Paul Fiddes

Paul Stuart Fiddes (born 30 April 1947) is a British Baptist theologian. He is Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford and was formerly Principal of Regent's Park College and Chairman of the Theology Faculty. He has been described as "one of the leading contemporary Baptist theologians", "one of the leading scholars of theology and literature writing today", "one of Christianity's most distinguished scholars", and "one of the foremost theological thinkers of the modern age". His book The Creative Suffering of God is "considered to be one of the major contributions to theology in the last decades of the 20th century".

Education

Fiddes was educated at Drayton Manor Grammar School. In 1965 he went up to St Peter's College, Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He quickly changed his course and ended up with a Double First in English Language and Literature and Theology. The relationship between these disciplines has formed a major part of his subsequent scholarship. He then embarked on a doctoral thesis entitled The hiddenness of wisdom in the Old Testament and later Judaism, which he completed in 1976, before spending a year at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen undertaking post-doctoral studies, and attending seminars of Jürgen Moltmann and Eberhard Jüngel.