Kenosis as Therapy: Donald MacKinnon in Recent Literature

Abstract

After several decades of being out-of-print, it is a fitting gesture that we finally have a republication of Donald MacKinnon's Signpost pamphlets as well as The Stripping of the Altars. 1 John McDowell, Scott Kirkland, and Ashley Moyse should be thanked for their initiative in making sure that these texts-which exist somewhat at the edges of his most disseminated work-are given their theological centrality. They press home the fact, once more, that MacKinnon was a figure who very much inhabited "the borderlands," whether these were the technicalities of moral philosophy or the sometime depressing suasions of Anglican Realpolitik. MacKinnon was a layman well-known for his more abstruse and interrogative explorations, as seen in other essay collections and monographs; but what these texts collected here reiterate is his deep and abiding concern for the nature of the Church and the cruciformity of its persistence. They present MacKinnon simultaneously at his most confessional and polemical, as one who did not shy away from inserting himself into the ecclesiological ordeal, and especially the debate regarding "establishment." In a contribution for The Cambridge Review in 1966, MacKinnon did not hesitate to call the historical "privilege" of the Church of England "sheerly grotesque." 2 In Kenotic Ecclesiology, however, there is a bit more of a measured tone even in the most significant of the texts here collected ("Kenosis and Establishment"), a fact partially traceable to its original audience and its historically grandiose setting. 3 But the overall tensions and tonalities herein, which are by and large conciliatory, probably also reflect MacKinnon's own "outsider" position, that is, his uneasy self-navigation