, his own theological proposals are firmly entrenched in the liturgical setting of the church’s worship, the locus in which the word is proclaimed and the sacraments are administered, whose priority over all theological explications he consistently defended. On the other, his work takes with extraordinary seriousness the secular discourse of unbelief and its rejection of church doctrine and practice. It canvasses rather massive yet diverse theological traditions, probing the ecclesiological legacy of Christendom Group Thomists and of Barth, as well as those who attempted to argue against or mediate between them. It produces a dialogical theology which can be at times expressionistically declamatory or knottedly self-questioning to the point of obscurity. Indeed, many of the rhetorical strategies he adopted readily echo his description of Kierkegaard’s exemplification of a Theologie des Korrektivs, especially the dialectical destabilizing of bids for historicist legitimations of Christian faith, the spiral pattern of the arguments, the putting of a question mark against the doctrines of others in place of positive doctrinal construction, the advertisement of incompleteness and prolegomenal status which hinder adequate summary let alone cogent criticism and the supplanting of the general thesis in favour of particular descriptions.1 Moreover, these same theological styles point up the fact that MacKinnon’s work was intended as a self-involving corrective in the face of the failure of theological imagination which greeted him on all sides in the Church of England and in his own tradition within it. In this sense it exhibited an intense concern for the lived practice of the church, its doctrinal traditions and moral conduct and for the world in which the church is set. This emphasis on the public dimension of ecclesial faith is crucial. If both concern and corrective emanated from and focused upon a particular church, its wide-ranging dialogical character shows that it was in no sense parochial but always intent on and directed to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church in its manifold local expression. This study has brought together MacKinnon’s ecclesiological discontents with his corrective proposal for ecclesial renewal in the form of an authentic fidelity in thought and practice to Jesus Christ. The preponderance of the negative in his account enshrines his refusal to evade the actual condition of the church by flight into theory or heavily idealized accounts of practice. There is here an unblinking empiricism which lays bare in the face of much grand talk about the church the weakened condition in which it exists. Yet in this substantially chastened account of the church there is not just the unsparing exposure of ecclesial sin and failure but also, in the form of his corrective, the equally relentless spelling out of the grounds of church renewal in terms of the gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection whose 1

For MacKinnon’s comments on the resourcefulness of Kierkegaard’s works, particularly his Training in Christianity, as a ‘corrective’ in just this way, see idem, Borderlands of Theology, pp. 123–35, 137; and idem, Themes in Theology, p. 176.

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benefits are mediated by word and sacrament and received by faith. If the church must speak about itself, MacKinnon urged that it speak of itself first in the context of the reality of its own brokenness and the healing grace which comes to it as gift again and again in the sacramental fellowship of the Eucharist. To this end his corrective is focused first of all on the AngloCatholic tradition within which he worshipped and worked. That tradition laid great emphasis, in concert with an important strand of twentieth-century Catholic ecclesiology, on the identity of the church as ‘extension of the incarnation’. Liberal Anglo-Catholicism in this period had essayed two kinds of prescriptive elaboration of this identity marker which in different ways encouraged hegemonic aspirations and thus, as we have shown, came under intense scrutiny in MacKinnon’s work. First was a line of thought which MacKinnon depicted as tending towards an ecclesiological fundamentalism in the shape of an unbending, authoritarian positing of external form legitimated by appeal to historicist arguments and a Platonist metaphysics. Second was that tradition of Anglo-Catholic modernism which argued in defence of the same external forms on the grounds that they were to be received as prophetic, symbolic sedimentations arising from and yet also constitutive of inner experience. MacKinnon viewed these overdetermined ecclesiologies as self-defeating on the grounds that both accounts secured the core doctrines of Christian faith as functions of ecclesiology in ways which masked the ambiguity and infidelity of church belief and practice by collapse into either a rigid historicism cloaked in the triumphalist mantle of the providential or a voluntarist anthropology marked by the disjunction of fact from value. MacKinnon saw both ecclesiologies as contributing to the public disappearance of the church, the one through retreat into an intransigent, albeit utopic, ‘catholic sectarianism’ and the other by vanishing into a relativist interiority in which faith creates its own objects. The overall force of his corrective marks a shift from the well-worn arguments over essentialist constructions of ecclesiology, whether in terms of sacramental validity, apostolicity of orders and the historic episcopate, to concern for the dynamic fidelity of the church to the way of Jesus Christ from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee. His challenge to the church to embrace the status viatoris of its normative horizon in the gospel cuts across these accounts of ecclesiological plerosis (the status comprehensoris of premature, ahistorical ecclesial totalizations). For the church to follow Jesus Christ along the way of the cross, MacKinnon insisted, it must eschew the security of guarantees, external or inward, for the risk and provisionality of creative and contingent faithfulness to God in the world. The hermeneutic device which MacKinnon deployed to underscore the gulf between the life of the Incarnate One and the actuality of the church which claimed to be the extension of that life was the topos of ‘Constantianism’, namely the various forms of establishment to which the church was prepared to cling in its quest for peace and security, whether 209

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an authoritarian insistence on those oppressive certainties whereby God is enlisted as the instrument of ecclesial interests or the impulse by which faith is harnessed to bless and to serve a preferred social and political order even to the point of collusion with totalitarian agents of violence in order to secure guarantees for its own life. Clearly something in its belief and performance has gone quite wrong if a church which is said to be the extension of the Incarnation could ever pin its hope on such notions as that of ‘a war to make the world safe for Christianity’.2 The criticism of this aspect of the public face of the church serves to destabilize Anglo-Catholicism’s self-confident, triumphalist accounts of the nature of the church. It is entirely to MacKinnon’s credit that he brings into sharp focus a problem skirted by far too many Anglican writers on the church, namely that for all their capacity to enable the baptized to know and to act, the ecclesial traditions and practices which they inhabit are neither self-regulating nor self-sustaining and, as MacKinnon repeatedly underscored, to pretend otherwise was to evade the conflict-laden actuality of the church by flight into abstraction. Christian ecclesial traditions suffer distortion through inattentiveness to that which they articulate and embody. MacKinnon construed the role of theology to refocus such attentiveness in order to facilitate the renewing of the traditions and hence of the lived reality of the church in the form of a unified thought and practice. The traditioned life of the church must always be opened up again and again to the source of convertedness in the gospel from which it has sprung. In other words, MacKinnon exhibits a consistent attempt to draw the boundaries of ecclesial identity from within in relation to the ever fecund, unconditional grace of the gospel as heard in the proclamation of the word and appropriated in the ministry of the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. His insistence on the objective character of word and sacraments surely conveys the assurance that where God so acts in self-gift, there will be the church. By contrast with an Anglo-Catholic doctrine which emphasized continuity with a church ‘behind’ us or a church ‘within’ us in such a way as to highlight the cumulative nature of ecclesial tradition (ecclesia consummatrix), MacKinnon resituated ecclesiology within the context brought to effect by the gospel, a context within which the corrigibility of that same tradition in relation to a dialectic between continuity and discontinuity, the already given and that which is yet to be received, the finding and the fashioning, must always be reckoned with.3 An ecclesiology whose ‘first 2

