Kenotic Ecclesiology: Select Writings of Donald M. MacKinnon

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Volume Introduction: Donald MacKinnon, Speaking Honestly to Ecclesial Power

John C. McDowell

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 actuality of divine existence and of the possibilities of human that are brought to the bar of a questioning more devastating, more searching, and (must we not say?) more intellectually demanding than the Socratic. . . . One should not attempt to iron out the inconsistencies, but rather to see their presence as an invitation to more searching enquiry: finding in that presence evidence that the reality of Jesus defied any sort of easy, and indeed most sorts of comparatively painful, assimilation. This strangeness may be judged rooted in, and expressive of, the way in which he lives 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.[1]

A Fragmentary Style

Introducing the moral philosopher and philosophical theologian Donald Mackenzie MacKinnon (1913–1994) is not an easy business. Of course, those who are already familiar with the work of the Scottish Episcopalian from Oban in the Highlands will know this but regard it as a necessary difficulty. It is necessary for two main reasons. Firstly, despite the fact that he is arguably the most influential and important postwar British philosophical theologian, (although many would want to place T. F. Torrance in this category), he remains relatively unknown to theological scholarship outside of those who have in some way had connections with the Universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge, at which MacKinnon had occupied Chairs. Secondly, the intellectual labors of this former Cambridge Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity are proving to be fruitful for a new generation of theologians (the three scholars involved in this project are examples of this) in a way that saves MacKinnon, at least for a little longer, from being relegated to the fleeting memory of a historical footnote in British intellectual life. What makes the introductory project difficult (and here the term is being used in a rather glib sense, especially with reference to a thinker so deeply immersed in refusing to evade the difficulty emerging from the intractable problems of the surd by offering premature resolutions) is that MacKinnon’s work is so resistant to the quick summary, the pithy statement, or the reductive sound bite. The style of his writing is often allusive and therefore particularly demanding of his audience.

The difficulty for the reader is not, however, one of elusive and opaque purple prose, the kind of rhetorical obscurity that sometimes serves to mask intellectually tenuous and substantively vacuous work, or that makes academic writing into a rhetorical cultus solely for the initiated. In contrast, MacKinnon rarely hides behind the tortured phrase. He always asks questions of the quality of commitment to good argument, which refuse to conceal the weak and disordered behind bluff and assertion; his writing style is rather compellingly lucid instead. The difficulty is more one of being left behind by his fertile imagination and erudition. In his massive tour de force entitled Theology and Social Theory, John Milbank explains that secularity has positioned theology.[2] The immobile and rather lifeless metaphor of positioning works badly certainly in relation to MacKinnon’s work, given the beautiful fluidity of his intellectual performance and the rich imagination that could skilfully float with seamless ease in the borderlands of theology between the Gospels, Plato, Shakespeare, high Attic drama, Leninism, Ernst Bloch, Arnold Schoenberg, Teilhard de Chardin, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth, and P.T. Forsyth, to name but a few of the evident expressions of his erudition. This is not merely a somewhat old-fashioned, cultured don performing John Henry Newman’s post-Humboldtian vision of what a university is good for. It is an express refusal to theologically curtail the hearing of God through a stingy gospel, a gospel that spells bad news for the makings of persons, that precludes them from the transformative action of the redemptive God. As Fergus Kerr notes, In 1951 MacKinnon was lecturing on utilitarianism and Kant, citing the New Testament, Sophocles and Shakespeare, as well as Dostoyevsky, George Eliot and Joseph Conrad. . . . As he says somewhere, the moralist’s ‘theorizing is impoverished if he ignores the dimensions of human experience to which such writers admit him.’[3] MacKinnon’s dealings with a host of writers was frequently generous, and even when he critically pushed them to their limit, the argument was passionately conducted in and through a conversational wrestling that attempts to achieve as much aid in understanding his own mind as he could. This appreciation of the complexity of the theological task as a conversational task enables MacKinnon to positively judge the place of literature within theological and philosophical reflection as explorations of living discourse.[4] Speaking of the moralist, for instance, MacKinnon argues that his theorizing is impoverished if he ignores the dimensions of human experience to which such writers [as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot and Joseph Conrad] admit him.[5] Fiction’s possibilities are no less ‘true, and therefore theologically significant, for being fictive. According to Paul Ricoeur, for example, fiction refigures time, and thus reaches beyond simple mimesis (imitation) to poesis (invention).[6] It purposes change by enabling a redirecting of our horizons for reading the world, expanding the capacity of language through the new reality of metaphor, suspending and redirecting literal description of actuality by performing the possibility of metaphor. So MacKinnon suggests, with reference to Hamlet, that

