Of the many threads to Macquarrie’s theological writing, the related themes of epistemology and hermeneutics are the most dominant. Even in his exploration of Christology, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought, much of the work is devoted to understanding how it is that humans can come to know who Jesus was and is, rather than expounding a particular view of Christology.Footnote 2 Macquarrie establishes the ‘Christ-event’ as an existential encounter, in which knowledge of God and Christ is established through revelation and experience, yet this is constantly framed within and tempered by an appeal to both biblical studies and to an undefined notion of the ‘plausible’ or ‘reasonable’. Macquarrie’s use of these three quite different approaches to theology creates something of a tension within his theological epistemology. Macquarrie’s theology is imbued with a deep interest in the mystical experience of God, something which is related in part to his early studies on Heidegger and to his study of Christian mysticism, particularly the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, amongst others.Footnote 3 His engagement with the mystical is not systematized or explained in detail, but he views Heidegger as a modern mystic (of sorts),Footnote 4 also utilizing Dionysian mysticism in his description of the sacraments, particularly in his portrayal of the idea of the symbol in worship.Footnote 5 There is an underlying sense throughout his work that revelation and experience produce a type of knowledge that is real and known to an individual but one that is not fully disclosable or is difficult to articulate.Footnote 6
The first section of this article explores Macquarrie’s engagement with Heidegger and the importance of experience in the development of knowledge. Macquarrie’s theological writings always begin from the self and from within. This process of inward reflection to gain an understanding of not only the world ‘outside’, but also of God is a fundamental part of Macquarrie’s thought: feelings and emotions are the basic tools with which individuals reflect on themselves and the divine. The second section explores the way in which this sense of knowing through emotion is contrasted and augmented by mystical experience, or revelation. For Macquarrie both revelation and reflection on the world ‘outside’ generate a change in an individual. However, while self-reflection on the world is personal, mystical experience is both personal, in the sense that a mystical experience is individual and internal, but, through liturgy and worship, which are means of establishing mystical experience, it is also corporate. The relationship between individual and corporate spirituality is central to Macquarrie’s thought. The final section explores the role of Scripture and reason in the evaluation of experience and revelation. Part of Macquarrie’s appeal to reason and reasonableness is found in the way he looks to biblical studies, especially New Testament studies, in his theological works: Macquarrie often looks to consensus as a sign of reasonableness. For example, in his study on Christology an important part of his argument is based on the development of Christology utilizing a dating system reliant on New Testament studies.Footnote 7 He does the same in his discussions of the Last Supper and the Eucharist.Footnote 8
The way in which Macquarrie sees the experience of the individual, the experience of the Church as a whole, and the importance for considering what is plausible have a certain resonance with Hooker’s so-called ‘three-legged stool’. The way in which Scripture, tradition and reason are played against each other in both Hooker’s and Macquarrie’s hermeneutic approach to theology does suggest that Macquarrie may have Hooker in mind, even if only subconsciously. Importantly, both Hooker and Macquarrie begin from an assumption that humans cannot know anything conclusively about God,Footnote 9 both maintain the insufficiency of Scripture,Footnote 10 both reflect the importance of early Church doctrine,Footnote 11 and both see a need to think theologically through reason.Footnote 12 In this regard, Macquarrie’s theological epistemology emerges out of the Anglican tradition. The article will end by reflecting on the ways in which Macquarrie’s epistemology gives space for both individual and corporate identities, and how such a position may contribute to contemporary issues within the Anglican Communion.
Epistemology and Emotion
The distinction between ‘intellectual knowledge’ and ‘felt knowledge’ or ‘experienced knowledge’ is one that is often marked semantically in many languages and often forms an important part of a religious or philosophical understanding of epistemology: for example, Wissen and Kentnnis in German, ϵιδϵιν and γνοσιρ in Greek, ‘ilm and ma‘rifa in Arabic and so on. Although much more could be said here about Macquarrie’s use of Heidegger in the development of his theology, Heidegger is only one of a great many influences on Macquarrie’s theological epistemology, and the thought of Martin Buber, Rudolf Bultmann and Hans-Georg Gadamer also warrant some attention. This section will explore the presence and role of felt-knowledge (i.e. Kenntnis) within his epistemology, as opposed to knowledge that is externally verifiable or analysable.