3

For use of this slogan, early and late, see MacKinnon, ‘Revelation and Social Justice’, p. 98; and idem, Themes in Theology, p. 104. MacKinnon’s approach must be distinguished from those ecclesiological correctives criticized by Cornelius Ernst which are rooted in an appeal for evangelical simplicity and thereby advance an ahistorical programme of ecclesial reform by appeal to an

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value’ is the Christian life and being a disciple will focus its task on rendering an account of how the church ought to live in relation to Jesus Christ. Authentic Christian ecclesial existence is to be judged by its transparency to its source and goal in the work and person of Jesus Christ in whom alone finality is to be found. As he put it in one lapidary formulation, the church must be conceived as standing under the sovereignty of God in Christ such that theological renewal is enjoined upon it by a Christological vision at once theoretical and practical which enables it to find forms of ecclesial life ‘less inadequately expressive’ of the mystery entrusted to its care.4 What we have called MacKinnon’s journey of intensification along the way of Jesus Christ is the enactment of a dialectical approach to ecclesial existence under the impetus of the gospel, an intention not so much to inform as to form and reform by putting the life of faith in all its dimensions repeatedly in critical relation with its generative and transformative source. He repeatedly insisted that apart from Jesus Christ crucified and risen ‘there is no focusing of the diverse stuff of human history upon a centre and no return of man to God as the source and end of his own existence’.5 If church doctrine and practices are to be renewed in terms of the gospel, they must come under the authority of an action which has been decisively accomplished and which discloses the truth about humankind, about the created order which they inhabit, and about God. The trajectory of MacKinnon’s ecclesiological thought traces what may be said about the church in relation to that decisive act of God by which the church has been constituted and reconstituted, namely the cross-resurrection of Jesus Christ. It proceeds first to distinguish Jesus Christ from the church so that the depths of the mystery of their relation, a relation which generates and regenerates it, can begin to be glimpsed across this distantiation. It emphasizes in this regard the transitivity of faith and the way in which word, sacraments, doctrine and mission rivet faith to its determinate object. Along this way MacKinnon’s concern is always epistemological but in a way which refuses to bracket ontology and moral practice. This trajectory locates ecclesial self-understanding within a thematization of the salvific economy of God’s act in cross and resurrection from which the church springs as a community of reconciliation. It insists first on an account that takes seriously the problem of metaphysics and thus attempts description of the works and identity of Jesus of Nazareth

4 5

idealization of New Testament church orders as a pre-given standard. See idem, ‘The Necessity of the Church in the Context of Non-Christian Religions’, in Multiple Echo: Explorations in Theology/Cornelius Ernst (ed. Fergus Kerr and Timothy Radcliffe; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), p. 215. The ‘visionary awareness of transcendence’ (Ernst) at the heart of the calling and vocation of empirical groups of believers in MacKinnon’s handling always arises from attentiveness to the way of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee. MacKinnon, ‘Christology and Protest’, p. 184. MacKinnon, ‘The Tomb Was Empty’, p. 12.

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as the one in whom the transcendent and the familiar, the divine and the human co-inhere. That thematization leads inexorably towards exploration of the divine reality which grounds its actuality and thereby renders ecclesial response possible. That is, if God’s being can only be glimpsed on the basis of God’s acts, Christian ecclesial theory and practice must follow in correspondence with that ordering. In other words, ecclesiology must be governed by theology understood primarily as an elucidation of the gospel which seeks to lay bare the identity of its subject as way, truth and life. MacKinnon consistently unpacked this recognition by arguing for a unity of ecclesial belief and practice as determined by a Christological grammar which directed attention to the epistemological, moral and ontological dimensions of ecclesial faith. His claim was that the church must repeatedly be reimagined and re-enacted in conformity to the gospel of cross-resurrection, that is, in faithful response to what was disclosed and brought to effect along the way of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee. But to begin with the gospel is to begin also with hearers of the gospel, those to whom Jesus Christ comes and who respond in faith to his self-gift by following him and bearing witness in and for the sake of the world. The purpose of differentiating Jesus Christ from the church, the head from the body, by description and redescription of his work and person is to point towards the mystery of the depths of their real relatedness within the triune relationality of God. MacKinnon’s earliest forays into ecclesiology involved a negotiation of issues which confronted him in his involvement in the Christendom Group. Initially attracted to a doctrine of the church thematized in terms of the Corpus Christi Mysticum theology, MacKinnon became suspicious of the degree to which this model reflected a far-too-realized eschatology which merged the church into Christ and thus displaced it towards its transcendent horizon and away from engagement with the world in which it was placed. He came to see that the rather static ontological framework in which it was structured tended to sublate the discontinuity of the cross in metaphysics. One result is that the New Testament emphasis on the interruptive character of the reign of God is muted by emphasis on the supposedly necessary continuities of development. In the early years of the Second World War he began to shape an ecclesiology receptive to an Anglo-Catholic mediation of Luther’s theology of the cross and to the early work of Barth reinforced by the thought of P. T. Forsyth. This ferment refocused emphasis on the disruptive impact of the work of the cross and brought the church’s relation to Christ and the world under the purview of the gospel of his death and resurrection. In this development MacKinnon began to lay emphasis on the active, sovereign presence of Christ in his church, construing scripture, doctrine, sacraments and office as the means of attestation of that presence. At the same time, he pressed beyond their instrumental identity to signal their ontological ground in the fellowship of the persons of the Triune God. If the 212