It can hardly be denied that our understanding of such notions as responsibility, free-will, decision are enlarged, even transformed (or should be enlarged and transformed) by the dramatist’s most subtle exploration of the Prince’s personal history. And this enlargement the dramatist achieves not by the enunciation of some general principle, but by laying bare, in the subject of his hero, the deepest recesses of the human spirit, the half-acknowledged emotional overtones and undertones which belong to any processes of decision, and which can so easily be overlooked.[7]

Of course, Milbank’s use of the spatial marker refers more specifically to the way modern theology adopted directions that had redirected its imagination as much as its energies. MacKinnon was, in contrast, fascinated by the specificities of the materials he was working with. In relation to the Christian faith, as will be explained below, his commitment to refusing to evade the demands of particularities was deeply rooted in a generative sense of responsibility to honesty and truthfulness.

In an introduction to another collection of MacKinnon’s writings, it was mentioned that in this regard the very allusive style of MacKinnon’s oeuvre is itself theologically revealing and suggestive.[8] Undoubtedly it expresses his personality, an eccentricity of which anecdotal oral materials are legend among those who met him. But for the editors of this present collection who were unable to meet him in person, there is something more theologically interesting and significant here than simply the strange quirks of a highly unconventional academic. They gesture towards being stylistic expressions of MacKinnon’s refusal to engage in providing simplistic systems . . . [or] to ‘take the broad road’ of easy solutions, premature resolutions, and trivialising abstraction from concreteness.[9]

While his fragmentary theological writing does not allow for a focused set of interests (his thinking was scattered and diffuse, un-Apollonian), it could be legitimately argued that one can detect a pervasive theological mood in his writings (while they may be scattered and unsystematic, they are not intellectually chaotic or Dionysian). That mood has been defined as profoundly interrogative by Kenneth Surin and others.[10] The essay style works well as a way of depicting the restless energy for the question, for the subversive moment of MacKinnon’s theological imagination, his compellingly intense fascination with the particular, and his refusal to take the broad road of premature resolution, which is borne of a deep moral sense of responsibility towards the uncontrollable and incomprehensible. It is in this way, and only in this intrinsic pressure for a theological honesty rooted in a deep sense of moral responsibility, that Surin’s assessment of MacKinnon’s profound interrogative style makes sense:

In theological matters, he refuses to take up substantive positions, and prefers instead to ‘map’ the ramifications of the espousal of such positions. This task is invariably undertaken with great subtlety and a deep respect for the complexities of the subject matter treated. The reader is always left with the impression that what matters for MacKinnon is precisely what is left unsaid, though, typically, this too is somehow indicated in his texts. A thinker who prefers to create an agenda (as opposed to dealing with one that has been pre-set), to articulate problems (as opposed to resolving them), to use speech to register (rather than to subdue) the complexity of ‘realia’, is very likely to produce a body of work that demands further exploration and elaboration.[11]

