Abstract
Stephen Neill (1900–1984) played a very significant role in many aspects of Christian history during the mid-twentieth century, including the missionary enterprises of British India, the rise of non-Euro-American Christianity, and the promotion of ecumenism. Indeed, the opening sentence of the present book calls him “one of the most important figures on the world Christian scene during the twentieth century.”
Having said that, Neill’s career often fell short of what seemed to be its full potential and, through the years, that constraint has intrigued observers. In A Worldly Christian, Dyron Daughrity offers a thoughtful and balanced account of a brilliant and many-sided figure who almost cries out to be the subject of a major novel as much as a biography. As the ambiguous title neatly suggests, Neill played his full role on the world stage, but was also held back by his “worldly” flaws and failings.
Neill came from a family with deep missionary roots. In 1924, he traveled to India, where he learned Tamil, and in 1939 he became the Anglican bishop of Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli), in the far south of Tamil Nadu. He was a vigorous and (generally) effective leader with a passionate commitment to inter-church cooperation. His great project was a union of all the region’s churches, regardless of their traditional divisions, and this was actually accomplished with the formation of the Church of South India in 1947. By that point, however, Neill had moved on.
After resigning his diocese in 1944, he worked for the World Council of Churches from 1947 through 1954. In later life, he taught at various universities, becoming a very prolific writer on topics including global mission, ecumenism, and the history of Christianity in India, but he also dabbled in many other topics, historical and theological. Neill owed his vast productivity to his severe insomnia, which gave him many additional hours to research and write.
On a personal note, the work of his that I cherish particularly is his magnificently accessible history of The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1961, which became even more valuable for researchers and students alike with the 25th anniversary edition updated and expanded by N. T. Wright in 1986.
But for all his splendid achievements, the nagging question remains: Why did Neill’s career within the Anglican world clearly go off the rails in the mid-1940s, never to be restored? Why did he not rise higher within the church establishment? Not surprisingly, in light of our modern awareness, the problem arose from scandals with a powerful sexual content, but not as straightforward as the acts of molestation that so regularly feature in contemporary accounts of “clergy abuse.” Like many of his British contemporaries, Neill believed in corporal punishment for the young, but he extended this to inflicting canings and whippings not just on children but on adolescents and young men, including his clergy and seminarians.
Whether or not he would himself have acknowledged this as a form of sexual sadism, the incidents were sufficient to cause real scandal (and evidence of such activities has proliferated steadily in later years). Obviously, the details of such scandals scarcely feature in Neill’s own accounts of his life and experiences, which long served as the principal source for understanding his career.
Any biographer faces the dilemma of potentially having a surfeit of material with which to work, much of which—in the case of Neill’s own words—is at least selective, and sometimes tendentious. Dyron Daughrity has done a fine job of navigating these multiple problems. The book follows a natural chronological arrangement, and appropriately, the most detailed material involves the “Loss of a Bishopric 1944–45,” which takes up some 45 pages. The author follows the various controversies and allegations closely and sensitively and addresses the controversies frankly.
A Worldly Christian is an excellent piece of scholarship, drawing on many hitherto unused sources, in the form of archives and interviews. Daughrity is enlightening in describing the complex pathways of research that he had to follow to elucidate aspects of his subject’s career. I do not mean to trivialize when I say that even reading one’s way through the whole of Neill’s published oeuvre is a solid achievement in itself. In consequence, Daughrity has produced a substantial text, running to over 370 pages of text, but it could hardly have been done in less space. Fortunately, given the subject, the book is very readable.
The book is richly informative not just on one significant but flawed individual, but it has much to say about many aspects of twentieth-century Christian history.