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church is aptly confessed as ‘extension of the Incarnation’, one implication of MacKinnon’s early ecclesiology is that the meaning of that claim will be found not in a metaphysical abstraction in which the church resides in detached tranquillity above the fray but in construing the lived reality of the church in relation to the way of Jesus to the cross, a way which situates the church firmly within the contingencies of the world. There in the disruption of Christ’s judging and forgiving presence the church as it is caught up in worship into the reality of the Triune God is again and again reconstituted and redirected in mission to the world. The ecclesial heart of the matter in this account is the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist in which believers are made sons and daughters in the Son, becoming by adoption and grace what he alone is by nature. One might sum up MacKinnon’s achievement to this point by saying that by such a dialectical account he is able to argue for the intimate ontological relation of the church to its sovereign head, Jesus Christ, while yet refusing to hide from view how far short of conformity to his example the church falls in its relations among its members and with the world. In a sense he unburdens the church by relinquishing the transcendental emphasis on the church’s participation in the paschal mystery as the condition for the possibility of the reintegration of society by placing greater emphasis on that goal as God’s act to which ecclesial response in witness and humble service is freely offered. These strategies of differentiation and identification by which MacKinnon explored the relationship of Jesus Christ to the church increasingly came to focus on a relation of identity-in-difference, shifting in the early period from a static, transcendent ontological approach to a gospel-normed dynamic account, from emphasis on the mystical body to conception of the church in terms of the body of Christ’s disciples who are on the way. They led him to set aside any ecclesiology that attempted to fix the relation externally in terms of the givenness of prescribed forms as the concrete embodiment of immutable ecclesial principles or which capitulated to the turn to the subject, finding ecclesial streams of life to be but the creative projection of inner spiritual experience. MacKinnon intended by this no denigration of the institutional structures of the church as elaborated in Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology which at this stage he construed positively in their indispensable dual capacity as response and witness to the gospel. Nor did he prescind from the experience of faith. In this shift, however, MacKinnon’s bid to destabilize the self-confident, triumphalist rhetoric of that ecclesiology and of the theory of selfhood on which it was based is already plainly evident. The sharp intensification of this direction came in the midst of the institutional crisis in Western societies in the 1960s in which MacKinnon consolidated his ecclesiological thinking by proposing the extension of the concept of kenosis to the doctrine of the church. The result was a thoroughgoing Christological concentration which again moved from soteriological concerns to exploration of the doctrine of the Incarnation and of the Triune 213

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God. What can be known about the church and its identity are tied by means of MacKinnon’s insistence on a pervasive Christological-Trinitarian grammar to the way of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee. Since his explorations of these latter themes are advertised as strictly prolegomenal, the corresponding effect of this move leads to considerable austerity or formalism in his treatment of the church. MacKinnon’s prolegomenal ecclesiology arises from faith in the contemporaneous presence of the risen Christ to his church, pressing upon it in all spheres of its life-setting the question of his identity, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Ecclesial response is to be guided by the apostolic imperative, ‘Look to Jesus; consider him’, by which attentiveness is directed away from its forms of experiential or historical mediation to their source, a source which transcends and yet can be known only in relation to the narrative of his sayings and deeds and what befell him as attested in the gospels and already confessed in the doctrines of the church. Fundamental here is MacKinnon’s claim that church doctrine and practice must correspond to what was revealed and effected along the way of Jesus from life to death to new life. This itinerary ‘posits the context’ for ecclesial life and renewal even as it is itself posited by the Incarnation. In his mature work, MacKinnon came to insist that only elaboration of the concept of kenosis and its extension to the church could adequately tie together the economy of salvation with the immanent reality of God and with the being and mission of the church in the world. In this work the ‘Constantinian’ device is still present heuristically, but the life of Jesus as narrated in the gospel framework of a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem or towards an approaching ‘hour’ is decisively identified as the setting to which the church must look to understand its own being and mission. In other words, its being and mission are received from and depend upon the being and mission of Jesus, themselves expressive of the being and movement of God to the world and back to God. Receptivity, dependence and correspondence are the key terms which MacKinnon elaborates in his reconstruction of the ecclesial context of word and sacrament grounded in the all-embracing context of Christ’s words and deeds, which themselves are grounded in and disclosive of the triadic perichoresis of God. In elucidation of this claim MacKinnon deployed two sets of tools. Its intelligibility and communicability, in reaction to the monist metaphysics so influential in Anglo-Catholicism, was tested by use of a set of arguments in epistemology, the logic of relations and substance ontology to develop a descriptive metaphysics in which the transitivity of faith, the notion of correspondence and the concrete particular come together in a ‘realist’ community of orientation for thought and practice. This philosophical task was directed to critical ends as well as to a kind of ad hoc apologetics. The fruit of this work was the radical unsettling of the metaphysical foundations of Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology by descriptions of ecclesial practice under the notion of conformity to Christ by which by appeal to particular embodiments he reshaped 214

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the notions of apostolicity and catholicity, underscoring their kenotic aspect as self-abandonment in humble service to and welcome acceptance of others in Christ. By re-construing all aspects of ecclesial life along the way from Galilee to Jerusalem MacKinnon linked the precariousness and exposure of this setting to a new openness and availability to the world of a church which lives in conformity to the way of Jesus. At the same time he began to explore in depth the way in which the church’s life in that very context can be said to be ultimately in the hands of God. The philosophical work is directed not to construction of a theory of realism but primarily to an elucidation of soteriological, Incarnational and Trinitarian doctrine in terms of what was revealed and brought to effect along the way from Galilee to Jerusalem. This intensifying performance is governed by a kenotic rule which exacts authentic fidelity to ‘laws of existence in dependence on the one whose essence lay in his dependence on the Father’. In order to understand what it might mean to insist upon the extension of the concept of kenosis to ecclesiology an analysis was undertaken of MacKinnon’s reconstruction of that concept in terms of his consistent emphasis on a soteriology which demands an incarnational basis and on a Christological concentration which is ultimately theocentric. The kenotic ecclesial context sited in the Eucharist is generated from and depends upon the cross-resurrection of Jesus which expresses the incarnational polarity of inhumanization–eternization, itself made actual by the procession of the Son in the intradivine relations which constitute the Godhead. The concept of kenosis holds together an account of this relational–ontological context which proceeds neither from below nor from above but in terms of a life in which the transcendent and the temporal, the human and the divine, interpenetrate. MacKinnon fastened on the oscillation in the gospel accounts of the work and person of Jesus between strangeness and ordinariness, humble obedience and confident demand, as indicators of a context in which recognition of a thrust beyond the limits of finitude meets the peremptory intrusiveness of the transcendent in the determination of his life. Thus on the one hand MacKinnon probed what might be said of the thrust towards the transcendent in the parabolic dimension of Jesus’ mission, balancing that direction by elucidation of that life as also paradigmatic of the reality of God. Within this polarity he locates the tensive relation between the discontinuity or interruptive character of grace in human experience and the all-embracing continuity of the love of the Triune God in creation and redemption revealed and effected in the cross-resurrection of Jesus, the locus of divine judgement through confrontation with the truth and of divine mercy in forgiveness and sending out in mission. Jesus Christ is not only truth, but way and life, and MacKinnon argued that the content of this evangelical assertion must be filled out in terms descriptive of his mission. While he did not repudiate the rich development of soteriological themes and idioms in scripture and tradition, he cautioned against the kinds of 215

