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Rev. John Macquarrie

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.

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.”

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.

Full story at the New York Times.