STEPHEN NEILL, who died in 1984, was a giant of 20th-century Anglican mission and ecumenism, author of some sixty books on theology, mission, and church history, and influential in the formation of the Church of South India and in the post-war ecumenical scene. He wrote pioneering studies of Indian church history and the history of mission, co-wrote the first (and still valuable) history of the modern ecumenical movement, and was an important figure in helping Anglicanism to begin to see beyond the colonial era towards a communion of fully independent and autonomous churches.

Like many others of his generation, Neill sewed together in his life and ministry radically different contexts, from the world of academe as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, to South India, where he was successively missionary, theological-college head, and bishop.

Yet Neill was a giant with feet of clay. The circumstances surrounding his sudden resignation from the see of Tinnevelly in 1945 were mysterious, until Richard Holloway revealed in a review (Books, 8 November 1991) of Neill’s posthumous autobiography, God’s Apprentice (1991), that he had a penchant for beating young men on the buttocks with a cane as a form of punishment.

Daughrity considers that there is insufficient evidence that this had a sexual motive, but Holloway used the word “sado-masochism”, and there is plenty of evidence mustered here to show that Neill’s attitude to sexuality was extremely complicated. Like the late John Smyth, Neill described these beatings in terms of correction of sin, but that is not how they were seen by their recipients. Indeed, he seems to have been a swirling vortex of hyper-activism, anxiety, insomnia, neurosis, and guilt, mixed in, perhaps, with some misogyny — hardly a psychological cocktail making for a balanced, stable shepherd of souls.

His ministerial career, as Daughrity shows, was an endless procession of short tenure of positions, with immense energy thrown into them, a daunting litany of initial success, and then collapse, sometimes triggered or exacerbated by his fatal flaw.

In today’s world, Neill would have been treated much less leniently than he evidently was. After India, the reason for his resignation (an impending lawsuit brought by a man he had beaten) kept largely out of view, he was given a key representative part to play in the nascent World Council of Churches, then worked for the permanent staff, and later became a professor in Hamburg, and then in Nairobi, before retiring to Oxford. But most of these appointments were marked by the same combination of ill temper, fractious personal relationships and abuse, and frenetic energy followed by extreme exhaustion.

Planet NewsStephen Neill in a photo taken some time before September 1966

Daughrity has written a warts-and-all biography, drawing on a very wide range of sources. He has left no potential source unexamined, it seems. A professor of religion at Pepperdine University, he has been researching Neill’s career for many years, and has produced what will surely be the definitive life for many years to come. An expert in world Christianity, Daughrity is well placed to appreciate the polyvalent character of Neill’s literary output.

Inevitably, much of Neill’s academic work has been supplanted by later research, but the highly original nature of his forays into Indian history and mission history, supported as they were by a formidable proficiency in Classical, European, and Asian languages, ensured that his work gained, at the time of its appearance, almost universal praise. Daughrity notes, sometimes almost in passing, the many ambiguities in Neill’s outlook: his criticism of colonial authorities despite his apparent imperialism, his seeming lack of awareness of the impact of a white British bishop exercising an autocratic style of leadership among Indian Christians, his love of India, combined with his suspicion of Indian nationalism, his self-loathing, combined with his “punishment” of others’ sins.

This all makes final assessment of Neill’s character and influence today extremely difficult. Daughrity notes the contradictions, and makes no attempt to gloss over Neill’s flaws. Yet, at the same time, his own admiration keeps breaking through. His familiarity with Neill’s writing perhaps makes that easier, but, for many readers, it may be hard to see things in quite the same light, particularly because attitudes towards colonialism and Western mission have changed so much since Neill’s heyday. All the same, this is an authoritative treatment of a very complicated human being.

The Revd Dr Jeremy Morris is a former Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

A Worldly Christian: The life and times of Stephen Neill
Dyron B. Daughrity
Lutterworth £25
(978-0-7188-9585-3)