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ideological distortions they may undergo when abstracted from the way of the cross, the most pervasive of which to his mind was the denial of the tragic dimension of Christian existence, whether in the stubborn refusal of the baptized to accept one another in the bonds of Eucharistic fellowship or to inhabit redeemed relationships in which people are treated humanly, or in other experiences of irreparable harm or irrevocable loss and, above all, undeserved suffering. In ecclesiological terms, MacKinnon’s emphasis on the tragic dimension exposes the false collectivism, the idealist evasion of the rupture of koinonia, which bypasses the cross. His emphasis on the ecclesial followability of Jesus Christ underscores the existence of a church exposed to risk, suffering and loss while at the same time arguing that if its attempts to realize its own guarantees are conducive to failure and to eclipse of the gospel, the resurrection of the Crucified One reveals that ultimately its life, insofar as it is in Christ, is hid in the depths of the triune relations. The effect of this argument was a reversal of the direction of the notion of ‘extension’ by stressing the dependence of the church on the work and being of Jesus and depicting its existence as a unity of thought and practice in faithful correspondence to his way. Under the notion of a dependence which yet liberates and renders ecclesial response possible, the church is conceived as both factum in Christ, and on that ground, faciendum in and through the ministry and mission of its members through the gift of the Holy Spirit by whom growth into and conformity with the way of Christ is formed and nurtured. The unifying concept which holds the ontology and the moral asceticism together is kenosis by which MacKinnon is able to ground and centre the ecclesiological context on the soteriological action and incarnational being of Jesus Christ whose essence is formulated as dependence on the Father. The Christocentric thrust of this kenotic grammar is boundarytranscending in both ecclesial and theological directions. What results is a description of the ecclesiological context in terms of the polarity rooted in the triune being of God of a missional impulse ad extra and a gravitational pull ad intra culminating in the cross-resurrection of Jesus who as the Incarnate One is the very inhumanization of God and eternization of the human. The life of the church is governed by the polarity of that context. As MacKinnon put it, in the context of worship God lays hold of human lives incorporated in Christ, in all their conflicted particularity and tragic incompleteness, and redeems them by drawing them within the embrace of God’s love. At the same time, God’s love impels the church towards the world in prophetic witness and service and in revolt against all that would curtail the saving reach of that love. If, as Rowan Williams claims, the theologian’s task is ‘to keep the Church attentive to the judgement it faces and the mission committed to it’,6 6

Rowan Williams, ‘The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma’, p. 91.

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MacKinnon’s journey of intensification, his work of evangelical penetration, in all its purposive one-sidedness and incompleteness may be interpreted as ordered to the primacy of that task. Ecclesiology as a properly theological task has its role to play in the elucidation of the gospel. His urgent delineation under the impulse of a Christological grammar of a church absolutely dependent on Jesus Christ and determined by conformity to his way locates its security in the one who himself embodies God’s boundary-transcending movement to humankind in judgement and mercy. In order to see itself clearly the church is counselled to look to Jesus. One implication of this reorientation of the ecclesiological context is that the directive ecclesia reformata sed semper reformanda is relocated at the very heart of a catholic doctrine of the church since, strictly speaking, a journey of intensification towards the cross-resurrection of Jesus cannot be concluded given that its starting point is also its transcendent goal. The unfathomable richness of that source and goal in which the divine and the human, the transcendent and the familiar, interpenetrate commands renewed essays in description and redescription of the mystery. Under its impulse, the stress on the mobility of the church in via requires a corresponding deployment of its scriptures, sacraments and doctrines at the frontiers of the church and the world in exposure to a diverse range of conversations and to the questioning of a wide variety of intellectual, moral and spiritual concerns. In this sense MacKinnon pointed to the permeability of the church’s boundary with the world with the same insistence with which he localized its centre in Jesus Christ, not in an attempt to secularize Christian faith and practice but to further the mission of the gospel through its encounter with the world which God loves. It was characteristic of him to note that the gospel itinerary from Galilee to Jerusalem took Jesus for the most part through non-religious territory, but also to point out that there is no place where the church finds God more present and active in redeeming the world than along that very way. What keeps this theological reorientation of the ecclesiological context from drifting off into mere ideality or a totalizing positivist metaphysics which sponsors evasion of the world and immunity to its violence and unbelief is MacKinnon’s fundamental conviction that authentic ecclesial existence only and always lives from the constitutive and transformative discontinuity of the cross-resurrection of Jesus – ‘non Deus revivificat, nisi per occidendum’, as he once framed the matter in overtly Lutheran fashion.7 In this saving context Christian speech about God, church and world is both generated and subjected to correction, that is, to conversion. From it authentic discipleship in apostolic imitation of Jesus Christ’s mission and catholic acceptance in redeemed relationship takes shape as a lived reality grounded, judged and renewed in worship and shared missional practices worked out step by step in faithfulness to God’s call amid the risk and exposure of following Jesus in the world. That 7

MacKinnon, ‘Aspects of Kant’s Influence on British Theology’, p. 352.

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the church is constituted by the interruptive yet healing way of the cross in which the precariousness of the life of faith is enfolded and recollected in the divine faithfulness which brought again Jesus Christ from the dead is the source of that patient hope which prevents his church from succumbing to optimism or pessimism in the face of its pervasive discontents.

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index

Abbott, E. S. 15n. 6, 23n. 41, 31n. 76, 82n. 231 Adolfs, Robert 89, 90n. 27, 97n. 64 Allison, S. F. 23n. 41 analogia Christi 68, 100 analogia entis 68 Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission 26n. 56, 28n. 62 Anknüpfungspunkt 153 Anselm 138 apologetics 37–8, 40, 48, 53, 64–5, 69, 81, 84, 95, 96, 97n. 64, 98n. 67, 116, 132, 214 aporia 107, 181, 187, 188 apostolicity 2, 5, 23n. 44, 29, 33, 47, 55, 66, 93–5, 117, 124, 126, 154, 169, 180, 208, 209, 214, 215, 217 reconstruction of 117–20 Aristotle 101, 106–7, 108, 109 assent 18, 21, 22, 28, 42 atomicity 106n. 110, 108–9 atonement 68n. 163, 139, 140, 194, 200–1, 203–4 moral vision of 151–68, 172 Aulén, Gustaf 152 Austin, J. L. 49n. 22 authenticity 13n. 1, 29, 41n. 132, 50, 93, 94, 99, 116, 124, 128, 130, 134n. 26, 160–2, 166, 193n. 112, 195, 203, 211, 217 and fidelity 10, 117–20, 126, 127, 129, 167, 169, 208, 215 authority 3, 11, 15, 17–19, 21, 22, 27–9, 32, 63, 72, 78n. 211, 80n. 220, 87,

