Niles, Daniel Thambyrajah (1908-1970)

1. Life and Ministry

Niles, Daniel Thambyrajah (He was known as “D.T.”) was active in the ecumenical
movement for four decades and for the last three of these was one of its best known leaders.
Niles was born on 4th May 1908 in Tellippalai in northern Ceylon. He was the son of a
distinguished lawyer and the grandson of a much-loved pastor and poet. After school and
college in his native Jaffna, he studied theology in Bangalore from 1929 to 1933. He was
already much involved with the Student Christian Movement and from 1933 was its national
secretary and took part in the meeting of the general committee of the world Student
Christian Federation in Sofia1.

In 1936 he was ordained to the ministry of the Methodist Church and served for three years
as district evangelist. He took a prominent part in the International Missionary Council
Tambaram conference of 1938 as a speaker and as secretary of the section on “The Authority
of Faith”. Following Tambaram he went to Europe as part of a team bringing the message of
Tambaram to the British Churches, and then for a year (1939-40) he was in Geneva as
evangelism Secretary of the world’s YMCA2. From 1953 he was chairman of the WSCF and
along with Phillippe Maury, planned and carried through an ambitious programme on “The
Life and Mission of the Church”, with the Strasbourg conference of 1960 as its centre-piece.
Meanwhile from 1954 to 1964 he was also chairman of the northern district of the Methodist
church while continuing to be heavily involved in the work of the WCC, including the
assemblies at Evantson and New Delhi. From 1959 to 1960 he was also Henry Emerson
Fosdick professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York. In August 1968, he took over
the leadership of the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka as the president of the Methodist
Conference3.

2. His Understanding of the Trinity:

The Christian faith is not simple “Jesus-religion”, and he declared in the Lyman Beecher
Lectures; “it is faith in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, one God in
three persons, Trinity in unity and unity in Trinity. Niles emphasized that, the Trinity
represented not a distinction within the Godhead, but a significant distinction for the work of
Salvation. The downward movement of God in creation and providence is revealed in
Christ’s incarnation, suffering and death; in the upward movement of the Holy Spirit is
manifest in his resurrection and ascension. Within the Trinity, “the Holy Spirit is the
missionary of the gospel. It is he who makes the gospel explosive in men’s lives and in
human affairs.

3. Contribution in Music:

Niles was a pioneering ecumenist and a leading figure in developing an Asian approach to
theology. His work included producing an important Asian hymnal. The first stanza contains
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an English reference, “Grant thy children mercy and blessing,” but apparently this is the
extent of the relationship between Maquiso’s original text and Niles’ version. By Western
standards this all seems a bit confusing. We tend to think that a poet writes the text and
someone else may compose the melody. Even in Western Hymna, however,the versions we
sing from our hymnals may have passed through several hands for textual translation and
alteration and musical adaptation and arrangement. As Asian Christians were attempting to
find their own musical voice, this kind of borrowing and adaptation was quite normal. His
greatest contribution to hymnology was as editor of the Cebuano hymnal, Awitan sa
Pagtoo(1973), which includes many of her original compositions and hymn texts. The
hymnal is widely used today among Cebuano speaking congregations.