With this collection of essays, Moser and Nasmith draw attention to an important but often overlooked figure of the early twentieth century. Hugh Ross Mackintosh was Professor of Systematic Theology at New College in Edinburgh from 1904 to 1936, his thought shaping a generation of students that included John and Donald Baillie as well as T. F. Torrance. He worked constructively at the intersection of German and Scottish theology, reviewed and translated into English important nineteenth-century German works, and was one of the first Scottish voices engaging with the dialectical theologians of the 1920s that included Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. Given Mackintosh's résumé and widespread influence, Moser and Nasmith have done a good service in organising a collection that spans his career and demonstrates his theological acumen.
Following a short preface and an introduction, the book is laid out in four main parts, three of which correspond to central themes in Mackintosh's constructive theology: revelation, redemption and atonement, and christology. The fourth section includes essays on the ‘Spirit and spirituality’ and is followed by an appendix that entails two of Mackintosh's sermons. On the whole, the book contains some of Mackintosh's finest work, such as ‘The Unio Mystica as a Theological Conception’ which defends ‘union with Christ’ as a uniquely moral and profoundly metaphysical concept that is essential to the Christian doctrine of redemption. Additionally, the editors provide helpful references for many of Mackintosh's quotations that are missing in the original versions of essays.
The preface introduces Mackintosh's conception of God as a personal and moral agent who encounters individuals in human experience. Thus, the editors suggest, Mackintosh's theological method involves ‘[looking] for features of human experience that serve as experiential evidence of God's active moral character’ (p. vii). While this description rightfully highlights the importance of human experience in Mackintosh's thought, it also risks presenting Mackintosh's thought as more subjective than it actually is. For Mackintosh, humans neither search their experiences for God nor does God exist in one's experience; rather, God is known through human experience. Encountering humans as a personal and moral agent, God prompts individuals to look beyond one's experience towards the object of its cause; that cause is God self-revealed in the person, life and work of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the scriptures and proclaimed in the life and witness of the Church. In other words, human experience is the medium through which God self-reveals rather than any sort of end in itself. (See, for example, ‘The Ritschlian Doctrine of Theoretical and Religious Knowledge’ or the essay ‘History and the Gospel’ in this collection.) While much more might be said by way of explanation, the point is that, though Moser and Nasmith rightfully highlight human experience as a vital aspect of Mackintosh's thought, they have overlooked the nuances that keep it from falling into subjectivity.
The introduction discloses the main argument of the book. Aligning him with Wilhelm Herrmann and emphasising his sympathies with the nineteenth-century German liberal tradition, Moser and Nasmith use Mackintosh as a foil to critique the theology of Karl Barth. Though this view does well to recognise the affinity between Mackintosh and Herrmann, it does not address Mackintosh's later enthusiasm for Barth's theology. For example, Mackintosh's 1933 Croall Lectures, posthumously published in 1937 as Types of Modern Theology, present a mostly positive overview of Barth's theology to date, thus demonstrating more solidarity with him than Moser and Nasmith allow.
Perhaps a more helpful introduction to Mackintosh's work would involve better highlighting his Scottish background and influences, individuals such as John McLeod Campbell and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, alongside his German conservation partners. Though Mackintosh engages deeply with German theology, he does so from a distinctively Scottish perspective that prevents him from belonging to any particular German theological school and facilitates his rather unique theological outlook.
Overall, this collection of essays presents readers with an excellent introduction to Mackintosh's thought. Moser and Nasmith should be commended for this compilation, as it provides a central perch from which one might survey the landscape of Mackintosh's theology and begin to discover both its complexity and its richness. One can only hope that these essays spark a wider reception and reading of Mackintosh's work, as he deserves far greater attention than the past century of theologians have paid him.