Heidegger’s conception of being-there (Dasein) is informed, in part, by Befindlichkeit, ‘affectivity’, that is the state in which one finds oneself, or the fact that as humans we feel and experience emotions within specific contexts. The introduction of Befindlichkeit into an understanding of epistemology goes beyond what is normally believed to be philosophically permissible, since, as Bruce Baugh comments, ‘feeling and emotion are more commonly regarded as interfering with knowledge’.Footnote 13 Yet for Heidegger:
we find ourselves in the world always in one mood or another mood. We do not start our existence, but we find ourselves as already existing, as already started. We find ourselves as thrown into the world not knowing, but as already disclosed, as being.Footnote 14
Both understanding (Verstehen) and affectivity (Befindlichkeit) form part of Heidegger’s understanding of being. We become aware of our own being within the context of individual moments in time, and our understanding of our self, our own being, and the world around us is influenced by how we feel and what we have experienced. These elements form a projection (Entwurf) onto all that we think and see. Macquarrie argues that:
to talk of projecting meanings is also to say that all understanding includes an act of interpretation. Whatever presents itself to us is seen ‘as something’ or heard ‘as something’, and so on… To assign meanings implies that we already have a frame of reference (or several frames of reference) on which we ‘place’ the several objects that confront us in experience.Footnote 15
The idea of understanding being mediated through interpretation permeates Macquarrie’s liberal theology, or as he puts it, ‘theological knowledge must be from the inside, it must be faith interpreting itself’.Footnote 16 For Heidegger, the interpreter is the source of meaning and where meaning happens,Footnote 17 and this is also seen in Macquarrie’s own theological epistemology.
This focus on the self and ‘felt-knowledge’ (Kenntnis) as the main vehicle for the development of theology can be seen in Macquarrie’s Christology, which emanates not from a reflection on God, per se, but from Christ’s humanity and the human, or more specifically, every individual’s response to it. He writes:
How then can one hope to speak intelligibly of Jesus Christ if one begins by talking about his coming from God or identifying him with the divine Logos? But there is something more to it than just the practical demands of the education situation. If there is any truth in the idea of incarnation, then this must mean meeting people where they are, and in a secular age that means meeting them on the level of their everyday humanity.Footnote 18
Macquarrie is not simply arguing that a ‘top down’ Christology is difficult from a missiological perspective; but, rather, he approaches his Christology from the basis that people come to knowledge through their selves and their own feelings and experiences, that is through a mixture of Befindlichkeit and projection. For Bultmann ‘any truly theological statement, whatever its original form, can be translated into a statement about man and existence, and only then will have assumed its clearest form’.Footnote 19 For Macquarrie, and any existentialist theologian, any God-talk must be meaningful to and rooted in an individual’s own understanding.
Christology can only be known and understood in relation to the self, and within this context a Christology ‘from above’ is intrinsically problematic since individuals have no firm grasp or understanding of what it means to be ‘from above’. In this sense, God-talk is something that emerges through self-awareness and self-reflection. Drawing on Kierkegaard, this self-reflection is driven by anxiety.Footnote 20 This is the fundamental movement driving theological thinking, and makes faith a lived, felt, experience (and knowledge), rather than one which is contrived and logical; Macquarrie writes:
We do not infer the Creator from the creation by argument (for, if we did so, we would reach the objectified God of metaphysics, not the holy and living God of religion and theology). But in ontological anxiety there is disclosed to man directly with his own finite being the possibility of the ground of his being, namely, God, and the possibility is actualized in God’s revelation of himself in religion.Footnote 21
The reason why Macquarrie’s Christology may appear less systematic than other contemporaneous theologians, particularly a figure such as Edward Schillebeeckx, is partly because of Macquarrie’s view that theology is the product of an internal dialogue between the self and the sense of the divine. In many respects, for Macquarrie Christology, or indeed any theologizing, is an attempt to gain an understanding of one’s own place within the cosmos, to define and understand the Dasein, but not, as in Heidegger, in relation to the world around us, but, rather, in relation to the divine.