89, 90, 92, 94, 115, 126, 138, 144, 182, 184n. 69, 206, 209, 211 of objectivity 100, 108, 109, 111 triumphal 124 universal 166 autonomy 42, 75, 99, 101, 110, 111, 113 Avis, Paul 14n. 2, 15, 17n. 18, 20, 25, 26n. 56, 28, 29, 30–1, 34n. 88, 35, 48n. 18 Anglicanism and the Christian Church 33 Ayer, A. J. 49n. 22 Baillie, John 54n. 49 Baker, John Austin 5 baptism 33–4, 55–6, 62, 63, 71n. 171 and Eucharist 123–4, 203, 210, 213 Barth, Karl 9, 10, 49, 50n. 23, 54n. 49, 68, 81, 138, 174n. 22, 175, 176, 190n. 97 Bell, G. K. A. 31, 45n. 3, 118, 119 Benson, R. M. 87 Berlin, Isaiah 49 bishops 3, 24n. 45, 25, 28, 31–2, 52–3, 66 Body of Christ 31n. 77, 49n. 21, 58, 62, 65, 100 image of 3, 5 mystical 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 66 Booty, John 17n. 18 borderlands theology 11, 37, 43, 70 Bradley, F. H. 104 Bradshaw, Timothy 30n. 73, 34 Braithwaite, R. B. 176n. 27

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INDEX brokenness 67n. 155, 83, 209 Brunner, Emil 49 Buchanan, Colin 17, 34 Bull, Paul B. 47n. 12 Bultmann, Rudolf 78n. 211 Butler, Joseph 10, 49, 109–10, 111 Caiaphas 39, 95, 98n. 67, 147, 156, 159, 163n. 182 Camus, Albert 113 Carey, George 32n. 79 Carpenter, J. 48n. 18 catechesis 29 catholicity 23n. 44, 30–1, 47, 75, 93, 117, 123–4, 202, 215 reconstrued 120–2 Cavanaugh, William T. 57n. 77 Chadwick, Henry 121n. 206 Chardin, Teilhard de 201n. 152 Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral 23–4 Christ, kenotic way of 140–50 Christendom Group 49, 57, 58n. 80, 60n. 99, 127 Summer School 72 Christian Newsletter, The 120n. 202 Christology 9, 41, 77, 78, 85, 86, 100, 126, 138, 139, 149, 170, 171, 174–83, 191–2 Christus-patiens 41 Christus praesens 100 Christus Rex 41 Christus solus 56 Church of England 14–16, 21–2, 38, 40, 44, 45, 47, 52, 85n. 8, 90n. 26, 92, 93n. 43, 122, 206–8 Doctrine Commission 19n. 26, 20, 23 as ecclesiological fundamentalism 39 establishment ethos, probing of 95–6 as tired institutional conservatism 39 Clérissac, Humbert 56 Coggan, Donald 96 coincidentia oppositorum 191, 192 Coleridge, S. T. 93n. 43 common mind 24, 28 communicatio idiomatum 131n. 5, 188, 192, 194, 197 Congar, Yves 5, 6n. 15

conscience 21, 113 consensus 14, 15, 20, 22, 26n. 56, 30, 31n. 75, 39 Incarnational-sacramentalist 2, 5, 8, 12 and reception 28–9 consensus fidelium 27, 28 Constantinianism 87 contemporary anglicanism 13–16 aversion to theology and 24–31 call for ecclesiology and 33–5 doctrine dislocation and 17–24 protest against ecclesiological self-preoccupation and 35–43 theory and practice, gulf between 31–3 Corpus Christi Mysticum 55, 57n. 77 correspondence 5, 40, 42, 76, 80n. 221, 83, 86, 101, 104, 108–9, 111, 114–16, 119, 124, 127, 141, 161, 162, 193, 212, 214, 216 creation 4, 7, 64, 68n. 159, 75, 90 creativity 15, 42, 45, 59, 77, 78, 99, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 146, 154, 161n. 168, 165, 168, 170, 179, 181, 189, 193, 200–4, 209, 213 creeds 2, 19, 22, 23n. 44, 24, 27, 66, 85, 126, 177, 183 critical scrutiny 20, 27, 91 cross-resurrection 7, 8, 43, 55, 61, 70–5, 78, 82, 123, 126, 162, 165, 172, 173, 179, 201, 204 crucifixion 56, 58, 63, 65, 72, 78, 125, 136, 139, 152, 156, 157, 160, 161, 173, 200, 202, 205, 211, 216 resurrection 4, 132–3, 137, 166, 167, 174, 202, 203 see also cross-resurrection Currie, Nicola 23n. 43 Davey, F. N. 50n. 23 Davidson, Randall 94n. 52 deconfessionalization 20

240

INDEX demand 37, 50, 65, 66, 106, 110, 112, 114–16, 127, 138, 182, 187, 205, 215 demythologization 152n. 112, 153 dependence 9, 56, 60, 62–3, 66n. 153, 72, 73, 76, 78, 89–90, 99, 102, 114–16, 129–30, 135, 145, 160–71, 179, 185, 188, 189, 193, 195–204, 214–17 determinism 106, 110, 113, 164 diakonia 146, 162 Dix, Dom Gregory 92n. 41 doctrine 42, 211, 212 of the church 5–6, 8–9, 13, 15–17, 21, 33–5, 43, 45–6, 55, 58, 70, 81–2, 84, 86, 91, 93, 116, 126–31, 167, 169–70, 172, 205, 212, 217 dislocation of 17–24 see also individual entries Dodd, C. H. 54n. 49, 121 dogmatic positivism, rejection of 41 Dudley, Martin 21n. 34, 28 Dulles, Avery 6n. 16, 34, 35n. 93 Dunstan, Gordon 16

Evanston Assembly of the World Council of Churches 120 exchange 45, 75, 125n. 231, 204 experiential-expressivism 19

Ecce Homo 41, 156, 157 ecclesiocentrism 39–40, 78, 86 modern 75, 116, 127 ecclesiologia viatorum 70 ecclesiological fundamentalism 16, 39, 116, 127, 209 attack on 91–100 ecclesiology see also individual entries English Reformation 22, 34 episcopate 2, 33, 44n. 1, 52, 66, 92, 96, 118 historic 2, 23n. 44, 45, 117, 209 eternal receptivity 198–200 Eucharist 4, 26n. 55, 33n. 83, 65n. 138, 69n. 164, 92, 113, 121, 122 and baptism 123–4, 203, 210, 213 oblation of 63–4 evangelical penetration 7, 153, 204, 207, 217 Evans, Gillian 13n. 1, 17n. 18, 19n. 26, 26n. 56, 27n. 61, 28–9