The Honesty of the Theologian

Telling stories of God’s ways with this world is always a hazardous enterprise in itself, risking what Nicholas Lash terms bondage to ..... unacknowledged narrative[s].[12] Precariousness and vulnerability, or living an exposed life, are part of the price paid for being honest, MacKinnon argues, a necessary disease that refuge in tradition, Christian culture, or claims to a finality in metaphysical explanation tempers the sense and tranquilizes the pain of.[13]

It is a desire for honesty that results in his exposure of the dishonesty in theological work. So his little known 1966 paper, Can a Theologian Be Honest? indicates a deeply disturbing question lying at the heart of MacKinnon’s churchmanship.[14] What he most personally struggles with is how to be true to his academic calling, whose integrity is in follow[ing] the argument whithersoever it leads, as one churched.[15] This particular paper certainly displays little explicit sense of responsibility to the struggle of knowing how to appreciate epistemic mediation and contextualization, and of being indebted to those contexts. For instance, a question has to be asked about the statement that the theologian is particularly alert to the clerical bias which almost inevitably on occasion threatens objectivity of judgment.[16] Nevertheless, that questions of ecclesial contextualization were not too far from his mind at this time is suggested not only by the reflection on ecclesial practice provided in his other works of the period, but by his advice to church members on this question, and both are visible in the collection The Stripping of the Altars.[17]

If one was to press the sense implied by MacKinnon’s reflections here one could say with Barth’s Church Dogmatics IV.3 (hereafter cited in text as CD) and the fragments of the uncompleted IV.4 (and this suggests something important about Barth’s own conception of the nature of limitations of the theological task) that falsehood, or lack of truthfulness and consequently also integrity, is subtler than any simple giving of a false impression—the externality that is lying. Falsehood, in this simple sense, is the mask worn to hide one’s motives (expressible primarily in the active voice, the deliberate activity of a deceiving agent). Rather, lack of integrity constitutes a being false—the delusion of those themselves lied to. This sense of falsehood expresses the creation of one’s being in untruthfulness (expressible primarily in the passive voice, of being made), the untruth that possesses, shapes, and determines the particular motives, consciousness, and active deliberations one has and is involved in.[18] This sense of what is false is hidden from one’s awareness as something gathered, learned, obtained, fallen into, a determinant of one’s consciousness and presumed natural to its believer.[19]

What characterizes the politics of certain kinds of power-relations (propaganda, totalitarian coercion and manipulation, even certain apologetic strategies) through which these falsehoods are predominantly expressed is their incapacity for conversation, as Rowan Williams, a former student of MacKinnon, suggests.[20] One steps back from the risk of conversation into a position of (imagined) invulnerability by displaying the control over the real subject matter. Williams targets the tyranny of a total perspective, that which subsumes all-knowing into a framework laying claims to comprehensiveness and finality.

This can make ideology sound more a matter of rationalization, of ideas imagined to be infallible, which consequently evade self-critical testing of their genetics, interests, and exclusions of the interests of others, than a matter of the very constitution of social subjects themselves. While suggesting something important about his own conception of the nature of limitations of the theological task, Barth’s description of ideology is similarly ideas-oriented. He calls it a distinctive numbness, hardening, and rigidity, and therefore an inertia in which he will cease to be a free spirit.[21] Herein, one’s presuppositions achieve not just a provisional and transitory but a permanent normativity, not just one that is relative but one that is absolute, not just one that is human but one that is quasi-divine. Simply, one no longer questions or learns from elsewhere since one’s formulations have achieved a normative and definitively binding status. Barth bluntly asserts: one’s ideal becomes an idol, possessing and dictating. However, there is something ethically significant in Williams’s and Barth’s descriptions. So Barth continues: What they [viz., ideologies] have to push systematically is their own excellence and usefulness, and by way of background they must show how utterly valueless and harmful their rivals and opponents are.

