Obituary of John Macquarrie

New York Times prints obit of John Macquarrie

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/world/europe/03macquarrie.html?ei=5088&en=89b19c94d576a5fc&ex=1338523200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

Rev. John Macquarrie, 87, Scottish Theologian, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

The Rev. Dr. John Macquarrie, an influential theologian whose graceful writing and sagacious melding of existentialist philosophy with orthodox Christian thought offered intellectually penetrating rationales for belief in God, died on May 28 in Oxford, England, where he lived. He was 87.
The cause was stomach cancer, his son Alan said.

Dr. Macquarrie was a Scottish Presbyterian minister turned Episcopal priest who never lost his enthusiasm for preaching in parish
churches. But he earned his reputation as one of the 20th century's leading theologians for lucidly combining the thinking of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, whose works he translated, with his own and others' interpretations of the Bible.

One of his goals was to develop an accessible theology relevant to a world that after the Holocaust and World War II seemed to doubt divine guidance.

Dr. Macquarrie's fluency in German facilitated early books in which he interpreted the groundbreaking New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, and gave a religious emphasis to the works of Heidegger and other existentialist philosophers.
He went on to write evenhanded surveys of modern theology, address practical concerns like prayer, find similarities among great Eastern and Western thinkers and detail his own beliefs in his masterpiece, "Principles of Christian Theology" (1966).
Dr. Macquarrie wrote about two dozen books. Reviewing one, "Paths in Spirituality," for The New York Times Book Review in 1972, Nash K. Burger wrote that "unlike some modern theologians, John Macquarrie writes about God as though he believes in him."
The God in which Dr. Macquarrie believed was Being itself, a definition that to him made it meaningless to suggest that God was dead or did not exist. In this, he adopted aspects of Heidegger's search for the meaning of being, although he eschewed Heidegger's pro-Nazi views.

Dr. Macquarrie wrote that all language about God was symbolic and not to be taken literally. But it must be taken seriously. To him, what separated believers from nonbelievers was that believers had experienced the revelation that the creation and its existence are good.

"Faith's name for reality is God," Dr. Macquarrie wrote in "Paths in Spirituality."

He said that the New Testament was misread to make Jesus seem divine, a view cemented into the church's early creeds. His Jesus was fully but not merely human, being the one human who most perfectly mirrored God's presence on earth.
In a speech in Richmond, Va., in 1993, he characterized Jesus as "a human being who was the bearer and the revealer of a deity."
In the audience was Dr. William L. Sachs, an Episcopal associate rector, who savored Dr. Macquarrie's theorizing, delivered in his soft Scottish burr. Dr. Sachs likened the experience to "listening to a fine, fine Beethoven symphony."

Dr. Macquarrie held several posts, including professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford and canon of Christ Church Cathedral at Oxford.

John Macquarrie was born in Renfrew, Scotland, on June 27, 1919. His grandfather was a Gaelic speaker, and his father was a craftsman in the shipyards and an elder in a Presbyterian church. He said he had idolized the local Presbyterian minister, who had a deep interest in philosophy.

He graduated from Glasgow University, where he earned highest honors in philosophy, then stayed on to earn another degree, in divinity. He worked briefly as an assistant parish minister in the Church of Scotland, then joined the British Army in 1943. He was ordained in 1945 and served in the army's chaplain department until 1948.

He worked as a parish minister until returning to Glasgow University to earn his doctorate in 1954 and lecture until 1962, when he joined Union Theological Seminary.

In New York, he became attracted to what he considered the richness of the Catholic element in Christianity in America's Episcopal Church. He became a deacon and then a priest in that church, which is called Anglican in Britain.
In 1970, he was persuaded to move to Oxford. In addition to his outpouring of scholarly work and his responsibilities in the classroom and at the cathedral, he found time to accept invitations to preach to an Oxfordshire village church or deliver a paper to local clergymen, the London newspaper The Telegraph reported.

Dr. Macquarrie is survived by his wife, the former Jenny Fallow Welsh; his sons Alan, of Glasgow, and John, of Oxford, his daughter, Katherine, of Dingwall, Scotland, and two grandsons.

As his systematic theology became ever more refined, Dr. Macquarrie's appreciation for the broad spectrum of Christian thought — from Quaker to Catholic to Baptist and beyond — grew. He propounded a view that some consider heresy: religions other than Christianity can and do reveal ultimate truth.

Dr. Macquarrie cautioned against dealing too severely with heretics, recalling the harsh fate of the Rev. John McLeod Campbell, whom the Scottish church expelled from the ministry for writing in 1856 that salvation was available to all, not just the chosen. Souvenirs of Campbell's life are now displayed in Glasgow University as if they were relics of a saint.
"In the long run, the only effective answer to heresy, near heresy and errors of other kinds is for the church to show that she has a better theology than the person suspected of error," Dr. Macquarrie wrote.