General Synod, Church of England 32, 33 givenness of dogma, and surrender 53 Gore, Charles 47–8, 49, 77n. 207, 81, 85, 90, 92n. 40, 93, 100, 116n. 178, 131n. 5 The Reconstruction of Belief 97n. 64 Gore Lecture 85, 99, 126, 131, 171, 178 and kenotic ecclesiology 86–91 Goulder, Michael 180n. 49 grace 2, 6n. 15, 57, 69, 110, 113, 121, 209, 213, 215 and nature 62, 63, 67 unconditional 148, 210 Green, Michael 180n. 49 Grillmeier, Alois 194n. 117 Gunton, Colin 35, 152

Faith and Order Commission 120 Farmer, H. H. 54n. 49 fidelity 41, 94, 97, 116, 121, 145, 157, 163, 165, 209 and authenticity 10, 117–20, 126, 127, 129, 167, 169, 208, 215 fides quaerens intellectum 11, 42, 125, 172, 174, 186 Fisher, Geoffrey 96, 119 flying bishops 32 Ford, David F. 9n. 27, 125 Forsyth, P. T. 7n. 20, 49, 54n. 49, 68n. 163, 77n. 207, 138, 155, 171, 176 Fowl, Stephen E. 18n. 24 France, R. T. 27n. 59 freedom 21, 101, 110, 112, 113, 129, 141, 142, 145, 166, 167, 170, 171, 179, 188, 189, 192, 201, 202, 204–5, 213

Hanson, A. T. 4, 14n. 2, 25 Hanson, R. P. C. 4, 14n. 2, 25, 31, 32n. 78 Hardy, Daniel W. 11n. 30, 35

241

INDEX Hartin, James 29n. 69 Healy, Nicholas M. 6n. 17 n. 17, 35n. 92 Hebblethwaite, B. 2n. 1, 138 Hebert, A. G. 81n. 229, 82n. 231 Hegel 78n. 212 Hick, John 180n. 49 Hinchliff, Peter 24 Hochhuth, Rolf Soldaten 119 Hodgson, Leonard 27n. 60, 31 Holland, Henry Scott 49, 170, 178 Holy Spirit 15, 49n. 21, 63, 69, 81–2, 88, 96, 122, 170, 198–9, 202–4, 206, 216 Homoousion 91, 137, 181, 184, 186, 191, 195 Hopkins, G. M. 193 Hoskyns, E. C. 4, 40, 49, 50n. 23, 55, 58, 59n. 84, 66, 68–9n. 164, 81, 82, 106, 131n. 5, 136, 174, 175, 177, 202 Howe, John 91 Huddleston, Trevor 118, 119, 132 humbleness 81, 129, 144, 166, 170, 179, 195, 200, 201, 213, 215 humility 66, 90, 120, 138, 146, 182, 199, 202, 205

Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission 14, 15n. 5, 27n. 60 internal ecumenism, challenges among Anglicans 14 internal relations 105 interpenetration 43, 113–14, 138–9, 169, 174, 182, 191–3, 196, 201, 215, 217 inwardness 9, 75, 98–9, 114, 164, 171, 203

idealism 101, 109, 203 attack on 43n. 146, 48, 50, 75–83, 121, 151, 172, 193n. 112, 216 Imitatio Christi 119 impaired communion 14, 32 Incarnation 8, 9, 43, 45, 48, 49n. 21, 60–1, 70, 81, 84, 97, 116, 117, 130n. 4, 136, 138–9, 163, 167, 172, 178, 184n. 69, 190–2 extension of 2, 3, 47, 58, 59, 61, 64, 66, 87n. 12, 131 Incarnational-sacramentalist consensus 2, 5, 8, 12 indifferentism 1, 121–2 infidelity 37, 117, 209 Inge, W. R. 196 inhumanization 179, 191, 192–3, 201, 202 intellectus quaerens fidem 126

Kant, Immanuel 10, 76, 101, 102–4, 108, 111–12, 125 Kavanaugh, Aidan 26n. 55 Kelly, J. N. D. 152n. 112, 186n. 77 Kierkegaard, Soren 174n. 22, 190n. 97, 208 Kirk, Kenneth 92n. 41 Kirkby, Gresham 44 koinonia 13n. 1, 121, 123, 128, 204–5 Küng, Hans 35n. 92

Janz, Paul D. 75–6n. 198 Jasper, R. C. D. 119n. 194 Jeffrey, R. M. C. 87n. 12 Jones, A. S. Duncan 119n. 194 Jones, L. Gregory 18n. 24 journey of intensification 9n. 27 judgement 4, 19n. 26, 23n. 44, 46n. 8, 51, 52–7, 59–61, 63, 82, 84, 92, 93, 97n. 64, 109, 117, 122, 146n. 90, 156–8, 160, 167, 213, 215, 216–17 see also mercy justification 39, 73, 75–6, 79, 80n. 220, 84, 98n. 67, 108, 202n. 162, 210n. 2

laity 25, 27, 29, 32 Lambeth Conferences 3, 21n. 35, 23, 24, 27, 28n. 61, 30, 32, 33, 92 Lambeth Quadrilateral 82 Lampe, G. W. H. 14n. 4, 34n. 91 Lash, Nicholas 131n.9, 180n. 50, 199n. 141

242

INDEX Leech, Kenneth 3n. 5, 38n. 113 Lex orandi lex credendi 80 Lindbeck, George 17n. 19, 18–20, 26 The Nature of Doctrine 17 Liturgical Movement 81 Lloyd, Roger 46n. 10 Logos 41, 90, 166, 193–5 asarkos 195 depotentiated 194 sarx 194 Lubac, Henri de 71n. 171 Lund Conference on Faith and Order 121 Lux Mundi 45 McBrien, Richard 34n. 92 McCabe, Herbert 198n. 140 McGrath, Alister E. 17n. 18, 27n. 58 Mackey, James 182 MacKinnon, Donald MacKenzie 5, 6n. 18, 7n. 21–3, 8n. 24–5, 10n. 28, 11n. 30–3, 15. n9–10, 16n. 12–14, 36–43, 84–5 anti-idealist polemic 75–83 apostolicity 117–20 attack on ecclesiological fundamentalism 91–100 baptism and Eucharist and 123–4 catholicity 120–2 church of cross and resurrection towards world 70–5 The Church of God 58, 66n. 153, 84 early ecclesiology 48–70 Gifford Lectures 111n. 152 God the Living and the True 59 Gore Lecture (The Stripping of the Altars) 86–91, 99, 126, 131, 171, 178 kenotic way of Jesus Christ 140–50 moral vision of atonement of 151–68 realism of 100–13 on resurrection 131–7 revisiting kenotic ecclesiology of 113–17 scripture and tradition and 124–7 A Study in Ethical Theory 104n. 98

