Lloyd Geering was and nonetheless is an erudite, scholarly and clever man however he was by no means well-known for his zingers. Besides possibly this one time. It was November 6, 1967, and Geering was talking to a full home at St Paul’s church on Cashel Road in central Christchurch. It was greater than a full home: there was additionally an overflow room. Radio, newspaper and TV reporters had been there too. Nobody wished to overlook the theological occasion of the 12 months, the intra-Presbyterian prize battle. Geering had been accused of doctrinal error, which is kind of the identical factor as heresy, and there was one other cost. They wished him for disturbing the peace of the church. However as he quipped to an viewers that held on his each phrase, it was not the peace of the church he disturbed, however “its sleepiness”.
Maybe you needed to be there. However the document reveals there have been occasions when the congregation laughed and occasions once they spontaneously clapped, despite the fact that they had been all supposed to take a seat in respectful silence. Even Geering’s opponents needed to concede that his 90-minute tackle, reproduced in full within the following morning’s papers, was good. Recreation over, however probably not.
The story of the so-called heresy trial has been advised many occasions, however now it has been advised in full. Jim Veitch was a pupil of Geering’s at Knox Faculty in Dunedin within the early Nineteen Sixties who went on to develop into an instructional within the spiritual research division Geering based at Victoria College. For those who squint you’ll be able to simply make Veitch out in a gaggle photograph of theological workers and college students at Knox Faculty in 1963 that he has reproduced in his new account of the Geering scandal, Lloyd Geering: Prophet or Heretic? Geering, each the principal of the school and its professor of Outdated Testomony research, sits within the entrance row, on the very centre. Veitch’s admiration has spanned many years and continues. The ex-student dedicates the e book to Geering, “with deep appreciation for his honesty and tenacity within the face of highly effective opposition”.
The e book’s origins return to at the least the Eighties when Veitch started interviewing individuals linked to the heresy wars. Feelings had been nonetheless recent: some thanked Geering for liberating them however others remained indignant he destroyed their religion.
Within the Nineties, Veitch met Geering’s chief opponent, Bob Wardlaw, who entrusted his archive to him, so long as he used it actually. Veitch was additionally given the archive of Presbyterian minister Bob Blaikie, Geering’s different fundamental antagonist. He submitted his analysis as a theology doctorate however says he selected to not search business publication “because of stress from revered colleagues”. Sixty years after the heresy wars started, it’s now presumably protected to go public, though Veitch says no New Zealand writer was prepared to take the e book on (it was put out by a Christian writer primarily based in Australia).
Within the meantime, Veitch has retired from tutorial life and is a minister at a church in Martinborough. On the time of writing, his former mentor and instructor is 107, residing in a relaxation house in Decrease Hutt and is formally the oldest man in New Zealand. Wardlaw, Blaikie and different key gamers have lengthy since died.
The main target is on the 5 years from Geering’s preliminary peace-disturbing article in 1965 to the second, less-remembered trial instigated by his fellow churchmen in 1970. Because of the mountain of paperwork Veitch has collected and inherited, which runs to at the least 30 packing containers, the story is advised in minute element.
There are letters, newspaper clippings and studies of conferences. A few of this turns into repetitive and a few of it’s revealing in its relative unguardedness. If something, the e book confirms that males of the material could be each bit as catty and gossipy of their non-public correspondence as laypeople. For instance, Reverend Arthur Gunn, a supporter of Wardlaw, wrote in a letter that, “The chance of the Principal resigning within the foreseeable future is negligible. These little chaps are far too egotistical for that.” When he mentioned “the Principal”, he meant Geering.
One other minister wrote in non-public that Geering was “an irritated man … tactless in pastoral respect, manner out doctrinally, out of his depth”.
An image emerges of a tradition conflict, and possibly not the one you anticipate. Sure, it was about perception vs doubt, the previous vs the longer term, conformity vs dissent, evangelicals vs liberals, however at its coronary heart, the heresy trial of 1967 was about Auckland vs Dunedin. You actually might have known as it a story of two cities. Dunedin was intellectually open, cerebral and egalitarian. Auckland was narrow-minded and conservative, run by outdated males with deep pockets. Amongst different issues, the Aucklanders wished a second theological school, to counter the liberalism of the one within the south.
