PT Forsyth, a Japanese Translation and an Unforgettable memory of Professor Donald Mackinnon

I  opened a parcel yesterday and found in it the recently published collection of essays on P T Forsyth, published in Japan, and in Japanese. I have a chapter in it which is a reprint of the piece on Forsyth from Evangelical Spirituality – never thought I'd be published in Japanese though!

The volume is a translation of Justice the True and Only Mercy, the collection of essays edited by Trevor Hart after the Forsyth Colloquium held in Aberdeen in 1995. That they wanted to add my chapter as a concluding essay is humbling and at the same time makes me feel a wee bit chuffed!

One memory of that colloquium stamped deeply in my affections was the paper delivered with Shakespearean power by Donald Mackinnon. It was a characteristic combination of lucid perplexity and integrated disjointedness! You have to envisage Professor Mackinnon's large presence, big arms waving and hands grasping and ungrasping as he threw out  grappling hooks, seeking anchor points on which to hang a virtuoso account of Forsyth, tragedy, German philosophy and high culture, atonement theology, kenotic christology and much else delivered with passion and in a voice modulating between gruff assertion and poignant questioning. It was as memorable a performance of theology as I've ever seen.

The essay in the book, revised and tidied up for publication, is a pale reflection of that encounter between Forsyth, Mackinnon and a bemused audience. Those of us who were there were both puzzled and moved, taught from deep wells and frustrated by an intellect ablaze, witnessing one of the great minds in 20th Century philosophical theology, like Samson wrestling with huge pillars of thought and threatening to bring it all crashing down on our heads. I exaggerate – a little! But it is the exaggeration of an affectionate admirer who gladly witnessed one of the genuine polymaths, performing an intellectual mini-concert, and displaying genius that eschewed pedagogic techniques that might make his thought more accessible to his audience. We weren't there to hear, but to overhear the theological soliloquy of a mind independent, fierce and passionately religious.