MacNabb, Donald 49n. 22 Macquarrie, John 14n. 4 Mangina, Joseph L. 202n. 162 Marshall, Bruce D. 4n. 7 marturia, of church 56 Mascall, E. L. 17n. 18, 25, 46, 48n. 18, 174n. 22 mercy 39, 57, 59–61, 64, 66, 67, 69, 123, 134, 136, 140, 144, 145, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162, 166, 200, 201, 215, 217 Mersch, Émile 55, 66n. 153 metaphysical-mindedness 11 Milbank, John 18n. 24, 118n. 189, 142n. 66, 150n. 106 mimesis 111n.152, 164 mind of the church 28 ministry 3, 32, 39, 45, 46, 48, 52, 57, 67, 82, 88, 90, 92n. 40, 93, 95, 117, 125, 210, 216 apostolicity of 47 of Christ 69, 91, 137n. 45, 140, 144–7, 151, 158, 171, 181, 182n. 57, 184n. 67, 190, 193–4, 196 of episcopate 28 Galilean 146, 148 of Holy Spirit 122 pastoral 163 of word 27, 29, 64, 69, 120 modernism 28n. 61, 53, 59n. 84, 76, 78n. 211, 85, 86, 89, 118, 125, 163n. 180, 175n. 27, 176n. 29, 180, 209 ecclesiocentrism and 75, 116, 127 modernity 47, 71, 72 Moore, G. E. 101, 104–5, 108 moral action 58, 164n. 184 moral agency 57, 58n. 80, 113, 202, 204 moral agent 109, 112 moral autonomy 111 and creativity 111 moral conduct 92, 208 moral failure 42 moralization, of atonement theology 164–5 moral law 112

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INDEX moral obligation 112 moral order 66n. 153, 109, 111–13, 167, 204 moral phenomenology 155 moral philosophy 10, 109–11 moral practice 114, 115, 211 moral response 57, 67n. 157, 112 moral self-deception 110 Moule, C. F. D. 138n. 49 Muddiman, John 24, 26n. 56 Murray, Paul 113n. 164 mutuality 27, 63, 105, 120–4, 192, 199–200, 202 mysterium Christi 9–10, 11, 40, 85, 114, 115, 127, 130, 132, 171, 172 Mystical Body doctrine 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 66, 213 mystic Christ 55, 80n.224 Nachdenken 43 Nacherlebnis 77 Newbigin, J. E. Lesslie 92n. 41 Unfinished Agenda 120n. 202 Newman, J. H. 22n. 40, 49 Nicaea 138 Nicholls, David 25 Norgren, W. A. 34n. 90 Norman, E. R. 58n. 80 ‘no special doctrine’ claim 22 obedience 60, 63–5, 69, 114n. 167, 129–30, 143, 146, 149, 154, 156, 157, 160–2, 164, 166, 169, 170, 179, 195, 197, 202, 215 objectivity 11, 70, 78, 80, 82, 86, 89, 100–4, 114–16, 123, 161, 164, 179, 203, 210 atonement and 158, 160, 166, 201, 203 authority of 100, 108, 109, 111 ontology and 183n. 66 relativism and 102, 110 of sacramental action 121 O’Brien, W. B. 92n. 41 O’Donovan, Oliver 22 Oldham, J. H. 120n. 202 omnipotence 144, 147, 195, 199

ontology 107–8, 114–15, 131n. 5, 138, 155, 169, 171–7, 184–7, 203 ecclesial 66 open reception 30, 32 Oxford Anglo-Catholicism 37 Packer, James I. 27n. 59 parables 141–3 secular 162 paradigmatic reality 143, 163, 165, 167, 179, 204, 215 patience 145, 152, 162, 163n. 180, 165, 166, 170, 179, 180, 197, 202, 218 Penhale, Francis 17n. 18, 27n.59 Pickering, W. S. F. 27n.59 Pilate, Pontius 119, 132, 158, 159, 183 Pinnington, Judith 47n.14 Platten, Stephen 3n. 4, 14n. 1, 15n. 8, 17n. 18, 32 pluralism 18, 20, 26–8, 105, 108, 140 Porvoo Common Statement 34 ‘positing the context’ 190, 191 pragmatism 24n. 45, 31, 38, 80n. 221, 87n. 13, 122 religious 79 Prichard, R. W. 23n. 44 Provincial Episcopal Visitors ministry 32 Quick, Oliver 34, 46n. 8, 62n. 115, 77n. 207, 93n. 41, 171, 177, 184n. 68 Radner, Ephraim 3n. 3 Ramsey, Arthur Michael 4, 31n. 76, 50n. 23, 55, 58, 66, 80, 81, 82, 85, 96 The Gospel and the Catholic Church 49 Rashdall, Hastings 22n. 40 Raven, C. E. 175n. 27, 201n. 152 Rawlinson, A. E. J. 75, 82n. 231 realism 9, 42, 47, 50, 67n. 157, 75n. 198, 76, 83, 86, 98, 100–14, 116–17, 140n.56, 165, 172, 177–8, 214, 215 reality 1–2, 6, 7, 47, 66, 98, 105, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 121n. 202, 127, 132, 136, 141, 143, 147–8,

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INDEX 150n. 105, 152, 159n. 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 172, 177, 179, 182, 190, 193, 195, 197, 204, 209, 210, 212–15, 217 reception 13, 27, 53, 82, 126, 142–3, 177 and consensus 28–9 critical 49, 207 dialectical 74 open 30, 32 passive 104n. 98 receptivity 9, 40, 42, 90, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 121, 138, 145, 164, 166, 169, 171, 178, 179, 182, 185, 188, 196–8, 202, 204, 214 eternal 198–200 of faith 111 Reckitt, M. B. 54n. 53 redemption 7, 55–6, 59–68, 68n. 159, 82, 117, 122–4, 143, 153, 154, 158, 160, 164, 167, 176–8, 180, 188, 189, 193, 199–201, 204–5, 215–17 rejection of rejection 32n. 82 resurrection 5, 58–60, 64, 66–7, 69n. 164, 81, 84, 95, 117, 119, 122, 124–6, 131, 134–7, 147, 150, 154, 160, 163n. 179, 164, 171, 177–9, 193, 197, 200, 203, 207, 208, 212, 216 see also cross-resurrection see also under crucifixion reticence 22, 24, 110, 126–7, 131, 136, 180, 200, 203 Roberts, Richard H. 4n. 11, 37, 45, 46n. 8, 81n. 228, 85n. 8 Robinson, J. A. T. 81n. 230, 89n. 26 Root, Michael 35n. 92 Rosenthal, James 23n. 43 Runcie, Robert 17n. 18 Rusch, W. G. 34n. 90 Sachs, William L. 47n. 13 sacramental practice 3, 5, 23n. 44, 24, 30n. 71, 32, 39, 47, 49n. 21, 54, 63–7, 69, 78, 80n. 224, 81, 85, 93, 117, 120–4, 130, 169, 202n.162, 203–4, 208–14, 217