There are shades of CD I.1 in which Barth speaks in a more eschatologically nuanced way than does MacKinnon of theology as a penultimate discipline, a work of critical revision and investigation of the Church’s proclamation in view of the divine verdict, yielding all too human fallible and uncertain results.[22] As such, theology is necessarily fallible, fragile, broken, penultimate, decolorized by sin, and resistant to all conceptual foreclosures or systematization.[23] Embracing this recognition of one’s proper eschatological location will render to theology’s broken words the proper service of a humble witness, and remind any theologia gloriae of its prematurity. In other words, theology cannot escape the risk of bondage to unacknowledged narratives. And yet an ethics that includes self-testing through doubt does not have to assent to the belief that all discourse is necessarily as ideologically regulated, and therefore as free as any other from the constraints of seeking the best forms of ideolo-clasm.

The form of closure proper to a concept of ideology needs to be carefully handled. The notion of fixing an otherwise inexhaustible process of signification around certain dominant signifiers with which the subject can identify, artificially arresting linguistic productivity into the closure of a sealed world of stability, is, Terry Eagleton contends, a latently libertarian theory of the subject, which tends to ‘demonize’ the very act of semiotic closure and uncritically celebrate the euphoric release of the forces of linguistic production. . . . But [w]hether such closure is politically positive or negative depends on the discursive and ideological context.[24]

As mentioned above, precariousness and vulnerability, or living an exposed life, are part of the price paid for being honest, MacKinnon argues. It is a sense of a necessary disease that takes refuge in tradition, Christian culture, or claims finality of metaphysical explanation and therein tempers the sense and tranquilizes the pain of the exposure.[25] Instead MacKinnon advocates a deliberate cultivation of an interrogative . . . mentality, a way of being true that attends to the multiple complexities that resist neat resolutions and evacuate particularities of their concreteness in generalities, and to the substantial limitations involved in our knowing.[26] Certainly he does engage in certain speculative constructions and even reengages in a certain type of metaphysics. But these are carefully disciplined by a deeply challenging and discomforting interrogative style of doing theology in the borderlands. This he otherwise names his untidy and inconclusive exploration, so that his assessment of R. G. Collingwood could almost have been a self-depiction: In the end he raised more questions than he answered; but here certainly he reminds his readers of Socrates, who made his associates face the difficult truth of their own deep ignorance.[27]

This way of couching MacKinnon’s work might suggest that his ongoing worth is as a negative theologian, as an iconoclast who casts a careful eye over the masking of idolatrous tendencies even in, with, and under the pretext of theological performance. In this vein, Surin depicts MacKinnon’s work as "profoundly interrogative . . . rather than affirmative."[28] In his discussion of Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, MacKinnon contends for an agnosticism which continually insists that where God is concerned, we may only confidently affirm that we do not know what we mean when we speak [or conceive] of him.[29] In this vein he speaks of the primacy of the apophatic, and suggests that we continually swing between . . . anthropomorphism . . . and ..... agnosticism.[30] According to Williams, for example, the theologian’s job may be less the speaking of truth . . . than the patient diagnosis of untruths, and the reminding of the community where its attention begins.[31] However, firstly, this would be to do MacKinnon a disservice, and secondly it could lead to a perspective that would be a theological mistake in its own right.

