Kenotic Ecclesiology

Select Writings of Donald M. MacKinnon

John C. McDowell, Scott A. Kirkland, John C. McDowell, Scott A. Kirkland, John C. McDowell, Scott A. Kirkland, John C. McDowell, Scott A. Kirkland

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781451496284
• eBook ISBN: 9781506418988
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Donald M. MacKinnon has been one of the most important and influential of the post-World War British theologians, significantly impacting the development and subsequent work of the likes of Rowan Williams, Nicholas Lash and John Milbank, among many other notable theologians. A younger generation largely emerging from Cambridge, but with influence elsewhere, has more recently brought MacKinnon's eclectic and occasionalist work to a larger audience worldwide. In this collection, MacKinnon's central writings on the major themes of ecclesiology, and especially the relationship of the church to theology, are gathered in one source. The volume will feature several of MacKinnon's important early texts. These will include two short books published in the "Signposts" series during World War II, and a collection of later essays entitled "The Stripping of the Altars."

Part 1: Signposts

Part 1 Introduction: The Terrible Occasion and Particular Paradox of the Gospel

Ashley John Moyse

The 1940 Signposts series, for which the following two texts of part 1 were written, offered its readers twelve small books released monthly that intended to illuminate the vital questions of human life, answerable by way of Thomist philosophy and of the Anglo-Catholic theology representative of the series contributors. Rather, as the publisher’s note reads in the front matter of each volume, this series is one “dealing with the relevance of the Christian Faith to the contemporary crisis of civilisation.”^[1] Although intended to provide such answers as part of the series, MacKinnon’s particular contributions, some have declared, failed to have any historical effect upon the culture.^[2] Even though this might be the case,^[3] it is not due to the potent significance of MacKinnon’s claims.

The texts following must continue to be read, as the argument is as vital to recognizing the failure of humanity to acknowledge our hope rightly now as it was then. That is, the apologetic importance of MacKinnon’s Signposts might help us to proclaim rightly the world we are taught to see by (and with) Jesus Christ, the Lord of the world, whom we have hung to a tree. Accordingly, MacKinnon’s two contributions to the series might be thought to revolve about the following thesis aimed at those, including the church, enamoured by and complicit in the modern cultural milieu and its preoccupation with the promise of progress and human achievement: Apart from Jesus Christ, we cannot know who it is we are (and before whom we are gathered). With the coming of Christ, however, we can know in his illic et tunc as well as in his hic et nunc that we are sinners reconciled to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. More appropriately to the two texts, we come to distress of “that terrible tale of Christ’s coming and rejection”^[4] as with the paradox of the church (the gathering by Christ of those who have crucified him), which “is only resolved when we have grasped . . . the primacy of the divine initiative.”^[5]

Although the thesis of MacKinnon’s Signposts contributions may be as such, his two texts sit as the second and seventh in the series after J. V. L. Casserley’s The Fate of Modern Culture, which labors to diagnose the pathology of the modern world, argued to have abandoned metaphysics for epistemology, and, specifically, epistemology as power. That is, the failures of modern philosophy and the victories of modern science have reinforced a recession from metaphysics (from those fundamental questions of being) while emphasizing the merits of the mechanics of knowing, thereby turning knowing towards positivist and pragmatic ends—“towards its culmination in the Kingdom of Man”^[6]—rather than the vital aspect of human being and becoming.^[7] Moreover, the pursuit of knowing as a means to further means, as a means for acquiring power to overcome nature, highlights the mechanisms of a technocracy that Casserley laments as the malady of modern scientific discourse, which cannot discover that remarkable beauty that will save the world. Rather, if left to exhaust itself again (and again) between the tensions of human sin and destiny, the fate of modern culture groomed by “confused thought and invalid aspiration” is a reciprocal rebellion collapsing into an abyss of “shapeless ruin”^[8]— bewildered, disillusioned, and despairing. However, for Casserely, as with his series colleague, such ruin can only be avoided by a belief in the riches of religious and intellectual orthodoxy (viz. “belief in God, belief in man, and belief in reason”^[9]).

There is a general continuity with Casserley in MacKinnon’s work—even though MacKinnon makes little mention of his argument or rhetorical construction. The critical assessment of the modern culture (including that of the Church of England^[10]), preoccupied with an intellectual history wrought by idealism, pragmatism, and positivism, looms large in MacKinnon’s two volumes. That is to say, as with Casserley, who has labored to elaborate the modern mind and its religion, which is “powerless either to challenge, humble, or guide the world [because] it tends to confirm at every point the baseless modern notion that ‘we are the people’ and that ‘wisdom was born with us,’”^[11] MacKinnon has sought to show that we can only come to know of ourselves as we give ourselves unto death,^[12] while resisting, under the authority of the church, the “tug of the world.”^[13] Unto death, therefore, we are gathered to bear witness to Jesus Christ, who, by the event of his life, death, and resurrection, constitutes our being (and hope) while authorizing, albeit paradoxically, our participation as his mystical body, the church, proclaiming the achievement of his work.^[14]

This position in tow with Casserley, however, follows the trajectory set out in 1922 by Charles Gore and his fellows in the Christendom Group. That is to say, as Timothy Connor has noted, MacKinnon’s thesis, from which his two volumes follow, adheres to and expounds upon Gore’s description of the program taken up by the group—the church is the body of Christ, visible as “his organ and instrumental for action in the world.^[15] Yet, for MacKinnon, what we see embodied before our eyes is both irruptive and disturbing—the interrogative particularity of Christ, who is most distressing.

