The Sadhu Who Silenced the Oxford Dons

In 1920, Sadhu Sundar Singh — a former Sikh from Punjab who had converted to Christianity after a vision of Christ at age fifteen — arrived in England wearing nothing but a simple saffron robe and bare sandals. Oxford University invited him to speak, expecting perhaps a curiosity, a novelty from the mission field. The lecture hall was packed with theologians who had spent decades parsing Greek verb tenses and debating the finer points of Pauline rhetoric.…