To take the second suggestion first, the so-called negative way, if that be grounded in the event of unspeakably determining one’s own subjectivity or in reaching the limits of human reason, can be construed as equally a reflection (albeit a negative reflection) of personal subjectivity of the God-imagist. Yet for MacKinnon, not any kind of theological silence will do, and his reflections conducted in apophatic mood enable a differentiation of silences. He is clear that the claim regarding God’s incomprehensible otherness is not a projected note immanent to reason. Unlike a kind of bowdlerized apophaticism in which God is but vaguely glimpsed through the clouds of metaphysical [and linguistic] distance,[32] apophasis functions very much in terms of the theological purification or therapy of theological speech, and thus has a determining context, or set of conditions, that shape our ability to properly perform theological askesis. The negation of our gods is not a given of the projections of interiority, whether through the movement of reason or the even more nebulous experience. After all, Williams recognizes, searching for a single concealed agenda that can be unmasked by the triumphant modern interpreter is to remain . . . in thrall to crude models of power.[33] Critique is never an acontextual moment, but is rather an examination driven by an irreducibly particular history. As Denys Turner claims, That we cannot form any ‘concept’ of God is due not to the divine vacuousness, or, we could add, of the predicable limitations of reason reached its boundary-position, but, on the contrary, to the excessiveness of divine plenitude.[34] That means that the ways of negation and affirmation cannot be seen as sequential or independent. Thus when MacKinnon concludes with the comment that it is therefore only within the context of the most rigorous discipline of silence that we dare think of such a reality [of divine love], the kind of silence he has in mind already moves beyond the kind of empty silence Turner has complained of. MacKinnon has in this context already mentioned the strange and perhaps hardly explored silence of Christ in his passion. Likewise, he argues elsewhere that Christian commitment requires one to focus an always questioning faith in the figure of a man since here is the point at which faith must seek to mature itself by the effort of understanding.[35] This talk does not offer a release from the constraints of a proper sense of the divine inexpressibility, but provides the very site of, or rule for, its learning. MacKinnon’s reading, in other words, begins to implicitly contest the possibility of an indeterminate reading.

While his interrogative mood does tend to dominate matters, MacKinnon’s pronounced sense of fascination with reflexivity is not of a piece with a deconstruction that self-ironisingly erases ethical responsibility. Christians may be encouraged to be the most suspicious people around for iconoclastic reasons, and yet they are also suspicious of any unreconstructed suspicion. The God we approach in this way too easily becomes a God whose infinity renders him indifferent to the very distinction between good and evil on which Moses lays such weight.[36] This God becomes a morally absent space, an emptiness or void at the heart of human performance, a conceiving of divine difference that results in moral indifference. MacKinnon asks whether Moses must not also accept for himself the discipline of silence, [and] even admit with a smile that the Aarons of this world help administer such discipline?[37] The issue is not simply one of speech and silence, but one of the nature of human existence, and thus one of ontology with an ethical significance. [W]hat sort of silence, he asks, what sort of repudiation of every image best conveys the ultimacy not of judgement but of love?[38] In fact, the abandonment of the God of the commandments results in moral disintegration, as the people negate the proper shape of their being-as-responsible-agents. MacKinnon’s Aaron is in error not in the attempt at public communication, but, despite his pastoral concerns for servicing the religious needs of the people, his mistake is in yielding to the pressure of the demand for a visible and comprehensible form of the restoration of the old gods.[39] Aaron’s is comforting, indulgent worship. MacKinnon does not suggest that the truth is not comforting (Matt 5:4), but his target is a disposition that preeminently requires comfort, since this is a self-indulgence that instrumentalizes the faith. Aaron’s is a conforming, consoling, too humanly human idol that trivializes the worship of God to the level of devotion to a godling who will condone every human weakness and indulgence.[40]

On the other hand, there are types of Christian faith that forget how to doubt, of Christian joy that are afraid to weep, of Christian preaching that are afraid to listen, but MacKinnon’s deeply and uncomfortably interrogative theological mood resists such shortcuts to resurrection faith. Our time has not yet known the revealed glory of resurrection. MacKinnon’s theology, then, can encourage schooling in new ways of resisting the paralyzing introspectiveness of a therapy culture by learning how to hope beyond any refusal to face the darkness of the cross or any pessimism that cannot see the cross in the light of the resurrection.

The first suggestion mentioned above gestures towards another note in MacKinnon’s writing—even if it is sometimes offered only on the margins, at other times only as directive of his critical voice from well under the rhetorical surface, and on others even distinctly audibly subdued even if never domesticated. This note is MacKinnon’s testimonial voice, a voice that seeks to illuminate things as they are,[41] a voice that attempts to offer guidance to understanding the infinite mysteriousness of the God whose ways are healing for creatures. That call to life takes its shape in and through the compelling witness to the depths of divine embodiment in the life of God’s world. This is where the critical mood is in the business of servicing the celebratory, for disciplining Christian conviction against the spirits that are not responsibly reflective of the iconization of the Spirit of the divine.