Nevertheless, as introduced above, MacKinnon leads his reader to consider that our distress brought by Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion impels us to see that the “tragedy of our situation is that God can speak no other language to us, and that is the language we find it hardest to understand. For that sets over against human achievement divine failure. It is not a transvaluation, but an inversion of human failure.”^[16] It may be such as this that prompts MacKinnon to declare in his introduction to God the Living and the True, “We do well to remember how terrible a book the New Testament is.”^[17] Moreover, MacKinnon includes in his first volume a discussion of the church, which serves, in some ways, as a prelude to his work in Church of God (i.e., those who once gathered in a great betrayal at the cross are now gathered, paradoxically, to become, as the mystical body of Christ, “the extension of that irruptive and disruptive activity that was [the incarnation]”^[18]).

The New Testament (NT) is terrible for MacKinnon, as it compels us to admit, at once, the futility of “human life and achievement,” which is also the “occasion of God’s mightiest act.”^[19] Accordingly, as advertised in the journal Theology, that principal claim of the series, as an exercise of theological speech, is to serve as “a signpost warning Homo sapiens of the precipice that lies ahead and directing him back to the high road of human fulfilment.”^[20] The precipice is marked by the hubris of humanity, who attend to the exercise of achievement and of solitary, self-sufficient rationality over against God’s self-givenness. Yet we are not forsaken. Rather the precipice is where God gives of himself and “becomes the object not of intellectual scrutiny but of contempt and rejection.”^[21] And in the NT, where we are reminded of our contempt and rejection of God, condemning Christ to a criminal’s death with a cacophony a murderous cheers, we also discover God’s agency, descending to the depths of death such that we might ascend to the fullness of life in resurrection: “Man is brought face to face with God, not through his effort, but through his failure. That is the paradox that lies at the very heart of the New Testament—indeed, of the whole Biblical theology.”^[22] In this, the terribleness of the NT directs our gaze towards the unique event of incarnation—“apart from the coming of Christ, [therefore] we can never know ourselves.”^[23] That is, as Nicholas Lash has so eloquently stated, our ruin can only be avoided (viz., our fulfillment known) as we are taught to see that reconciliation “springs—according to the Christian story—from what we count as failure, for it is through blood spilt in rejection of love’s invitation that, and in spite of which, love’s promised peace is made.” Lash continues, quoting MacKinnon, “Beyond illusion, and the noise of war, we . . . need to see God as he is. But, ‘When we so see him, we are at first shocked that his face is marred above the sons of men. But as he confronts us, we are enabled to see of what stuff we ourselves are. Then no longer does it surprise us that there is no beauty that we should desire him’.”^[24]

As our gaze, therefore, is reoriented by the one who stands before our eyes (in the mystery of his body and by his spirit), we do not come to know of ourselves after the direction offered by general principles, the occasion to garner knowledge by way of a theoretical a priori, or the achievement of a self-sufficient will. Rather, as we learn from MacKinnon’s Church of God, we come only to know of ourselves, and of each other, as we are brought to see within the corpus mysticum, the church, that city of God, where “grace continually struggles with nature.”^[25] That is, where GLT was written to emphasize the event of God’s own self-giving, which illumines the very nature of God’s being, thereby delimiting our speech about it, COG was written so as to make intelligible that particular, albeit paradoxical city of God that gathers around (and is gathered by) God the Living and the True. Rather, as with GLT, COG aims to locate the way towards understanding both God and humanity from within the particularity and passion of Christ, which disciplines our own ideas of the church, a transcendent society not to be achieved by the promise of human intellect, ingenuity, and industry (or by way of a “Christian rationalism”^[26]), but inaugurated, impelled, and intelligible by way of Jesus Christ, who alone is the question and the answer to the disciples’ query, “Lord to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”^[27] That the Word became flesh, for MacKinnon, is the concrete and particular occasion of revelation that cannot be reduced to ordered form, as other objects of modern inquiry have been reduced. Rather, the concrete and particular occasion of revelation, who is Jesus Christ, conforms us—conforming our understanding of the nature and work of the church and of ourselves.^[28] Therefore, we do not come to see the world rightly as we apply abstract categories and principles and ideologies upon that which we observe, as though each object, including God as it were, is waiting to be discovered by some exercise of intellectual assent and achievement. Yet MacKinnon further has shown such an exercise, initially developed in Casserley’s series introduction, to be impotent and left to the abyss of nihilism and unreason (of ruin). Instead, we come to see the world rightly as we consider and are transformed by Golgotha—as MacKinnon maintains, one cannot see the world the same again once one admits (viz. acknowledges the disruption and redemption brought by) the terrible entry of God into it.^[29]

In summary, MacKinnon’s Signposts illuminate the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is, these two brief volumes labor to express the tension between the summons and judgment of God, which became known in the death and resurrection of Christ. It is a tension that challenges modern sentimentality to the self-sufficiency of human reason and the techniques sought to placate such summoning and judgment. It is a tension that expounds upon the ontology of the church, which is summoned to be the subject of divine action in and for the world, and therefore vulnerable to the hate of those for whom the church bears witness. Yet, in their stead, the church, which is the mystical body of Christ, is also the object of divine judgment and mercy—crucified unto death for the resurrection to life.

Therefore, the interrogation performed in the following two texts, which attends to the interruptive event of Christ, is one that labors to disturb the human with the transformative power of grace. In this, MacKinnon directs his reader towards the interrogation of humanity brought by Christ, himself. Thus, MacKinnon’s theologia crucis, extending across these two texts, instructs the reader to acknowledge the event of Christ as that one event of judgement and grace that is both terrible and conciliating. They petition us, again and again, to attend not to the exer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Editors' Acknowledgements
• Volume Introduction: Donald MacKinnon, Speaking Honestly to Ecclesial Power
• Part 1: Signposts
• Part 2: The Stripping of the Altars
• Select Bibliography of MacKinnon’s Works
• Index