Philosophy and the Burden of Theological Honesty


Book Description

Donald M. MacKinnon has been one of the most important and influential of post-war British theologians and religious philosophers. Generally eclectic, frequently allusive, usually intellectually generous, persistently richly challenging and always astonishingly erudite, he had a significant impact on the development and subsequent theological work of the likes of Rowan Williams, Nicholas Lash, David Ford and John Milbank. A younger generation largely emerging from Cambridge, but with influence elsewhere, has more recently brought MacKinnon's normally occasionalist writing to a larger audience worldwide where it is beginning to receive noteworthy attention. In this collection several of MacKinnon's most outstanding papers not yet published in book format is collected together with an Editorial Introduction by a former student of one of MacKinnon's own students.They range from his reflections on theology as educational, the nature of moral reasoning, considerations of ecclesial practice, dogmatics and hope.Here is another reminder of MacKinnon's intellectual brilliance.




Donald MacKinnon's Theology


Book Description

Andrew Bowyer presents the first comprehensive examination of Donald MacKinnon's theology in relation to his moral philosophy. He offers an original and creative reading of MacKinnon's methodology, and important insights into the key influences and core questions which stood at the heart of his work. Bowyer outlines MacKinnon's contributions to Anglican theology in the aftermath of the Second World War, highlighting the “therapeutic” nature of his approach in as far as it combined a call for intense self-awareness with a commitment to moral realism. As one of the most influential Anglican theologians in the mid-twentieth century, MacKinnon's writings reveal him as a restive and unsystematic thinker. However, Bowyer argues that a series of reoccurring questions – 'obsessions' might better honour the memory of MacKinnon's temperament –appear throughout his work, relating to the tensions between the realism and idealism, the call to be “morally serious”, the nature of theological truth claims, and the perennially disruptive presence of Christ. Bowyer examines the key influences on MacKinnon's thought, the centrality of Christology to his project, his engagement with literature and literary criticism, as well as his response to Wittgenstein's later philosophy. This volume offers an appreciation of his contribution and a critique of his legacy.







Kenotic Ecclesiology


Book Description

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.”




Borderlands of Theology


Book Description

This collection of Professor MacKinnon's writings shows his three preoccupations: philosophical, theological, and ethical. As a philosopher and theologian working in one of the world's great scientific centers, Professor MacKinnon is aware (as he says) "that it is in the laboratories of the molecular biological research unit and in the radio astronomical observatory rather than in the libraries and lecture rooms of the Divinity School that the frontiers of human knowledge are being pushed back." Faced with this challenge Professor MacKinnon's mind is continuously moving on the borderlands between theology and knowledge and is again and again driven to formulate some estimate of the person of Jesus Christ."If I remain in some sense a Christian," he says, "it is because of the questions set to me by the person of Christ . . . we face the question of the sense in which a concrete individual may not simply teach or reveal what is true, as Jesus did to the Samaritan woman and to others, but be the Truth!"These essays are evidence of a powerful and incisive mind which is able to relate the philosophical, theological, and ethical problems of our time and to offer guidance to the serious reader and thinker. Professor MacKinnon is at work on the frontiers where theological and Christian belief is being tested and tried today by the sweep of new knowledge and new disciplines.




On Tragedy and Transcendence


Book Description

From the time of Plato’s proposed expulsion of the poets, tragedy has repeatedly proposed a challenge to philosophical and theological certainties. This is apparent already in early Christianity amongst leading figures during the patristic age. But this raises the question: Why was the theme of tragedy still accepted and deployed throughout the history of Christianity nevertheless? Is this merely an accident or is there something more substantial at play? Can Christian theology take the tragic seriously? Must Christianity ultimately deny the tragic to be coherent, or might it be able to sustain its negativity? Some like George Steiner, David Bentley Hart, and John Milbank have doubts about such a coherency, but others think differently. This book aims to examine this debate, laying out the lines of disagreement and continuing tensions. Through a critical examination of the work of Donald MacKinnon and the eminent Christian thinker Rowan Williams, the book aims to show that there is a path for reconciling the claims of Christian orthodoxy and the experience of tragedy, one that is able to maintain a metaphysical foundation for both real transcendence and unfolding historicity, without denying either.




Donald M. MacKinnon


Book Description




The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology


Book Description

One of the 'borderlands' of theology is the area in which it concerns overlap with those of philosophy. This book charts some of the frontiers that are of most concern in contemporary discussion. Beginning with a study of ontology in the New Testament, it proceeds to consider the borderlands between theology and philosophy from different standpoints in four main groups: the apostolic and patristic age, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, morality and ethics and, finally, contemporary reflection about meaning and truth. This distinguished collection of essays has been produced to honour Donald McKinnon, who retired from the Norris-Hulse Professorship of Divinity in the University of Cambridge in 1978, a bibliography of whose published writings is included in the volume.




Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams


Book Description

Brett Gray traces the portrayal of Christ that emerges throughout Williams' diverse writings, including in his engagements with literature and philosophy. What emerges is a vision of Jesus that grows from the roots of the Christian tradition, but is pronounced in a contemporary idiom and sensitive to modern concerns. Although attentive to the broad sweep of the Christian tradition, Williams' Christology is also seen in this book to be a particular British artefact, shaped in dialogue with thinkers such as Donald MacKinnon and Gillian Rose. What is ultimately brought to the surface in this work is the profoundly hopeful, if frequently under-pronounced, eschatology underlying Williams' Christology. Jesus is the “last word”, changing creation's possibilities and summoning it into an endless and vivifying journey.




The Lyric Voice in English Theology


Book Description

In this book, Elizabeth S. Dodd traces the contours of a lyric theology through the lens of English lyric tradition. She addresses the dominance of narrative and drama in contemporary theological aesthetics by drawing on recent developments in lyric theory. Informed by the work of critics such as Jonathan Culler, Dodd explores the significance of lyric for theological discourse. Lyric is presented here as a short, musical, expressive and personal form that is also fragmentary, embodied, socially located and performative. The main chapters address key moments in English lyric tradition. This selective approach aims to expand the theological gaze beyond the monochromatic features of the traditional canon. It covers Anglo-Saxon hymns, medieval lullaby carols, early-modern sonnets and the prophetic poetry of Romanticism, but also Grime and hip hop, performance poetry, social media poetry and Geoffrey Hill.