Who Was W. H. Griffith Thomas? Oxford, Toronto and Dallas Seminary

Biography Bible Study Prayer Holy Spirit

W. H. Griffith Thomas (1861–1924) was an evangelical Anglican minister, scholar and Bible teacher. He was vicar of a busy London church, then principal of Wycliffe Hall, the evangelical training college at Oxford. In 1910 he moved to Toronto to teach at Wycliffe College, and he spent his last years in Philadelphia, speaking at Bible conferences all over North America. He helped plan the school that became Dallas Theological Seminary, but he died a few months before it opened. His books are clear, ordered and full of Scripture, and they still help ordinary Christians understand the Bible, prayer and the Christian life.

Here's the story of his life, what he taught, and which of his books to read first.

A hard start on the Welsh border

William Henry Griffith Thomas was born on January 2, 1861, in Oswestry, a market town in Shropshire, England, close to the Welsh border. His family was Welsh. His father died before he was born, and his mother brought him up for his first years in her own father's home. She married again, and the boy did not have an easy or a wealthy childhood.

He came to personal faith in Christ in 1878, at sixteen, and soon set himself to a hard course of study. By twenty he was working in London for a relative who made watch dials, and he studied in every spare hour. He was largely self-taught in Greek. From 1882 to 1885 he studied at King's College, London, and in 1885 he was ordained in the Church of England.

Curate and vicar

His first posts were curacies. One of them, from 1889, was at St. Aldate's Church in Oxford, where he also studied at Christ Church. In 1896 he became vicar of St. Paul's, Portman Square, in the West End of London. He stayed nine years. The church was known for its support of missions, and he held several prayer meetings every week. Many of his early books grew out of the Bible readings he gave there on weekday afternoons.

In 1898 he married Alice Monk, who had taught in New Zealand. Their daughter Winifred later worked as his secretary and, after his death, edited several of his books for the press.

Principal of Wycliffe Hall

In 1905 Griffith Thomas became principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, which trained men for the Anglican ministry in the evangelical tradition. He taught doctrine and the English Bible, edited a theological journal, and took a doctorate in divinity from Oxford. Every Saturday evening he gave an address in the college chapel on the minister's life, and every week he lectured on pastoral work.

Those talks became The Work of the Ministry, his handbook for pastors. In it he says what he believed about every call to serve:

Christ never calls without equipping, never commissions without providing, never authorizes without empowering.
The Work of the Ministry, The Ministry of the Twelve

In these years he also became a regular speaker at the Keswick Convention in England's Lake District, where the theme was holiness by yielding to Christ and trusting the Holy Spirit. His short book Life Abiding and Abounding began as an address at Keswick and a Bible reading at Northfield, D. L. Moody's conference in Massachusetts.

Toronto and the Stone Lectures

In 1910 he crossed the Atlantic to teach at Wycliffe College in Toronto, the evangelical Anglican seminary there. He stayed nine years, wrote for Canadian papers, and was more and more in demand as a speaker in the United States. In 1913 Princeton Theological Seminary invited him to give its Stone Lectures. He believed he was the first Anglican to lecture on that Presbyterian foundation. The lectures became The Holy Spirit of God, a full study of what Scripture and church history teach about the Spirit.

A teacher for the whole continent

In 1919 he left the college and settled in Philadelphia. From there he gave himself to writing and to Bible conferences in the United States and Canada. He wrote a weekly column for The Sunday School Times, which reached a very large lay readership. He held firmly to the Bible as God's Word and spoke out against modernism, the movement that set aside its miracles and its authority. He also held a premillennial, dispensational view of prophecy.

In 1922 he met with Lewis Sperry Chafer and A. B. Winchester to plan a new school for training ministers in the Bible. Griffith Thomas was to teach there. He died in Philadelphia on June 2, 1924, at sixty-three. The Evangelical Theological College opened that October, and it was later renamed Dallas Theological Seminary. His library was bought for the new school, and he's remembered as one of its founders. His largest book, The Principles of Theology, a study of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, came out after his death and has been reprinted many times.

What he taught

Griffith Thomas was a scholar, but he wrote for people in the pew. His books come back again and again to a few things.

Christ first. He loved Paul's words that Christ should have "the pre-eminence," and he wrote a whole book on Colossians under that title, Christ Pre-eminent. For him the Christian life was Christ's own life in the believer, received by faith:

The Christian life from first to last is the Christ-life and a life of faith.
Grace and Power, Sanctification

The Word and prayer together. He taught that God speaks to us in the Bible and we answer Him in prayer, and that a Christian who keeps both will keep growing.

In prayer the soul speaks to God; in the Bible God speaks to the soul and this is another of the meeting places with God.
The Christian Life and How to Live It, Walking with God

He wanted that devotion to shape everything else, including his own scholarship. Writing on Paul's prayers, he used an old Latin saying, "Pectus facit theologum," and turned it into English for his readers:

Pectus facit theologum — it is the heart that makes the theologian
The Prayers of St. Paul

Prayer behind work. He held up Paul as a man whose busy life came out of his prayers:

He was a man of action because he was first and foremost a man of prayer.
The Prayers of St. Paul

A mind that serves the truth. He never asked his readers to stop thinking. He asked them to let God's revelation lead their thinking.

Reason is not the origin but the organ of truth.
The Holy Spirit of God, The Holy Spirit and Intellectualism

Why he's still read

Griffith Thomas had a gift for outlines. He'd take a verse, find three or four plain points in it, and show how each one touches daily life. That makes his books easy to teach from. Pastors still use his handbooks on ministry, and Bible class leaders still use his studies of Paul's prayers and letters. And because he joined careful study with warm devotion, readers who want both find a friend in him. For many more of his lines, see our W. H. Griffith Thomas quotes.

Where to start

TheWay Library has eight of his books, all free to read. Start with Life Abiding and Abounding, a short book on the Word and prayer as the two secrets of abiding in Christ. Then read The Prayers of St. Paul, a compact study that teaches you to pray Scripture for other people. For a fuller map of the Christian life, read Grace and Power or the simpler The Christian Life and How to Live It. Students will want The Holy Spirit of God, and pastors The Work of the Ministry.

Our guide to W. H. Griffith Thomas's books describes all eight, and you'll find them together on the W. H. Griffith Thomas author page.