The Revd Dr Richard Briggs writes:
ANTHONY THISELTON was one of the world’s leading scholars of hermeneutical theory, in particular as it applied to biblical and theological studies. A lifelong academic who remained committed to church involvement on multiple levels, he always saw his work as primarily in Christian theology.
In a varied career, he also taught New Testament for many years, was twice a theological college principal, and became a professor of Christian theology. Nevertheless, it was with hermeneutics that his name was most often associated, thanks to his published doctorate (The Two Horizons, 1980) and his advanced textbook (New Horizons in Hermeneutics, 1992), which, for many, largely defined the scope of hermeneutics in theological terms. He also introduced the topic — and the term hermeneutics itself — to a wide audience at the 1977 National Evangelical Anglican Congress in Nottingham.
A premature birth and childhood meningitis meant that Anthony (known as Tony till later in life) always had poor eyesight. He liked to tell the story that his pre-ordination medical report in 1958 read, “This man will never be able to read enough books to exercise a useful parish ministry.” Happily, this was ignored by his bishop, and he was ordained to a curacy in Sydenham in 1960, after training at Oak Hill. His relatively conservative theological upbringing was soon broadened during his time as a tutor in theology at Bristol’s then Tyndale Hall Theological College in the late ’60s. One year, he took a weekly train to Oxford to listen to George Caird’s lectures on language and imagery in the Bible, long before they were published. That, said Anthony, was what opened his eyes, or — and he would here imitate a well-known Bristol colleague — “was when the rot set in!”
His Bristol teaching included lecturing in the university, and he soon realised that this was a natural home for him, leading to 15 years’ teaching New Testament at the University of Sheffield. After extensive extra-curricular commitments (a pattern of generous over-commitment that marked much of his career), Anthony finally arrived at serious writing and research in the late 1970s.
His Ph.D. examined the resources of Heidegger and Gadamer in exploring language use in the New Testament, largely in response to Bultmann, and drawing most creatively on the work of Wittgenstein. The task was to show that serious attention to the workings of language — its extra-linguistic commitments and inter-subjective solidity — offered a range of ways of handling biblical language and interpretation responsibly. The image of “horizons” was drawn from Gadamer, and arguably its common use in subsequent theological literature is entirely down to Anthony’s painstaking work. Whether his 1992 textbook New Horizons was as accessible as he hoped is debatable. It included a shift to taking on board the more reconstructive philosophical work of Paul Ricoeur, as well as the significance of looking at language use via “speech acts” after J. L. Austin.
In later years, he did write many more popularising accounts of the subject, including a 2009 shorter textbook titled simply Hermeneutics: An introduction. He remained disappointed, however, that so much debate in biblical and theological interpretation showed little awareness of hermeneutical sophistication, and, in 2019, offered a plaintive short defence entitled “Why Hermeneutics?” that still urged taking Ricoeur more seriously.
After enjoying a year at Calvin College in the mid-’80s working collaboratively in hermeneutics, Anthony turned to theological-college life. He became principal of two different St John’s Colleges: first in Nottingham, where the Charismatic tradition was not an entirely happy match for his talents and temperament, and then, in 1988, in Durham. He was a conscientious and hard-working principal, determinedly fair-minded, and always willing to explain how hermeneutical awareness cultivated good Christian and community living.
At Durham, one of his great delights, which he had missed in Nottingham, was the music and liturgy of the cathedral. His Orthodox theology gave him a firm base from which to appreciate the wider glories of the Anglican tradition. His time at Durham also reintegrated him into university life, and led to his accepting the post of Professor at the University of Nottingham, switching into teaching Christian theology for this final academic stint.
It was here, though, that his magisterial 1500-page commentary on the Greek text 1 Corinthians finally came to completion, pursuing the argument that a prevailing issue in Corinth was an over-realised eschatology, to which 1 Corinthians offered a response with much to teach the increasingly post-modern Western world. He finished his teaching career with a second spell at Nottingham alongside a part-time post at Chester.
Anthony had just completed the writing of his under-rated book on The Hermeneutics of Doctrine — which explored how doctrines arise in the midst of questions driven by life experience and from particular horizons — when, in August 2007, he suffered a major stroke. To the surprise of doctors, he recovered well, and enjoyed another ten to 15 years of writing in his retirement.
Among his multiple other commitments were 30 years on the Doctrine Commission. When he first joined, in 1978, as one of only two Evangelicals, most of the Commission were inclined to be patronising towards those of such tendencies. This all changed when, after someone had raised the question of “myth” (following The Myth of God Incarnate), Anthony, exasperated, gave a seven-minute summary of the different meanings of “myth” in contemporary theology. The rest of the session was punctuated with somewhat awe-struck liberals saying “as Dr Thiselton has so helpfully explained”.
Anthony also chaired the government’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority and served ten years on the Crown Nominations Commission. His visits to General Synod included the comic highlight that was his explaining the report The Mystery of Salvation to some inebriated fellow travellers on the train to York. Among his various academic honours, he became a fellow of the British Academy, was president of the Society for the Study of Theology for a year, and was honoured with two Festschriften in 2013. He wrote a short memoir in 2015: A Lifetime in the Church and the University.
Anthony was something of a model Renaissance scholar: widely read, scrupulously fair to interlocutors, and excited always by the pursuit of deeper thinking and interdisciplinary links that could illuminate theological matters. Doctoral students thought it a major (and rare) triumph to report on a book that he had not read. In his quiet way, he helped to change the academic landscape in theological and biblical studies.
He is survived by his wife, Rosemary, whom he married in 1963, and their three children.
The Revd Professor Anthony Thiselton died on 7 February, aged 85.
