ABSTRACT
Professor MacKinnon writes as the Apostle Paul wrote in the Epistle to the Romans, searching a self painfully sensitive to conflicting claims, obedient to that posterior centre of unity from which both claims derive and in which both subsist, yet torn by them in the self to a depth which honesty can contemplate but not assuage. On Paul the claims were of two communities, Old Israel and the new – both, as he was bound to say, from God and both one in God, but seemingly irreconcilable in Paul's own person. Professor MacKinnon is sensitive to the suspicion, in an academic community, that the substance and method of his own discipline, the philosophy of religion, are intellectually dubious. It is in the second part of his paper, when he is dealing less with inheritance of the past and more with the present engagement, that Professor MacKinnon by clarity of vision penetrates to something like a solution to his own problem.
