In regard to the Way… I serve and worship the very same God served and worshiped by all our ancestors… Paul, as quoted by Luke in Acts.
The first time I encountered the Scottish theologian John Macquarrie, I made a fool of myself. Macquarrie was a philosophical giant, translator and explicator of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and one of the most esteemed divinity professors at Oxford. I was wading through my first degree.
Macquarrie was raised in a staunch Presbyterian family and was a Church of Scotland minister for a time. We students thought up questions to try to expose what we had been primed to believe was the folly of his thinking. Our questions were risible; he was patient and gracious.
In his 1996 book, Mediators Between Human and Divine: From Moses to Muhammad, Macquarrie wrote: “I believe that, however difficult it may be, we should hold to our own traditions and yet respect and even learn from the traditions of others.”
He went on: “I do not deny for a moment that the truth of God has reached others through other channels—indeed, I hope and pray that it has. So while I have a special attachment to one mediator, I have respect for them all and have tried to give a fair presentation of each.”
I met the great man a few years later at another university. This time, I at least had the good sense to listen more and speak less. But it would be many more years yet before I began to grasp, even faintly, his theology. I guess you could call this my “conversation” with Macquarrie and his theology. He challenged my then-dogmatic faith.
The question at the heart of all this is what exactly do Jesus’ words “I am the way,” mean? Does it mean his teaching? His divine and human nature? His example of showing the wideness of God’s love?
Jesus has told the disciples he is going to get a room ready for them in his Father’s house, that he will come back, and that they know the road he is taking.
Thomas says they don’t know. Jesus replies: “I am the road … No one gets to the Father apart from me.”
But elsewhere, Jesus said: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them.” So what does he mean?
Moreover, St. Augustine, who lived about 1,600 years closer to the text than we do, observed that the philosophers (especially Plato, Aristotle and the neoplatonists) discovered through God’s gift of reason that God is life and truth. What is unique in Christianity, he says is in the incarnation. The Word, “by taking upon him human nature, is made the way.”
That’s yet another interpretation. But Augustine says non-Christians know about God.
The notion that God has revealed something of the divine nature to people other than Christians and Jews disturbs some. In fact, some people believe it’s heresy.
It is sad when faith is so shallowly rooted that it cannot be generous. It doesn’t have to threaten our faith to consider that God’s own self-generosity may result in other people coming to know truths about God, either through faith or reason.
A couple of months ago, Dr. Dorcas Gordon of Knox College helped us begin this conversation. She noted that the church needs to spend some time thinking more deeply about Christianity’s relationship with other religions, especially in this multicultural, multi-faith country of ours.
Christians, as evidenced by Paul in the opening quotation from Acts, were first known as people of the way.
Do we need to open our minds to the possibility that on our pilgrimage, we may encounter others who have arrived at certain points along the way by another route? That maybe our faith holds unique beliefs revealed to us by Jesus, but that others can also know much about God?
If you think this is heresy, I’ll leave you with Macquarrie’s gentle comment: “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.”
Let’s keep the conversation going.
