WITH the death of Maurice Wiles, the Church of England and the world of academic theology have lost a leading representative of the liberal school. His books on belief were careful in their intellectual foundations and, at the same time, a cause of more than occasional anxiety to conservative minds by seeming to make the Christian tradition so reasonable as to sacrifice its distinctive content. Over a varied career he encouraged colleagues and influenced many Cambridge undergraduates and Oxford graduate students by his passion for truth, his integrity, and his transparent goodness.

Maurice Frank Wiles was born in 1923, the son of Harold (later Sir Harold) Wiles, a civil servant and eminent mandarin in the Ministry of Labour from 1920. He was educated at Tonbridge School where he gained a classical scholarship to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and an abiding love of cricket. His leg-breaks included the scalp of the young Colin Cowdrey, and as a canon professor he continued to play for four teams, including the usually victorious Oxford diocesan XI and the Stonor village team.

This may well have been the root of his English sense of fair play which, with his historical sense, led him to contribute to the Cambridge genre of Rehabilitationsschrift, reopening the negative verdicts of the Fathers on so-called heretics. The Second World War gave his education an unexpected turn when in 1942 he was among the first recruits to be taught Japanese and to work on Japanese diplomatic and military codes. This mathematical gene, recognised so early, came to ultimate fruition in his son, Sir Andrew Wiles, who solved Fermat’s last theorem in 1994.

After the war his degree was initially in philosophy, then in theology while training for ordination at Ridley Hall. After a curacy at St George’s, Stockport, 1950-52, he was invited back to teach at Ridley Hall as chaplain. His sympathies stood then with a liberal evangelicalism, and he began to make a systematic study of early Christian thinkers, especially Origen.

In 1955 he accepted a lectureship in New Testament at the university of Ibadan, Nigeria, and his four years of experience in West Africa honed his skills in communication. In 1959 he returned to the UK and became Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, where for eight years he taught the history of early Christian thought, producing two monographs on patristic exegesis and one general book, The Christian Fathers (1966). His protestant standpoint emancipated him from considering as irreversible the decisions made in antiquity regarding the nature of orthodoxy.

He also became increasingly concerned with post-Enlightenment questions about the validity of the tradition of faith today. This shift of interest coincided with his appointment to a chair at King’s College London, and with the publication of The Making of Christian Doctrine (1967).

In 1970 the Crown appointed him to be Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. His background and aesthetic sense did not immediately predispose him to fit easily into the role of canon at a Cathedral where the music of a great choir and choirmaster provided a substantial vehicle for worship. He himself felt unrestricted in his intellectual freedom, but if any thought him less than truly independent in consequence of the attachment of his chair to a prestigious canonry any such misgivings were soon allayed. In 1974 he published The Remaking of Christian Doctrine, eloquently stating the need for reconstruction and restatement, but showing an important liberal manifesto. He also accepted the chair of the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, which in 1976 produced the report Christian Believing. It was a sign of the times that the Doctrine Commission was reconstituted, purged of most liberals and called its next report Believing in the Church.

In 1977 Wiles became embroiled in the controversy aroused by his book The Myth of God Incarnate, even though his own contributions were not particularly controversial. He opposed the literalism of some religious discourse, and drew attention to its metaphorical and (in a positive sense) mythological character. His own unease with some language most precious to orthodox Anglicans was enough to ruffle feathers, but his more positive statement of his beliefs in his Bampton lectures of 1982, Faith and the Mystery of God, won over most of his critics and also won him the Collins Religious Book Award. The more philosophical side of his work was evident in God’s Action in the World (1986) and several articles on this theme, and the breadth of his concerns were discussed in Christian Theology and Interreligious Dialogue (1992).

On retirement, he gave fine expression in 1996 to his interest in combining the ancient and modern, and also the historical, philosophical and theological, taking his studies of Arianism into the 18th century and beyond in Archetypal Heresy (from Athanasius to Rowan Williams). He also ventured into Christian apologetics with Reason to Believe (1999), a work which continues to impress by its sturdy common sense and refusal to go beyond the evidence.

His last book, A Tale of Two Grandfathers (2003), combined family history with theological history by exploring his sober Anglican and ultra-conservative Baptist roots. It shows him, as always, able to sympathise with, and see some value in, positions he himself did not share.

No discussion of his 15 books and numerous scholarly articles can do justice to the care taken over his teaching, his gift for friendship, and the leadership he gave in the institutions with which he was associated. An active Fellow of the British Academy from 1981, he edited the Journal of Theological Studies from 1985 to its centenary in 1999. For many years he was chairman of the Oxford Conferences on Patristic Studies, and helped to edit the volumes arising from there.

In Oxford he became a byword for honesty, straight thinking, and sound judgment. The style of his engagement with his colleagues in England and in North America is well captured in A Shared Search: Doing Theology in Conversation with One’s Friends (1994), a collection of 13 Festschrift articles which catches the flavour of much English theology before the 1980s’ pendulum swing.

A naturally shy and private person, most at home in a devoted and highly gifted family, Wiles accepted the responsibilities that went with the positions he never sought.

He is survived by his wife Patricia (Paddy) and by two sons and a daughter.

The Rev Professor Maurice Wiles, theologian, was born on October 17, 1923. He died on June 3, 2005, aged 81.