John Macquarrie was born on the 27th of June 1919. He was educated at Renfrew High School and Paisley Grammar School (1934-1936). He graduated from Glasgow University with a first-class MA in philosophy, remaining at Glasgow to study his BD degree in 1943. Macquarrie gained pastoral experience at Dumbartan, and then as assistant minister in Paisley in 1944 following his ordination. Between 1945 and 1948, Macquarrie served as an army chaplain to German prisoners-of-war in the Middle East. He was briefly a parish priest at St Ninian’s in Brechin, and married Jenny Fallow (née Welsh) in 1949. The marriage produced three children.

In 1953, he was a lecturer at Glasgow University, and completed his PhD there in 1954 on Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann (published in 1955 as An Existentialist Theology: a Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann). From the 1960s onwards, he worked on translating Heidegger’s Being and Time, which was published in 1962, and wrote books on theology and philosophy, such as Twentieth-Century Religious Thought (1963), God and Secularity (1967), among many others. In much of his writing, he used an ‘existential-ontological’ and systematic approach to his discussions of theology and philosophy. From 1962 until 1970, Macquarrie was Professor of Systematic Theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, USA, and acted as consultant for the Lambeth Conference in 1968 and 1978. Although Macquarrie was first ordained as a Presbyterian minister in the Church of Scotland, he joined the Episcopal Church during his time with the Union Theological Seminary. From 1970 until 1986, Macquarrie was the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church at the University of Oxford.

In 1962, Macquarrie was awarded the Territorial Decoration. Between 1967 and 1994, he received several honorary degrees, from the University of the South (1967), the General Theological Seminary (1968), Glasgow University (1969), Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest (1981), Virginia Theological Seminary (1981), Nashotah House (1986), and the University of Dayton (1994). In 1984, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. He became the Gifford lecturer at the University of St Andrews from 1983 to 1984, delivering a series of lectures called In Search of Deity, which was published in 1984. Whilst at Oxford, he became governor of some of Oxford’s Anglo-Catholic institutions, such as Pusey House and St Stephen’s House. Macquarrie additionally received invitations overseas, such as to Japan, Denmark, India, Russia, China and Hong Kong.

Upon retirement, Macquarrie received a Festschrift (Being and Truth, 1986), as well as a second Festschrift to mark his fiftieth anniversary of his association with SCM Press (In Search of Humanity and Deity, 2006). He moved to Oxford with his wife after retirement, preaching regularly at St Andrew’s Church. He died on the 28th of May 2007 from a recurrence of cancer.