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Holy Week resources and reflections

Teacher to the end: A Student’s Remembrance of Shirley Guthrie

Those of us who entered seminary in the latter years of Shirley Guthrie’s career are grateful that this teacher never relinquished his passion for sharing his gift with the church. Already a professor emeritus by the time I entered Columbia Theological Seminary, Shirley gave little evidence that he had laid aside his calling to instruct.  Indeed, his beloved wife Vivian knew that, in many ways, the seminary classroom was his first home.

Shirley’s popularity (and success) as a teacher stemmed in part from his ability to make accessible important concepts in Christian theology. George Stroup, his longtime colleague at Columbia, said it best in an earlier tribute to Shirley: “The genius of the book [Christian Doctrine] is that it makes accessible to people with little or no formal theological education the most important insights from the work of Karl Barth, ‘translates’ theology into human experience, and makes theology, in the best sense of the word, ‘practical.’”  Many Voices, One God, eds. Walter Brueggemann and George W. Stroup (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 2.

To seminarians befuddled by the dense, spiral writing style of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Shirley encouraged perseverance, assuring us that we would “get the point” by the third time Barth made it.  Shirley’s own style—both in writing and in lectures— was, by contrast, direct and plainspoken.  I am convinced that the church’s frequent liturgical use of A Declaration of Faith derives from the lucid way in which that confession expresses the convictions of the Reformed faith. 

Shirley sometimes complained that churches asked him to teach the same topics over and over, and that he would often see the same students in those classes. (I confess that the church I served as an associate pastor, where Shirley and Vivian worshiped, fell into that category.)  In making those remarks, Shirley forgot, I think, how rare was his gift for making theology accessible to all kinds of folk. 

But people flocked to Shirley’s classes—in seminary and in countless churches—for another, more human reason: his humility. Shirley respected all people as children of God, and honored in practice his own observation that every person is a “practicing theologian.” He relished dialogue, genuinely expected to learn from the encounters, and delighted in welcoming former students as colleagues in ministry. One Sunday while teaching a series on the book of Job entitled, “What Kind of God?” I spotted Shirley in the class. Intimidation quickly gave way to gratitude as Shirley graciously, but nonintrusively, enriched our class discussions. Shirley embodied not only the truth that every great teacher is also an eager student, but also the conviction that we are all pilgrims exploring together the mysteries of the loving God who embraces the world in Jesus Christ. In a world hungry for authenticity, Shirley Guthrie exuded it both in and outside the classroom.

Finally, one cannot remember Shirley without noting his passionate commitment to the notion that the church exists to witness to God’s love and to join God’s work in the world by striving for justice, exercising compassion, and working for peace. At my own ordination, Shirley charged the congregation with these words:

There are church members and whole congregations who belong to the church because of what it has to offer them and do for them and their families, and because of the fellowship they enjoy with other people like them. . .. And there are also church members and congregations who believe that ministers are “paid Christians” who are hired to do God’s work in the world in behalf of its members so that they don’t have to do anything except to write a check now and then.

But [the church] . . . is here not only to serve the religious, psychological and social needs of its members, but to serve the needs of people in the world around us. It is here to bear witness to the good news of what God is doing and promises to do not only in our lives but in their lives too. And our ministers are not people we pay to do the church’s work for us; they are people we pay to enable and help us to do it.

During the last weeks of his life, Shirley occasionally felt strong enough to sit up and listen to some of his mail.  On a visit to see him, I read a note from one of his seminary colleagues enclosing the syllabus for a course on providence and theodicy that Shirley had been scheduled to help teach. “What an interesting course!” I remarked after scanning the enclosure. Then, with that twinkle in his eyes and broad grin that could lend an elfish look to Shirley’s face, this teacher to the end leaned forward slightly in his wheel chair and whispered, “Yeah.  It kind of makes me want to hang around a while longer.” For those of us blessed to be among his students, Shirley Guthrie will be hanging around—in the way we do theology, and hopefully in the way we live out our faith in decades to come.  Thanks be to God for Shirley Guthrie! 

 

JANE FAHEY was formerly associate pastor for mission at Trinity church in Atlanta and currently serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia Theological Seminary.

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