Sir Lloyd Geering

Lloyd George Geering was born in Rangiora, New Zealand, on 26 February 1918, to Alice (née Johnston) and George Frederick Thomas Geering. His parents worked in the Kaiapoi woollen mills and on small farms. For the first quarter-century of his life his household had no electricity. He spent early years in Dunedin, then four years in Australia from 1927 to 1930, where he was dux of Warrnambool Elementary School, before returning to Dunedin.

At Otago Boys' High School (1931-1935) he was dux in his final year and vice-captain of the hockey first XI. He later recalled a contented but somewhat solitary childhood after his three older brothers had left home.

Geering entered the University of Otago in 1936 to study mathematics. In 1937 a friend's invitation to church and to the Student Christian Movement changed his direction. He later called the experience a conversion he accepted only reluctantly because he was strongly anti-evangelical. He was elected president of the Otago Student Christian Movement in 1939, played first-grade hockey, and took part in drama and debating.

The University of Otago nominated him for a Rhodes Scholarship in 1939. He graduated BA with first-class honours in 1940, then entered Knox College as a theological student. As a pacifist he was exempted from Second World War military service. He completed Old Testament studies and was ordained in the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand in 1943.

After ordination Geering served as a parish minister in Kurow; Opoho, Dunedin (1945-1950); and St James, Wellington (1950-1956). He then taught Old Testament studies at the Presbyterian Church Hall in Brisbane (1956-1960) and at Theological Hall, Dunedin (1960-1963), becoming principal of the Dunedin hall from 1963 to 1971.

In 1971 he became foundation professor of religious studies at Victoria University of Wellington, a post he held until retirement in 1984, when he was named professor emeritus. He was honorary associate minister of St John's Church, Wellington (1971-1983), later honorary assistant at St Andrew's on The Terrace, and a long-time lecturer for the St Andrew's Trust for the Study of Religion and Society. He remained on the Presbyterian Fasti and wrote more than twenty books, from God in the New World (1968) to late-life memoirs.

Geering married Nancy Marie McKenzie at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Timaru, on 22 May 1943. They had two children before Nancy died of tuberculosis in Dunedin on 4 October 1949. On 20 November 1951 he married Elaine Morrison Parker, a speech therapist; they had one child. Elaine died in Cromwell on 19 August 2001. In 2004 he married Shirley Evelyn Adams (later Lady Geering); she died in Petone on 1 October 2021, aged 94.

His three children were Jonathan (died 2024), Judy and Elizabeth. Family statements after his own death stressed integrity, humour, compassion and goodwill, and noted that loss and pastoral work in Kurow, Opoho and Newtown informed his theology. In later years he played Scrabble on Skype with partners around the world and remained a lifelong churchgoer even after leaving full-time parish ministry.

Geering's public theology rejected a supernatural God who creates and supervises the world, denied the immortality of the soul as traditionally taught, and treated the resurrection of Jesus as a symbol of hope rather than a bodily resuscitation. He said the bones of Jesus could lie somewhere in Palestine. He called Christian and Muslim fundamentalism social evils, criticised the evangelical Alpha course as dangerous indoctrination, and argued that modern Christians must face evolution, cosmology and ecology without older metaphysical guarantees.

He remained culturally and communally Christian: a Presbyterian on the ministerial register, a member of progressive congregations, and a supporter of rituals grounded in the natural world, including Matariki. Late in life he joined Intergenerational Climate Ambassadors and said green issues had become the great religious questions of the day because human action was driving planetary temperature beyond survivable limits.

The 1967 Presbyterian case made Geering a dividing line in New Zealand religious debate and a rare figure tried for heresy in a modern Western church. Victoria University's religious studies programme, which he founded, grew into one of the largest and most influential in Australasia. Colleagues such as Emeritus Professor Paul Morris described his donated archive as important for New Zealand's intellectual, social and religious history.

The Sir Lloyd Geering Scholarship in Religion continues postgraduate work in his name. His books, Listener columns, broadcasts and Sea of Faith and Jesus Seminar links carried liberal Protestant and secular-Christian ideas to audiences far beyond the academy. Obituaries remembered him as New Zealand's oldest man and as a writer who helped many people rethink Christianity without abandoning community.

• Honorary Doctor of Divinity, University of Otago (1976)
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), 1988 New Year Honours
• Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (PCNZM), 2001 New Year Honours, for services to religious studies
• Member of the Order of New Zealand (ONZ), 2007 New Year Honours (New Zealand's highest civilian honour, limited living membership)
• Redesignated Knight Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (GNZM), 2009, after restoration of titular honours
• Patron, Coalition for Open Government
• Sir Lloyd Geering Scholarship in Religion established at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington (announced 2022)

Geering was a familiar voice on New Zealand radio and television and a columnist for the Auckland Star and the New Zealand Listener. The 2007 documentary The Last Western Heretic, produced in New Zealand and Israel and later aired on TV One, revisited the heresy case and his later thought. He appeared in Auckland Writers Festival events, Westar Institute / Jesus Seminar programmes, St Andrew's on The Terrace lecture series, and interviews around his 100th birthday in 2018.

His popular titles, especially Christianity without God and Wrestling with God, kept him in public conversation long after university retirement. Portrait commissions and Government House Order of New Zealand dinner photographs made him a recognisable elder statesman of New Zealand letters and religion.

The defining controversy was the 1967 Presbyterian General Assembly case. Conservative laypeople and a conservative minister charged him with doctrinal error and with disturbing the peace and unity of the church after articles and lectures denying a literal resurrection and the immortality of the soul. The assembly dismissed the charges and closed the case. Geering later said his accusers had not kept up with their reading and that what they called the peace of the church was better called its sleepiness.

Later disputes were intellectual rather than legal: his description of fundamentalism as a social evil, his secular reading of Christianity, and his climate advocacy drew criticism from conservative Christians while attracting progressive audiences. No criminal or personal scandal defines the public record beyond the theological trial.

Sir Lloyd Geering died on the morning of Thursday, 5 November 2026, at Bob Scott Retirement Village in Lower Hutt, aged 108. His family announced the death the same day. The cause of death was not made public in initial reports. He had been New Zealand's oldest living man since the death of Jim Easton on 17 September 2025.

The family planned a private natural burial at Wellington's Natural Burial cemetery in Makara and said a public memorial would be organised at St Andrew's Church, with the date to be announced. They described him as a person of integrity, humour, compassion and goodwill, and noted gratitude for the length of his life and for messages thanking him for clear statements of belief.