Epistemology and the Mystical Experience
Macquarrie often appeals to a sense of mystery and the unknown: ‘we can understand only in part, and even so we have to help ourselves out by the use of myth, metaphor, paradox and other figures of speech’.Footnote 22 Macquarrie holds to the distinction made by Bultmann between καρδια and νους: that νους is concerned with knowledge, and καρδια with feeling. However, within an existential framework, the role of feeling (Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit) plays an important role in the way in which an individual relates to the world and gains knowledge of it – the one feeds into the other. Macquarrie gives the example of Paul’s references to the heart (namely, 2 Cor. 4.6, 8.16; Rom. 1.21, 2.5, 9.2), and he comments:
The connection of the ontological interpretation of affective states with the knowledge of God is, however, implied in other Pauline passages. Saint Paul himself claimed to have extra-ordinary and even ecstatic religious experiences. These must have been accompanied by profound emotional moods, and it is significant that the apostle connects them with revelation (αποκαλυψις) of God.Footnote 23
For Macquarrie, feelings, particularly anxiety, can lead someone to despair or a lack of certainty about the self, or it can lead to a search for a deeper understanding of the divine and the religious experience.Footnote 24
While Heidegger sought to seek world disclosure (Erschlossenheit) through self-reflection on the world, others sought divine disclosure through mysticism. In his most famous work, I and Thou, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber developed an epistemology that was gained through dialogue with an ‘other’. He developed his mysticism from the Jewish mystical traditions of Hasidic and Kaballastic approaches to the Divine, although he did come under some criticism for not adopting one or the other fully.Footnote 25 As with Heidegger, Buber conceives the fact that reflection on the world and the self changes the individual, not the world or what is seen:
The man who experiences has no part in the world. For it is ‘in him’ and not between him and the world that the experience arises. The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to be experienced, but has no concern in the matter. For it does nothing to the experience, and the experience does nothing to it.Footnote 26
Martin Buber’s I and Thou seeks to elicit knowledge of the divine through a meditation or reflection on, or dialogue with, the other, through which the other is united with the self. Buber’s famous image is that of someone reflecting upon a tree:
In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and have its nature and constitution. It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering that tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is no longer It.Footnote 27
Macquarrie draws on Buber’s metaphor of the tree in one of his discussions of the Eucharist.Footnote 28 He argues that Buber’s understanding of human union with the divine can be achieved through a meditation on a finite object, such as the bread and the wine (or indeed any object). Macquarrie comments elsewhere that Buber’s sense of dialogue creates a sense of the word God that ‘points not to some invisible tangible being to be conceived as standing outside the world, but to a person who meets us in an encounter’.Footnote 29 Theology is, for Macquarrie, a matter of encounter and knowledge is something that is exchanged during such encounters, an idea that also underlies Bultmann’s concept of Selbstverstädnis.Footnote 30
Although both Heidegger and Buber are interested in reflection and/or dialogue, Buber seeks reflection on external realities in order for the individual or the self to commune with that object, and, moreover, with God. Buber’s notions of dialogue and revelation have been heavily critiqued by some theologians,Footnote 31 particularly on the grounds that personal experience is an insufficient basis on which to develop an epistemology. However, to do so is to misunderstand the mystical element within Buber’s thought.Footnote 32 Within mystical traditions, be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim, the act of achieving oneness with God is epistemologically real and requires no other corroboration or verification.Footnote 33 In some cases, Macquarrie seems to view the practice of theology in similar terms: the understanding that an individual has is internal, rather than rationally driven, albeit that first internal experience or understanding is appraised and re-appraised in light of Scripture and biblical studies, which will be discussed in more detail below.
In one of his discussions of the Eucharist, Macquarrie refers to the ideas of transvaluation and transignification: the idea that the bread and the wine change value or significance for the person who is witnessing the celebration of the Eucharist.Footnote 34 For Macquarrie, as well as Schillebeeckx, the experience of the divine presence in the elements of bread and wine is related to the individual or individuals present, or as Schillebeeckx says, ‘Believing man is naturally involved in this transsignification of the phenomenal.’Footnote 35 In this way the reality of the divine presence within the elements of bread and wine is generated through the ‘dialogue’ between the believer and the elements themselves. As in Thomist thought, accidentally, the bread and wine remain bread and wine, but their substance, their significance, and their value changes; but contrary to Thomist thought, this comes about through the way in which the elements are perceived, felt and believed to become the Body and Blood of Christ, rather than simply through the objective saying of specific liturgical formulae.Footnote 36 For Macquarrie and Schillebeeckx, transignification or transvaluation is not simply about the changing of the elements, but about a change within the individual.
The concept of transignification (or transvaluation) concerns the personal relationship between an individual and the elements, but also the way in which that process reveals something of God. Transignification is a revelatory action in which the elements look beyond the accidental form of bread and wine to become elements containing the divine presence. For Macquarrie this action does not simply stop within the accident and substance of the bread and the wine/body and blood, but, rather, the person participating is also changed, and comes to gain understanding of the divine through that process. The way in which dialogue generates a notion of, and engagement with, the divine forms an important part of Macquarrie’s theological epistemology.
