We may look at the contributions of Shirley Guthrie to the Presbyterian Church, to the church catholic, to his students and colleagues, and to his family and friends from many angles. In the appreciative articles honoring him and his work, the Outlook, with the advice of his colleagues at Columbia Seminary, has represented those angles of approach to this profound thinker and teacher of great simplicity, who by God’s grace (he would most certainly say) had a beneficent and transforming effect upon multitudes. Wherever his students preach and teach, Shirley’s influence is spread to people in the pews, who themselves begin their own theological reflection — even if they are shy to call it that.
I knew him from a distance as a teacher. In two cities where I was pastor, Columbia Seminary was generous enough to share him with gatherings of ministers for one-day refreshment courses. Shirley was unfailingly helpful; he brought us up to date theologically and offered us resources useful to congregations.
The 1968 edition of Christian Doctrine for the Covenant Life Curriculum, which was written for Adult Church School in the former PCUS, opens with a discussion of how all of us actually “do” theology, even unawares. With that beginning he invites elders, deacons, and the laity into conversations of complex theological issues: salvation, atonement, Trinity, predestination, and even double predestination. Before they know it, they’re engaged in thinking their faith and using the “life of their minds in the service of God.”
To claim that Shirley made an impact on multitudes is no exaggeration when you consider that the revised edition of Christian Doctrine (1994) has been translated into Japanese, and that it is the theology textbook in Trinity Theological College in Legon, Ghana, West Africa. Of equal significance is a remark I heard shortly after the 1968 edition was published, when controversy over the Covenant Life Curriculum was still causing havoc in the church. A conservative, venerable minister with whom I jousted theologically said it was a shame that congregations were rejecting CLC wholesale; they were missing the most important book (Christian Doctrine) written for the church in his lifetime. This minister was no fundamentalist. He was a careful, orthodox preacher who only a few years earlier had begun to shed his social conservatism. I have not forgotten what he said. It demonstrated the depth and breadth of Shirley’s thinking, as well as his love for the church on ordinary days, and for God’s people who were hungry for the Word made intelligible.
The most important angle is this: Shirley Guthrie is one of a tiny cadre of teachers of Reformed Theology in Presbyterian seminaries the last century who could encourage students, after ordination, to become pastor theologians. He convinced us that as we became stewards of the Word, our most important task was to use words faithfully in order to interpret the Word made flesh, in a congregation of flesh, and in a church which, whether at peace or in soul-destroying conflict, carries the treasure of the gospel in “earthen vessels, in order to show that the glory belongs to God and not to us.“ (II Corinthians 4:7)
There is no substitute for such teaching in seminary and congregation. Alongside preaching and sacraments, it builds the church, strengthening it in joint and sinew, institutionalizing the gospel’s grace and mercy in the lives of disciples, and causing knowledge of the Christian faith to flourish among people who belong to Jesus Christ. Where such teaching is absent the church becomes shallow, or is captured by the culture of consumerism, apathy, and violence.
Thanks be to God for Shirley Guthrie, servant of the Lord, master teacher and friend, who built up the church of Jesus Christ, and whose life and work encouraged faith, awakened knowledge, and bound disciples to each other and to the church of the Living God. To God be the glory.