Geering, our man from Dunedin, comes throughout as brilliant and honest however maybe a little bit naive and too trusting in his dealings with each the media and his critics. As for the Aucklanders, Geering would later describe Blaikie as “probably the most theologically in a position, and likewise probably the most aggressive, of my critics” (Blaikie was lifeless by then). Wardlaw was an promoting govt and Presbyterian layman who based the Laymen’s Affiliation to close Geering down. Veitch describes him as having “a forceful character”, which appears like a euphemism.
However there have been variations within the anti-Geering camp too: Blaikie was extra evangelical and Wardlaw extra conservative. Within the background had been Sir James Fletcher and Sir William Goodfellow, rich Auckland businessmen who had been early backers of Wardlaw’s laymen.
The primary Geering article, printed within the Presbyterian journal Outlook in September 1965, known as for a brand new reformation. A second, in April 1966, doubted the bodily resurrection; Geering’s use of an often-cited quote from Ronald Gregor Smith, claiming “the bones of Jesus lie someplace in Palestine”, confirmed his considering didn’t come out of nowhere however was inside a wider, post-war transfer in direction of secular Christianity that had not but reached the pews. One million Sunday Faculty pictures vanished in a second. However that 12 months ended with the Presbyterian Meeting reaching a compromise.
Worse was to come back. In March 1967, when Geering delivered the Victoria College graduation tackle in a church on Taranaki Road in Wellington, he mentioned, “Man has no immortal soul and we’re pressured to agree that man is an animal”. Reporter John Ross from the Dominion occurred to be within the viewers; in accordance with this account, he was additionally a born-again Christian. Recognising the information worth of Geering’s assertion, Ross requested a query and Geering confirmed that man has no immortal soul. However everlasting life, Geering mentioned, is one thing totally different.
No resurrection? No immortal soul? For those who can nonetheless bear in mind your Nicene Creed, it regarded like Geering had already breached at the least two clauses and would go on to breach many extra. Wardlaw was rapidly again on the warpath. However there was extra subtlety to Geering’s positions than we would assume now; he was not partaking in Richard Dawkins-style debunking and mockery from the prevalence of a scientific place. He was genuinely looking for a option to accommodate Christianity with how the world was understood within the twentieth century. He nonetheless thought-about himself a Christian.
Geering’s hometown newspaper, the Otago Every day Occasions, expressed scepticism about Wardlaw’s behaviour and known as for calm: “Confronted with difficult statements distilled from 25 years’ theological expertise, Mr Wardlaw has apparently absorbed all of the implications in 48 hours, demolished Professor Geering’s doctrinal arguments, and proved to himself and to others that Professor Geering is so fallacious that he have to be eliminated. Or is it that Mr Wardlaw has reacted in a purely emotional style, that he’s both ill-equipped or unwilling to undertake a thought-about evaluation … Laymen who really feel dismayed or unsettled by Professor Geering ought to really feel much more dismayed by Mr Wardlaw’s response.”
Then the trial got here, which Geering gained decisively, however his enemies continued to search for methods to take away him. As he did in March 1967, Geering handed them one other golden alternative. He was in Brisbane in Could 1970 when he did a TV interview and went a lot additional than he ever had in public earlier than. He mentioned Jesus was not the Son of God, the virgin beginning didn’t occur, heaven and hell didn’t exist in any actual sense and there was no life after dying. A transcript made its manner again to Auckland, and whereas he couldn’t be tried a second time, there was a vote to disassociate the church from Geering’s statements.
It’s not solely clear what disassociation meant, and this second trial is handled in only one paragraph in Geering’s autobiography Wrestling with God. You possibly can argue that Geering was silly or naive to talk so overtly to the media, even past New Zealand, simply as it might not have been smart to be so forthright with John Ross in Wellington in 1967. Alternatively, this was actually an instructional freedom subject, which makes it related to us in 2025. As Reverend Evan Pollard, a supporter of Geering, wrote in response to Blaikie: “Controversial dialogue should at all times have a component within the lifetime of the Church if theology is to be a residing factor and never merely lifeless dogma.”
Veitch has a novel angle on the Brisbane interview. He wonders how the Australian journalist was so nicely knowledgeable about Geering’s views. He suspects there might have been a set-up, as if Geering walked right into a lure laid by the Aucklanders. It’s onerous to know the way critically we are able to take this concept.
By the top of 1970, Geering had accepted the place of chair in spiritual research at Victoria College. But he stays a Presbyterian minister to at the present time.