This is not just seen in Macquarrie’s sacramental theology, but also in his Christology, where he often refers to the ‘paradox’ and ‘mystery’ of Christology.Footnote 37 In his analysis of Macquarrie’s Christology, John Hick is largely complimentary, apart from Macquarrie’s affirmation of certain beliefs, that Hick caricatures as a resort to his clericalism – a moment where Macquarrie suspends his logical framework to adhere to a doctrine that cannot be substantiated by reason. Hick comments:
The ‘compelling reasons’ that Macquarrie listed are far from compelling, either individually or collectively. Presumably the answer is that he sees an affirmation of Jesus’ deity (as well as humanity) as required of a devout practicing member of the church, committed to its life and liturgy.Footnote 38
For Hick, an appeal to a feeling or a revelation, in the sense of a personal disclosure of the divine through others and things, is not philosophically credible as an argument for defending the two natures of Christ. Hick is also dismissive of the theology of the Christ-event, in which the Christ-ness of Jesus is disclosed not in the single moment of Jesus’ life but in the way in which Christ has, and will continue to be understood.
Mysticism and the exploring of the deep ‘mysteries’ of God and the church is a fundamental part of Macquarrie’s theological reasoning. It is, in part, the reason why Macquarrie does not offer a detailed picture of how he views the person of Christ. Theology, and even Christology, is partially based in the existential encounter of each individual with the mysteries presented – the person of Christ, the sacraments, prayer and so on. One of the reasons why Macquarrie rejects the traditional Chalcedonian Christology ‘from above’ is because of the way in which it has been imposed on believers, and it is a view that he attacks often and stringently.Footnote 39 For Macquarrie, such a prescriptive approach is inimical to his existential theology: when theology is developed out of a reflection on the self in relation to others, in which mystical and unverifiable knowledge are also incorporated, any theology must originate and emerge from an individual’s own self. Hick’s criticism of Macquarrie’s clericalism is based on rationalism and is seen, by Hick, to detract from Macquarrie’s own christological thinking; however, this is not a step backwards or a retreat into what is known and familiar, but these aspects of faith are based on divine disclosure (i.e. revelation) and are consequently central to Macquarrie’s theological epistemology. In a monograph that predates The Metaphor of God Incarnate, Macquarrie provides a response to Hick’s critique of his method:
A dynamic theology does not cease to be a scientific discipline because it is inspired by the passion of an intellectual love. It cannot rest content with knowledge about God and it positively abhors a chattering about God. Knowledge of God, like knowledge of our friends, must finally be a knowledge based on communing. The knowledge of God merges with the love of God.Footnote 40
Epistemology, Scripture and Reason
While Macquarrie’s epistemology is inherently existential and appeals to a theology that emerges from the self, through dialogue with the world around it, he was suspicious of the place of natural miracles within the Gospels, interpreting them as signs and images of power, rather than necessarily real events, since they are contrary to the natural order of the world and what is known and understood about the world at large.Footnote 41 This illustrates the extent to which Macquarrie’s thought, even his Christology, is tempered with rationalism, or, more accurately, a sense of what is a reasonable, or warranted belief.Footnote 42 This sense of reasonableness is seen in Macquarrie’s frequent appeals to New Testament studies: although Macquarrie cites the Bible in his discussions of theology, he seems all too aware of the inherent hermeneutic complexities of the process, and attempts to lend credibility to his use of the Bible with recourse to New Testament scholarship.
This is seen throughout his work, but the clearest example is in his analysis of biblical Christology. He begins not with the Gospels, but with the Pauline corpus, and then looks at each of the Gospels according to the dating given by scholars of the New Testament. He writes:
It might seem that we should begin with the gospels which offer us an ordered chronological account of the career of Jesus. Yet the gospels come from a period which is, we may suppose, a full generation after the time of the events which they narrate.
He critiques Schillebeeckx’s approach of analysing the gospels to produce layers of the tradition, and simply concludes:
So rather than get involved in these ‘doubtful procedures’ where even New Testament specialists are in disagreement with each other, it seems to me to be preferable to begin with the writings of Paul.Footnote 43
Macquarrie’s approach to New Testament Studies is motivated by a vague notion of consensus, as consensus appears to be a signal of veracity and reasonableness: while there is a general consensus that part of the Pauline corpus predates the Gospel, there is a lack of consensus over Schillebeeckx’s attempts to find the earliest layers of the Gospel texts; as a result he follows the academic consensus and takes the Pauline texts as the earliest articulations of Christology. However, Macquarrie does not really outline his own approach or discuss the way in which he uses this material in much detail. Joel Green has commented that in Macquarrie’s work ‘reference to Scripture is scarce in his study of theology, and engagement with Scripture is practically non-existent’.Footnote 44 In some respects this is true, Macquarrie’s Christology and his sacramental theology does not necessarily begin and emerge out of Scripture, but it is unfair to say that Macquarrie does not engage with the Bible in his systematic theology.
