Disappearing Christian Thinkers: Maurice Wiles

Maurice Wiles (1923–2005) rounds out this vanishing act as the consummate academic insider whose radical revision of Christian doctrine was so polite, precise, and decorous that it failed to spark an enduring movement.

While his contemporary Dennis Nineham dismantled the historical reliability of the Bible, Wiles dismantled classical Christian dogma from the inside. As the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University and the chairman of the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission, Wiles held the keys to the theological establishment. Yet, his legacy has faded because his elegant, rationalist critique of the supernatural ultimately left academic theology with nowhere to go.

His eclipse is a result of several defining characteristics of his work and career:

1. The Quiet Demolition of the Incarnation

Wiles is best remembered as the driving intellectual force behind the explosive 1977 book The Myth of God Incarnate, a collection of essays that caused a massive public outcry in the UK.

• The Argument: Wiles argued that orthodox Christian claims—specifically that Jesus of Nazareth was literally God incarnate—were not factual descriptions of reality. Instead, he argued that "incarnation" was a poetic, mythological way for the early Church to express Jesus’s profound awareness of God.
• The Erasure: Unlike Don Cupitt, who used this idea to launch a media career as a radical iconoclast, Wiles presented it with the dry, understated caution of an Oxford don. Because his presentation was so academic, once the initial media storm of 1977 passed, his ideas were folded into standard university debates rather than serving as the rallying cry for a vibrant, living movement.

2. A World Without Miracles (Deistic Tendencies)

In his 1986 Bampton Lectures, published as God’s Action in the World, Wiles took his critique to its logical conclusion by arguing against the idea of divine intervention.

• He asserted that God does not perform localized miracles, answer specific intercessory prayers, or alter the laws of nature. To Wiles, God's sole action is the single, ongoing act of creating and sustaining the universe.
• The Problem: By reducing God's activity to a hands-off, cosmic backdrop, Wiles's theology began to look indistinguishable from 18th-century Enlightenment Deism. For subsequent generations of theologians, a faith without a prayer-hearing, intervening God felt spiritually sterile. It offered very little nourishment for preaching, liturgy, or Christian practice, causing the Church to quietly move past it.

3. The Rebound of Orthodoxy

Wiles’s career peaked in the late 1970s and 1980s, during what seemed like the final triumph of secular, liberal enlightenment over traditional religion. However, he did not foresee the massive theological counter-revolution that followed.

• In the 1990s and 2000s, academic theology experienced a dramatic resurgence of orthodox, conservative, and post-liberal thought (such as Radical Orthodoxy).
• Thinkers like John Milbank and N.T. Wright argued that Wiles's rationalism was a dated product of Victorian skepticism. They reasserted a robust, supernatural, and historically grounded orthodox faith. Wiles’s polite skepticism suddenly looked like yesterday's news, trapped in a mid-century modernist paradigm.

4. The Scholar of the Past Who Undermined the Past

Wiles was initially a world-class patristic scholar—an expert on the early Church Fathers who hammered out the creeds in the 4th and 5th centuries. His books like The Making of Christian Doctrine are still praised for their historical clarity.

• The irony of his career is that he used his immense knowledge of the Church Fathers to argue that their conclusions (like the Nicene Creed) were historical accidents that modern people should abandon.
• Because he used patristics to dismantle patristic authority, he ended up in a no-man's-land: traditional patristic scholars found his conclusions unacceptable, while modern radical theologians found his focus on ancient texts boring and old-fashioned.

The Fourfold Collapse of British Liberal Theology

Looking at all four of these thinkers together, we can trace the precise trajectory of how mid-to-late 20th-century British theology vanished:

• John Macquarrie built a traditional cathedral but used modern existential scaffolding that eventually rotted away.
• Don Cupitt sawed off the branches of the Christian tree, declared the tree dead, and walked into secular mysticism.
• Dennis Nineham proved that the soil the tree was planted in (historical scripture) was highly unstable, but stayed in the shade of the tree anyway.
• Maurice Wiles used impeccable manners and Oxford prestige to neatly prune away every supernatural branch of the tree until there was nothing left but a bare trunk.