Neville didn’t invent a teaching and then attach it to Scripture. He didn’t twist Bible verses to suit a personal theory. What he did was far more direct: he read the Bible correctly — through the one key it offers repeatedly from Genesis to Revelation — the power of imagination. Not imagination as fantasy or whim, but as the divine creative faculty, the “I AM” that forms and transforms reality.
Once this key is seen, the entire structure of Scripture unlocks. What appear to be external events become revelations of inner movement. Abraham becomes the father of faith not through lineage, but through assumption. Jacob’s wrestling is the reshaping of the self. Joseph is the imagination ruling over circumstance. Jesus is not a figure to admire from afar but the pattern of realised identity — the Word made flesh, the awakened I AM.
Neville didn’t believe in traditional Christianity because, in his words, it had turned the Bible into “secular history” and chained it to fear, guilt, and external authority. But he was wholly devoted to the Scripture itself — quoting it constantly, expounding on its symbolism, and showing again and again how every story, every character, and every prophecy points inward.
For Neville, the Bible was not a moral manual or a record of divine intervention. It was a masterfully woven psychological revelation — a guide to awakening, passed down in symbolic language. And he didn’t arrive at that by speculation; he arrived at it through experience. He lived what it taught. He tested imagination and found it to be the power the Bible names as God.
So was he a Christian? Not in the doctrinal or denominational sense. But if Christianity means honouring the Scriptures, recognising the Christ as a living pattern within, and walking in conscious union of pleasure with the Father — then yes, profoundly.
More than anything, Neville returned the Bible to the individual — not as a book to obey blindly, but as a story to understand, embody, and live. And in doing so, he didn’t reinterpret the message of Christ. He recovered it.