There is a multi-faceted tension between Macquarrie’s view of the truths expressed and communicated through Scripture, the personal experience of the divine when reading Scripture, the personal experience of the divine outside of Scripture, and what is reasonably and rationally believable. For Macquarrie, Scripture is certainly not the starting point of theological exploration, nor does he accept the Bible as a divine truth in and of itself; but rather, material in the Bible is triangulated against these different elements. In his appraisal of Macquarrie’s Christology, Purdy notes that for Macquarrie the Scriptures
re-present the disclosure of primordial revelation, but only when catalysed by an authentic experience of the Holy. Scripture is apparently only revelatory in the context of a prior religious experience. One of the advantages that scripture has however is that it possesses a stability and objectivity that individual experience does not provide. Another important aspect of the scriptures is their power to provide identity for the community of faith.Footnote 45
Scripture is not a direct source of knowledge of God for Macquarrie, since Scripture is itself mediated by experience, and consequently its role in his theological epistemology is limited to a role of corroborating a theology derived from self-reflection and engagement with the world.
Macquarrie, following Bultmann,Footnote 46 is strongly aware of the impact of one’s experiences and contexts on interpretation, or to use Gadamer’s terminology, the notion of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein (‘historically-affected consciousness’).Footnote 47 Macquarrie is following many modern and postmodern approaches to philosophies of reading by taking the position that the Scriptures cannot mean anything until they are read, and when they are read the reading is affected by the consciousness of the reader.Footnote 48 Consequently, their epistemic value is no different to that of revelation or experience, since it is simply a different type of theological experience. This is why Bultmann (and Macquarrie) are not particularly interested in the historical Jesus. As McLean notes:
[in] Bultmann’s view, the Jesus of history is irrelevant to faith; what is essential is that we know the Christ of faith. By implication, the Christian kerygma, which is the essence of the Christian faith, contains no authenticated historical facts. The kerygma is the preaching of the Christ of faith, of Christ crucified and resurrection, not the preaching of the Jesus of history.Footnote 49
Macquarrie is very interested in Jesus the human, but not in the historical Jesus, about which we can and do know very little. It is the human self where theology begins, an idea which he shares with Bultmann. For Bultmann:
A human being is above all a historical (geschichtlich) being, a being which is constituted in concrete encounters with others. Human existence is ‘always already’ a ‘being-in-togetherness’ (Miteinandersein) with others, and apart from this togetherness any notion of humanity would be a mere abstraction.Footnote 50
Macquarrie’s theology and his epistemology are concerned with navigating the transcendental aspect of the existential encounter, alongside the corporate, community-driven aspect of a lived faith; but for Macquarrie, the lived, community-driven aspect of faith extends to the life of the Church of the past, as well as the present.
A Re-formed ‘Three-Legged Stool’
Macquarrie’s theological epistemology is a complex system of interwoven elements that is centred on an individual’s own experience of the divine. As Owen Cummings comments, for Macquarrie, experience ‘is the necessary starting-point, acknowledged or unacknowledged, for all theology’.Footnote 51 However, personal experiences are, in turn, placed within a theological and lived context, namely the Church and tradition. Macquarrie does not espouse a theology that is based solely on rational arguments, to do so is to divorce the theology from any lived experience; at the same time, his view of theology is also not one that is only rooted in the self alone. Macquarrie’s concept of truth and knowledge of the divine is generated both by the self and through engagement or dialogue with other people and objects; but this knowledge is then tested against and corroborated with other experiences of revelation – through Scripture, through the inherited beliefs of the Church, and through scholarship. In this way, Macquarrie develops a theology that is existential, corporate and reasonable, allowing for a private and personal experience of God, yet placing this with a shared, faith community.
