Donald MacKinnon’s place in twentieth-century Anglican theology is substantial, but arguably unacknowledged. The Scotsman’s writings have had significant influence on a generation of theologians he trained – Rowan Williams chief among them – but his own work has largely fallen into obscurity, not helped perhaps by his dense prose and occasional obscurantism. In the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity, where MacKinnon taught for many years as Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, MacKinnon lives on in an arresting portrait in one hallway and in the amusing stories told by his former students of interacting with their sometimes awkward professor.

This volume brings together several of MacKinnon’s important works and makes them freshly available to a new generation of Anglican and ecumenical thinkers. To spend time with MacKinnon is to be taken into the heart of a gospel message which emphasizes the transcendence and glory of God against the struggle of humanity and the brokenness of the world.

Kenotic Ecclesiology reprints two short books from the 1940 Signposts series: God the Living and True and The Church of God. The first reveals several characteristic emphases for MacKinnon. It combines theology and philosophy and begins by asking how Christians are to live at a time of ‘the triumph of the forces of nihilism and unreason around us and within’ (p. 43). For MacKinnon, the answer is to embrace the apparent irrationality of the gospel: ‘whom God wills to save, he first drives mad’ (p. 44). A repeated word in this book is ‘frustration’, which is equated with sinfulness. Characteristic of the human condition is our inability to achieve in the way God calls us. Christ in his resurrection calls us out of our inability to resolve that frustration. There is an important role for the church, whose function ‘is in every age to bring the individual and the society in which his life is cast face to face with the judgment of God, once revealed in the execution of Christ’ (p. 63). Here one can hear strongly ideas later developed in the theology of Rowan Williams.

MacKinnon’s deep care and concern for the church was not untempered by criticism. It is perhaps the final section of this book that speaks most clearly to the church of today. ‘Kenosis and Establishment’, first delivered as the Gore Memorial Lecture at Westminster Abbey in 1968, is a strident critique of the Church of England and a stirring call for the church to acknowledge and embrace the ‘post-Constantinian age’ in which it finds itself. No longer should ‘episcopal lawn sleeves … flutter in the breeze as their wearer bestowed the diocesan benediction upon the latest Polaris submarine’ (p. 189). Instead, the church is to embrace the kenosis of the Christ, the same kenosis that Gore put at the centre of his own work. To be a Christian today, MacKinnon writes, ‘is to be stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows’ (p. 190). Christians are called to cultivate a spirituality that enables the church to truly witness to the gospel and embrace a weakness in which strength is made perfect.

Kenotic Ecclesiology also contains several other of MacKinnon’s essays, originally published in the book The Stripping of the Altars. One title that catches the eye of the modern reader is ‘The Controversial Bishop Bell’, in reference to George Bell, Bishop of Chichester. The essay, a 1967 tribute to the late bishop, sees the controversy of Bell not, naturally, in his recent posthumous treatment by the Church of England but rather in the example he offered in society. MacKinnon sees in him the kind of spirituality which he longs for the church to lay claim to. Bell ‘knew himself a citizen of another country, whose laws and demands were in increasingly sharp conflict with those of the province he knew’ (p. 236).

Like Michael Ramsey, Austin Farrer, and indeed Rowan Williams, MacKinnon – as a Scottish Episcopalian – grew up in a situation of religious minority. It is perhaps noteworthy that the three editors of this book all come from outside England and may similarly be drawn to the outsider perspective that MacKinnon never lost. Each section of the book is introduced by one of the editors. While their contributions may sometimes rival the denseness of MacKinnon’s prose, the editors are to be commended for gathering a selection of MacKinnon’s writings into one volume and making them widely available to a new generation. MacKinnon’s concerns are not that different from our own.