Anthony C. Thiselton, 1937–2023
My first encounter with Professor Thiselton had taken place at Wheaton College in 1980 or 1981. As an undergraduate philosophy major, I attended the annual philosophy conferences that Arthur Holmes used to organize, bringing such luminaries as Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, and George Mavrodes to campus year after year to deliver lectures that mostly soared right over the heads of relative beginners like me.
One year the theme was hermeneutics, so of course (because The Two Horizons had just been published) Dr. Holmes invited Prof. Thiselton, and, miraculously Prof. Thiselton was able to accept. He was not a regular participant, so he was unaware of the usual level of the papers. When he stood to speak, now having heard some of the other papers, he apologized for having assumed that his audience would be undergraduates interested mostly in biblical studies, not a roomful of leading Christian philosophers. Then he read his paper. I, for one, was grateful to hear, for once, a paper I could understand!
When we received word at Eerdmans that Anthony Thiselton had died, I immediately knew that we needed to post a memorial to this remarkable scholar and writer. I also knew that the right person to write it was my illustrious predecessor, Jon Pott, who was already at Eerdmans when The Two Horizons was published and subsequently worked with Professor Thiselton to bring over a dozen more books into the world.
—James Ernest, editor-in-chief
An Added Grace
By Jon Pott, former editor-in-chief
Over many trips to the U.K. after the Frankfurt Book Fair, I rarely missed calling on Tony Thiselton. And almost always—in fact, I can think of only one exception, when he happened to be in London for an Anglican church conference—it was for lunch at his University of Nottingham faculty club, the genteel academic ambience nicely suiting him. It was a lovely routine—the morning train from London St. Pancras station, which schedule he never failed to check for me beforehand, the arrival at the busy Nottingham station and my musing whimsically yet again about Robin Hood and whatever happened to Sherwood Forest, and the familiar taxi ride up to the university, where he greeted me at the club door with a warmth that always managed to be at once familiar and courtly.
Our publishing friendship went back to the early 80’s. In 1980, Eerdmans had published his groundbreaking The Two Horizons , this book arguing with great sophistication for interpreting the biblical text not only in its own context but also in our own. In the 1982–83 academic year, Tony came to live in Grand Rapids, a resident scholar at the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship. (We also in that year attended the same church.) Tony was an emerging central figure in a revival of evangelical scholarship in the UK, a movement we were tracking closely with such evangelical UK presses as Paternoster and IVP, and, more broadly, with presses like SPCK and T&T Clark. But also, forty years ago, Tony was an important figure in the growing engagement of British evangelical scholarship with its counterpart in North America—including with Dutch Calvinists in Grand Rapids who might not have identified themselves as evangelical but embraced a common traditionalist cause.
The subject for the Center that year was hermeneutics, and from that yearlong inquiry came a book Tony cowrote with Clarence Walhout of the Calvin English Department and Roger Lundin of the Wheaton English Department. Eerdmans published The Responsibility of Hermeneutics in 1985. The point of the Calvin project was, of course, to be interdisciplinary in its study of hermeneutics, and the book brought Tony into conversation with two splendid scholars steeped in literary theory.
But, as he had demonstrated in The Two Horizons , Tony was impressively interdisciplinary on his own in his grasp of hermeneutical developments not only in theology (especially on the European Continent—Ernst Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling , and later Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg), but also in linguistics and philosophy, both Continental (Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur) and also Anglo (the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and John Searle). Tony, it should be noted, was, along with William Abraham, Janet Martin Soskice, and Sarah Coakley, one of the relatively few English and North American theologians in his time at home in the world of analytic philosophy. This range allowed him singlehandedly to undertake A Concise Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion (Oneworld, 2001; Baker, 2005), as well as produce later for Eerdmans—again single-handedly!—his 860-page Thiselton Companion to Christian Theology (2015).
Hermeneutics remained the major theme in Tony’s scholarly work. After The Responsibility of Hermeneutics came New Horizons in Hermeneutics , a textbook presentation of contemporary hermeneutics that built on The Two Horizons and was published by Zondervan in 1992. This was followed, with other intermittent books, by no fewer than four more Eerdmans books devoted explicitly to hermeneutics, beginning with a thorough update of the Calvin project, now called The Promise of Hermeneutics (1999). Then came the omnibus Thiselton on Hermeneutics (2006), which combined journal articles with selected extracts from his books. And then The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (2007)—doctrine, like the biblical text, also needing to be contextually interpreted from two horizons. And, finally, as a primer to his subject, came Hermeneutics: An Introduction (2009).
But beyond the explicit books, Tony’s engagement with hermeneutics permeated everything he did, from his early Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self (T&T Clark and Eerdmans, 1995), critiquing the postmodern notion of the self as trapped in the language of power; to Life after Death (Eerdmans, 2012), exploring such matters as the language of promise and expectation; to the massive The Holy Spirit: In Biblical Teaching, Through the Centuries, and Today (Eerdmans, 2013); and then to his more approachable A Shorter Guide to the Holy Spirit (Eerdmans, 2016). Nor is it absent from his final book for Eerdmans, Doubt, Faith, and Certainty (2017), in which he helpfully explores the multiple meanings of these deeply human impulses and postures.
Whatever his theorizing about the discipline of hermeneutics, Tony, already in The Two Horizons , was always scrupulous to attach his theorizing to actual cases of exegesis. And in no place did he put his views on hermeneutics more magisterially to work than in his 1500-page volume on First Corinthians for Eerdmans’s New International Greek Testament Commentary . Here, indeed, was a marvel, combining his own translation of the Greek text with exhaustive linguistic analysis, a rich survey of the main issues of interpretation from the church fathers to the present, and an erudite application to the most important theological, ethical, and sociohistorical interests of today. I recall that when the volume first appeared, no less a figure than Gordon Fee, himself responsible for a magnificent New International Commentary on First Corinthians , shook his head in admiration at the sheer scope of Tony’s accomplishment. And then, wanting, as he always did, to be a theologian of the church, Tony distilled this massive work into 1 Corinthians: A Shorter Exegetical and Pastoral Commentary — still 325 pages, but with all that learning, what was he to do? The irony, I suspect, amused him as much as it did me.
. . .
Anthony C. Thiselton was a great gift to the academy and to the church. He was also a great gift to the Eerdmans publishing program, to which, over his long scholarly career, he contributed no fewer than sixteen books , all of them important and some of them landmarks in their time. It is a wonderful gift for a publisher to be able to publish wonderful books. It is an added grace, as it was with Tony, for a publisher to feel, over the long arc of a rich career, gifted to publish a man as well, a man who became for Eerdmans—and for me—so admired a friend.
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