Macquarrie’s development of a way of doing theology that integrates the personal with the corporate and the existential with the reasonable resonates with contemporary theological tensions,Footnote 52 and the contemporary, secular emphasis on personal identity and identification. In the plentiful, and at times heated, debates around issues such as human sexuality in Anglicanism, there is an inherent tension between what individuals may feel or know within their own personal theology and the theology of the Anglican Church as a whole. Alexander Ross argues that understanding this tension between individuals within the Anglican Communion and the Anglican Communion as a corporate body is the one way in which clashes in scriptural interpretation (and by extension theology) can be resolved. He writes:
Inherent in each of these gaps is the holding in tension of distinctive hermeneutical principles. Failure to appreciate these tensions results in a relational impasse where different interpretations of Scripture across the communion cannot be reconciled.Footnote 53
The crucial question is how competing theologies within the Anglican Communion can be resolved. Macquarrie’s theological epistemology may provide a way forward since it forces the Church not to simply ask what the Bible says about an issue, or what the Church has thought and thinks now about an issue, but challenges it to consider seriously, prayerfully, and thoughtfully what individual Christians believe and experience: the experience of individuals is, and should always be, important to the Church. At the same time, Macquarrie’s epistemology challenges individuals taking a position outside of an ‘official’ Anglican position to perceive their own theology in light of, or in contrast to, the Church’s official view and to find some way to negotiate that theological ‘gap’: the experience and position of the Church is an essential component in the development of personal theologies. At its heart, Macquarrie’s liberal theology is collaborative and seeks to bridge the gap between personal experience and collective viewpoints,Footnote 54 offering the modern Anglican Church a means of navigating some thorny contemporary issues.
Macquarrie’s theological epistemology espouses the Anglican preference for being both catholic and reformed, integrating a personal response to God within a lived and active tradition. The interrelation of different elements of coming to knowledge and world disclosure, and the way in which they are each played off one another, has something in common with his Anglican theological forebear Richard Hooker. Hooker’s Laws begin with the basic premise that:
In the matter of knowledge, there is between the angels of God and the children of men this difference: angels already have full and complete knowledge in the highest degree that can be imparted unto them; men, if we view them in their spring, are at the first without understanding or knowledge at all… The soul of man being therefore at the first as a book, wherein nothing is and yet all things may be imprinted; we are to search by what steps and degrees it riseth unto perfection of knowledge.Footnote 55
The question for theologians is how to attain knowledge. For Hooker, Scripture, tradition and reason provide the means by which an individual can gain understanding of God and how one should behave. The ‘three-legged stool’ is the means of elevation into ‘complete knowledge in the highest degree’. As an existentialist, Macquarrie sees experience and revelation, not as a means of elevation but as an act of elevation: an experience of God and an unveiling of divine mysteries elevates the individual into the presence of the divine.Footnote 56 In Macquarrie’s thought elevation is not a process, pace Hooker, but an experience. However, that experience needs to be checked and understood through an appeal to tradition (both the Bible and Church teaching), and an appeal to reasonableness, rather than reason. Macquarrie’s ‘three-legged stool’ is formed of experience, tradition and reasonableness, with each informing and influencing the other.Footnote 57 Macquarrie’s theological epistemology carries an Anglican identity: one that gives a place to both the Church and the individual as vehicles and receivers of divine revelation. This suggests that in the various controversial debates within the Communion, there is a need to appreciate and engage with individuals, that is to seek to bridge the ‘hermeneutic divide’, since all individuals can be vehicles and recipients of divine revelation.
Although Macquarrie’s epistemology is highly philosophical and technical, and a step away from ordinary lived experience, his way of doing theology is still relatable to all members of the church, theologians or not. It is a natural way of doing theology in the sense that most people primarily come to know something of God not through Scripture or the Church, but through their own personal lived experience and spirituality.Footnote 58 Macquarrie’s epistemology offers a means to navigate the space between personal identity and the catholicity of the Church. The question that underlies Macquarrie’s thought is not ‘what does the Church believe?’ but ‘what do I believe?’ If this were the only question that an individual asked, an ego-centric and anarchic Church would emerge: but Macquarrie’s thought does not end there, but asks the deeper and more meaningful questions: ‘do my beliefs and experiences reflect the tradition of the Church?’ and ‘are my beliefs and experiences reasonable?’ Such questions challenge an individual’s interpretation of their own experiences and situate them in the context of the Church and tradition: these questions fuse an acceptance of individual identity with the corporate body of the Church.
For Macquarrie, theological reflection changes the individual, but this process of change is done in communion with the Church as a whole.Footnote 59 Macquarrie’s new ‘three-legged stool’ offers an Anglican response to the modern emergence of the individual, while maintaining a corporate identity: it is an inherently Anglican epistemology, one that is both traditional and contemporary, as well as catholic and reformed.