sacrifice 64, 94, 95, 124, 152, 157 salvation 6n. 15, 65–6, 69, 72, 76, 78, 126, 130, 140, 151, 153–4, 158, 167, 169–73, 179, 181, 189–90, 195, 214 sanctification 5, 72, 149, 180, 202 Scripture 2, 5, 22, 23n. 44, 24, 27, 29, 30n. 71, 85, 117, 124–7, 169, 179, 182, 212, 215, 217 self-abandonment 116, 118, 149, 158, 165, 166, 202, 215 self-committal 190, 193, 201 self-communication 197 self-confidence 45, 48, 97n. 64, 210, 213 self-consciousness 31n. 76, 54, 78, 95n. 52, 102, 194 self-consecration 124, 149 self-disclosure 173 self-existence 74, 107–9, 177 self-gift 165, 192, 200, 203, 204, 210, 212 self-giving 116, 189, 199, 203, 204 self-impartation 173, 193 self-interpretation 78, 139, 145, 146 self-interrogation 77, 115, 144 self-justification 39, 73, 75–6 self-limitation 166, 188, 192, 193, 194, 199, 201 self-oblation 86, 134, 149 self-scrutiny 113, 119, 144 self-understanding 14, 36, 37, 51, 82, 86, 90, 103, 118, 182, 205 Selwyn, E. G. 75 Essays Catholic and Critical 45 Sherry, Patrick 126n. 232 sin 1, 5, 38, 54, 62–3, 67n. 157, 99, 116, 126, 131, 136, 154, 157, 158, 171, 204, 208 Smedes, Lewis. B. 48n. 18 Smith, Martin 87n. 12 Sobrino, Jon 116n. 177 soteriology 8, 41, 66n. 153, 68, 81, 130, 138–9, 150–3, 156n. 138, 160, 162, 165, 169–70, 174, 179, 213, 215–16 sovereignty 40, 112, 123, 188

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INDEX of God 42, 55, 60, 62–3, 65, 69, 120, 143, 197, 211–13 of gospel 58n. 80 of inspiration 117 of self 101 of self-gift 192n. 110 Spens, Will 44n. 1, 75, 175n. 27 Stead, G. C. 183–4, 186n. 77 Steiner, George 7n. 22 Stevenson, Kenneth 17n. 18, 26n. 55 Strawson, P. F. 101 Streeter, B. H. 181n. 53 subjectivity 48, 76n.200, 77, 78, 103, 104, 143 substance ontology 183n. 66, 198 Surin, Kenneth 150n. 106, 153n.120, 159, 160n. 161, 167, 173, 184n. 68 Sykes, S. W. 2n.1, 14n. 3, 17n. 16, 19, 20n. 29–30, 25n. 51, 33, 194n. 117 The Integrity of Anglicanism 3

116, 124, 134, 137–8, 140–1, 143, 147, 165, 171, 178–80, 188–91, 193 transparency 78, 101, 119, 195–6, 211 Trinity 90, 182n. 59, 186, 198 see also Incarnation triumphalism 38, 44, 45, 55, 85, 92, 124, 131, 135, 137, 144, 202n. 162, 209, 210, 213 Triune God 6, 9, 15, 27, 43, 55, 66n. 153, 126, 129, 138, 163, 167, 170, 171–2, 175, 178, 180, 192, 196, 197, 203, 204–5 two integrities doctrine 32–3

Talbot, Neville 46n.10 Temple, William 31, 45, 77n. 207 temporality 67n. 157, 70, 72, 104n. 98, 115, 117, 125, 135, 148, 183, 192, 193, 194, 200–1, 215 theodramatics 190 theologia crucis 9, 55, 60n. 95, 86, 176 Theologie des Korrektivs 208 theology 41 aversion to 24–31 see also individual entries Thornton, Lionel 82n. 231 Tinker, Melvin 27n. 59 ‘tired institutional conservatism’ 39, 77 Tomkins, Oliver S. 81n. 230, 121n. 204 tradition 1–7, 10–11, 27, 37, 39, 43, 49, 51, 66, 68n. 163, 73, 78, 80, 82n. 231, 86, 91–2, 94, 99–100, 107–8, 115, 118, 121–2, 124–7, 134, 145, 146n. 90, 151, 173n. 17, 180, 186–9, 206–10, 215 Anglican theological 25n. 53, 26n. 56 of churchmanship 14n. 2 constitutionalist 21 transcendence 1, 51, 55–8, 70, 76, 79, 82, 103, 106, 107, 111–12, 114,

Wakefield, Gordon S. 176n. 27 Webster, John 24, 25n. 49, 26n. 56, 29–30n. 71 West, Philip 150 Whale, J. S. 54n. 49 White, Roger 140n. 56, 141n. 61 White, Stephen Ross 17n. 18 White, Vernon 151n.110 White, Victor 60n. 99 Wignall, Paul 9n. 26, 49, 84, 155n. 131 Wiles, Maurice 14n.4 Williams, N. P. 46n. 8 Williams, Rowan 2, 3n. 5, 10, 26, 32, 98n. 67, 101, 150n. 106, 160n. 161, 181 Woozley, A. D. 49n. 22 word 3, 9, 25, 47, 51, 60n. 95, 65, 66, 67, 82, 117, 130, 139–40, 149, 156, 160, 164, 165, 167, 171, 182, 186, 190, 194, 196, 203, 208–11, 214 of gospel 30n. 71 ministry of 27, 29, 64, 69, 120 World Council of Churches 31 Wright, N. T. 27n. 59

via crucis 9, 59n. 84, 88, 117, 154, 156, 165, 195 Virginia Report, The 23 von Balthasar, Hans Urs 10, 138, 170, 174n. 22, 175, 176, 184n. 67, 190, 191n.102, 198

Young, Frances 152n. 112

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