If MacKinnon appears hesitant to allow full reign to the celebratory mood, to the urgency of confessional testimony, it is because he is struck by the antikenotic tendency to leap over the unstanched wound inflicted on the Christian imagination by the cross, the stubborn messiness of the tragic. Kerr argues that "For MacKinnon, the locus theologicus, the ‘place’ to begin and end Christian theology, was Gethsemane, the ‘agony’ in the garden."[42] Recognizing this is crucial, for it is not only this refusal of the dishonest slip into the glib and facile modes of the imagination that eminently attracts MacKinnon to von Balthasar, but it is from here that his self-reflexivity takes its rise. His interrogative theological disposition, or as in George Steiner’s description of Kierkegaard, the prevention of the frozen certitudes of the dogmatic, the inertia of the canonic, is irreducibly informed by the cross[43]—this necessitates a refusal to absent thought from the pressure of the surd. As Williams suggests, The final control and measure and irritant in Christian speech remains the cross.[44] It is in this context that MacKinnon finds the dramatic imagination of tragic drama an eminently fruitful resource for the theological imagination.

The Tragic Gospel?

It is in refusal to capitulate to the self-indulgent temptations of imagining that the way one tells one’s story is free from articulated falsehoods and that humble dialogue with other perspectives and disciplines begins. Barth’s famous assertion concerning the possibility of hearing God in strange places conceptually belongs here[45]; it is a way of, as he later describes it, eavesdropping on the world. Thus while alien categories are not brought in, theology of this sort is willing to learn from non-theological sources something about the mechanisms of deceit and control in language.[46] Jürgen Moltmann’s claim is that Ideological and political criticism from outside can force theology and the church to reveal their true identity and no longer hide behind an alien mask drawn from history and the present time.[47] What one senses in MacKinnon, however, is the very fact that there is a certain problem with sloppy talk of outside—there is no outside to grace other than sin, and sin pervades the church as well. Putting this into a little more practice, MacKinnon cites a broad range of dialogue partners: "A radical Christian should be among the first to insist that many existing religious beliefs, institutions and performances . . . are fair target not only for disciplined academic criticism but for the kind of merciless satire on TV and radio which has caused so much indignation among the bien-pensants"[48]

In other words, Christian theology, for the sake of its own health (hearing the world’s judgment upon itself) and that of God’s world (the environment of the now fallen-but-still-graced-creation), has to be in the business of conversing widely. God, Williams declares, is to be sought and listened for in all occasions.[49] This perspective, of course, requires qualification, since while one ought to be enabled to make reference to God differently, there are severe dangers, and thus one’s address to God must heed and follow (albeit not slavishly) Jesus’s address to God. What it is that serves to control the reading, as Barth suggests with his talk of the little lights of creation receiving their radiance through participation in the light, is what David Tracy calls an interpretation of Christian fact.[50] And as is the case in MacKinnon’s theological sensibility, a far more radical notion (and various forms of ideological and political criticism seem to have led him to this recognition) is the crucified Christ himself, as Moltmann is surely right to argue.[51]

Characteristic of his theological alertness to the power systems operative in understanding is his attention to the multiple complexities and contingencies that resist neat resolutions and oppose the evacuation of particularities’ concreteness in generalities, and to the substantial limitations involved in our knowing. Being attentive to the potential for discourse distortion by reference to all discourses’ inescapable cultural embeddedness does not entail that one can ever know that one has wriggled free from the grip of distortion and illusion. But it is at least a good start to maintain discourse in constant self-interrogation—or better yet, to acknowledge self-interrogation as a constant travelling companion (a discomforting