This book is dedicated to the memory of the post-war British theologian Donald MacKinnon (1913–1994). It seeks to embody something of the form, and perpetuate something of the content, of MacKinnon’s preoccupations within the ‘borderlands of theology’. MacKinnon’s essays contain open-textured provocations, diagnoses, protests, and questions, all backed by a vast array of cross-disciplinary reference. Such inspiration is detectable in Corner’s book. It contains an argument divided into five parts, each of which contains multiple short chapters. From various angles, they explore the place of uncertainty and failure in contemporary theology. These themes are thought to characterise a ‘kenotic approach’, which Corner believes to be ‘a central theme of MacKinnon’s writings’ (p. 102). It is also the approach, so Corner argues, that is most likely to ‘rescue’ God, or rather, the plausibility of belief in God in an age of scepticism and secularisation (p. 49). David Brown emerges as a major interlocutor, with Sarah Coakley and Bruce McCormack also making appearances when knotty doctrinal and philosophical problems related to kenoticism are aired.
Parts 1–3 advance the point that epistemological uncertainty is what we should expect as the theological norm in a creation brought into being by a self-limiting God. This is not the God of the deists, the blind watchmaker, nor is it the God of a self-assured believer who finds a sacred text, institution or religious experience to be secure foundations for theological truth claims. Such options are ruled out for Christians because the incarnation renders faith open to judgments of historical probability. For Corner, a key task for theologians is to help the church manage this state of uncertainty. This will mean eschewing the irrationalism of Kierkegaardian ‘leaps’ or logical proofs for God’s existence. Even so, philosophical approaches to chance (Part 2) and scientific approaches to time and space (Part 3) are seen to describe a universe in which a self-limiting God may be more plausible than not. God’s agency is not limited to the ‘gaps’ of scientific knowledge but is conceived as a sustaining reality in, with and under all things.
In Part 4, Corner looks to Heidegger, Aristotle and Aquinas for help to clarify the necessity or inevitability of conceiving of such divine sustaining and draws upon metaphors of ‘light’ and ‘being’ as possible ways of conceptualising the ‘universe’s continuing dependence on the Creator’ (p. 146). I imagine the average atheistic philosopher or scientist will remain unmoved at such proposals, while believers may be reassured. For Corner, the contingency, dynamism and disorder of the natural order may open the way to faith, but a faith in which nothing is guaranteed. Indeed, the whole enterprise of human history may end in failure, but such is the terrible freedom in and through which God exists and creates.
From beginning to end, the author is keen to grasp various ‘nettles’. Whether it is the possibility of human self-destruction, the fact that God may be unable to save some people from their own free choices, or even effect the ultimate victory of good over evil. All are expressions of vulnerability which are in accord with an affirmation of ‘the eternal process of mutual indwelling-in-vulnerability that is the essence of the triune God’ (p. 218). In the colourful idiom that characterises Corner’s style, readers are asked to reject ‘skydiving’ conceptions of kenoticism (p. 133). Such approaches posit that the incarnation is God’s temporary brush with contingency, limitation and failure, before the incarnate Word ‘returns’ to the safety of the omnipotent imminent Trinity, there to bask in victorious impassability. Here McCormack’s notion of ‘ontological receptivity’ of the eternal Trinity to the incarnate Son is discussed, and Corner judges him to have avoided the full implications of a too radical kenoticism by disallowing any role for notions of divine mutability.
Notable also is Corner’s scepticism of kenotic theologies that seek foundations in trinitarian relational ontologies, seeing them as driven by an anxiety to protect Christ’s mission from the possibility of frustration and failure. By contrast, he insists on beginning all talk of eternal trinitarian kenosis with reference to Jesus’ uncertainty about his own vocation, his temptations and the real (rather than merely apparent) failure of the cross. Alarmingly, in grasping this particular nettle, histories of atonement that draw on sacrificial and substitutionary concepts are rejected out of hand rather than repaired. Likewise, the resurrection is reduced to something like the uncanny persistence of love in an otherwise unremittingly tragic world. The Eucharist is held out as a means to participate in an albeit muted divine celebration of some sort.
I fear that the author may have fallen into various traps that MacKinnon avoided by invoking the category of ‘substance’, most notably in a 1972 essay exploring the relationship between christological dogma and metaphysical categories. This allowed MacKinnon to hold paradoxical claims in tension, such that God’s immutability and ultimate victory over evil were never placed in a zero-sum game with the fact of Christ’s historic ‘failure’. For MacKinnon, attention to historical tragedy was a corrective to crass theodicy and idealistic metaphysics, but they were never presented as the foundation of a revised Christian ontology. If we are not, in the end, left with a passive, mutable God and ‘process panentheism’, then Corner delivers us to a destination that feels very much like it. MacKinnon encouraged the grasping of many nettles, but this was not one of them. Despite such reservations, Corner’s book provides a lucid and provocative contribution to debates as to the viability and limits of kenotic theologies.