The e book is actually a doctoral thesis with some up to date materials added and whereas we are able to recognize Veitch’s diligence and dedication, it’s clear a distinct and maybe higher e book may very well be created from this materials. The narrative may very well be stronger, the writing may very well be sharper and livelier. At occasions I needed for extra of Veitch, extra of his opinions and interpretations, and extra recollections of Geering that may have added character and color.
However the occasions lined had been necessary and engaging then, and stay so now, lengthy after Christianity has retreated from the centre of New Zealand life. Geering’s readability and bravado made a doubtlessly troublesome mental topic straightforward to observe, even when the concepts on the coronary heart of the battle had been rather more nuanced than they seemed to be within the media protection. You possibly can argue that the heresy trial was as necessary a Nineteen Sixties turning level in New Zealand as, say, the Beatles tour in 1964 or the top of six’o’clock closing, additionally in 1967.
It’s onerous to think about a distinct consequence. Veitch photos a situation through which Geering stayed on to form and direct a newly liberal, fashionable church for a contemporary New Zealand, however that appears fanciful. Geering was higher out than in, despite the fact that some have argued his presence within the mainstream world had the impact of really limiting spiritual debate. Paul Morris, one other former spiritual research professor at Victoria, believed Geering “successfully closed down public debate about faith and muted spiritual voices within the nation”. In a chunk within the New Zealand Overview of Books in 2007, Canterbury College affiliate professor Mike Grimshaw made the same declare when he requested, “What has occurred when our most influential and well-known author and thinker on faith is 86 years outdated and retired from his college put up again in 1984? Why has a complete technology of theological and non secular scholarship failed to realize a public voice? Is it due to what they’ve – or haven’t – been saying? Or is it due to how they’re trying to precise it?”
Eighteen years later, our media and cultural panorama has develop into extra secular nonetheless. Even the spiritual broadcasting on Australia’s ABC appears unimaginable right here. As Morris wrote in his piece on Geering in 2018: “In the primary there hasn’t been a spiritual voice outdoors of a extra right-wing one with a selected ‘conventional’ theological view, so there hasn’t been a lot of a public debate.”
Veitch needs to return to the determine of Jesus and he does this in a few methods. One is to revisit Geering’s affiliation with the Jesus Seminar, a US-based group of students who revived analysis into the historic Jesus within the Eighties and 90s, based by a person named Robert Funk. They aimed to strip away what they noticed as supernatural materials added after the very fact to give attention to the earliest sayings of Jesus, who emerged as a wandering sage and social justice advocate. This sort of considering might nonetheless be controversial in New Zealand as lately because the early 2000s, because the visits of John Shelby Spong confirmed. However that model of Jesus may be helpful to us now, as Veitch writes: “The values of the historic Jesus could be useful guides, because the nation continues to grapple with problems with identification, equality and justice.”
To be truthful, that’s fairly a wishy-washy assertion. The identical message was delivered with extra urgency, bravery and drive by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde on the Nationwide Cathedral in Washington DC in January. In entrance of a congregation that included US President Donald Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and different outstanding Christians, Budde urged the President to have mercy in direction of immigrants, in direction of refugees fleeing struggle zones, in direction of homosexual, lesbian and transgender youngsters. She warned concerning the tradition of contempt and “the outrage industrial complicated”.
That is the place Geering and different liberals had been pointing within the Nineteen Sixties. Geering was extra keen on Christian group than supernatural doctrine. He was targeted on the right here and now quite than a world past.
You’ll be able to see that within the controversial Brisbane interview from 1970 when the journalist requested Geering a query on everybody’s minds. If there isn’t a life after dying, then what’s left in Christianity?
Geering replied: “Effectively, I believe Christianity is a problem to males to neglect themselves and to reside for others. It’s not a straightforward problem, and actually it by no means has been. And you’ll nicely keep in mind that the Gospels themselves clearly document the phrases of Jesus when he calls his followers to take up their very own cross. That’s, they’re ready to die, to provide away their lives with a purpose to sacrifice themselves for the wants of others. And this, I believe, is the center of the Christian message nonetheless.”
Amidst all of the gotchas and headlines about heaven and hell, and the calls from Auckland to punish the heretic a second time, nobody appeared to pay a lot consideration to that a part of the interview.
Lloyd Geering: Prophet or Heretic? by Jim Veitch (Coventry Press, $69.99) is out there in chosen bookstores nationwide.
