Isabel Wood Rogers died March 18 at Westminster Canterbury, Richmond, at the age of 82, after a battle with cancer. “Dr. Izzie” as she was often called, left us a rich heritage.
She was born in Tallahassee, grew up and then took degrees at Florida State University, the University of Virginia (political science), the Presbyterian School of Christian Education (Richmond, Va.) and Duke University where she earned a Ph.D. in theology and ethics and was Phi Beta Kappa. After serving as Presbyterian chaplain and director of religious activities at Georgia College and State University she settled down as professor of applied Christianity at PSCE, now Union-PSCE in Richmond, for 37 years from 1961 to 1998.
She left us a heritage of insightful written works, focusing on her interests.
Izzie wrote a brief study entitled, In a Word: The Power of Language in which she explores the “shaping power” of language, such as words the biblical authors used to describe God as a “decreeing, punishing, conquering” and also “delivering, “divine.” She warned against idolatry of race, class, age, and even of ourselves as we use language that creates God in our own image.
She showed the scope of her faith in another early publication, The Christian and World Affairs (1964), for the Covenant Life Curriculum. She thought we were living in a “grand and awful time” in which we as Americans must not pull our heads, like turtles, into our shells and avoid the outside world. God, she held, is somehow involved in human history and we must, as citizens, participate intelligently and faithfully in foreign policy around the world.
In her pamphlet The Church’s Ministry to the Campus (1960), Izzie cast a vision for effective ministry among college students. She showed her practical approach to student worship services, stewardship activity, reaching out and enlisting students of different denominations in ecumenical service on campus.
With In Response to God, How Christians Make Ethical Decisions (1969) along with her Teacher’s Book, published in the Covenant Life Curriculum, she showed the scope of her vision for Christian faith and life. She explored how we discern what God is doing in us and the world, the social contexts in which we make our decisions. She invited readers to join “God in His work” by sharing God’s sacrifice for the world in a “new life with a Risen Christ.”
She herself expressed with joy in Sing a New Song from a third world perspective and in collaboration with Nantawan Boonprasat of the Church of Christ in Thailand, a director of a women’s division in that nation, the new one world. This work stresses the need to spread the gospel in “strange lands” from a third world perspective showing Izzie’s global reach.
Her closing words capture its vision:
We were all born to live in one world, to share the same global resources and, ultimately, to share the same fate and destiny. The world today is apparently not what it is meant to be. It has become a world of competition, injustice, and violence. … We still have faith and hope in the world, but a better one! Such hope demands our dynamic and concrete action and response, and requires courage to risk for a better future. Do we dare to live that dream and hope?
Izzie so dared!
She was still daring in Handle with Care (1982), another church school study dealing with “responsible stewardship” of the world, that she wrote with two other colleagues. It presents Izzie’s reflections as she walked the shores of the Gulf Coast and hiked the trails of the Appalachian Mountains and others, summoning us to care for God’s good earth.
Late in her career she wrote about the issue of feminism. As one who rose high in the academic and ecclesiastical arenas of life, she was concerned that other women should also rise. For the Women’s Ministries Program Area she wrote a tract entitled Toward a Liberating Faith: A Primer on Feminist Theology (1999). She called for an end of “submission” of women to men in which women refused “to accept their full created status as partners with God in the work of God’s mission in the world” because of “self-denigration,” “lack of self-affirmation,” and showed “excessive dependency.” She suggested fresh insights from the Scriptures to the importance of women. She agreed with other scholars that Jesus himself was a “feminist” in his views and in his treatment of women.
Izzie sent an open letter (April 1, 1991) to the moderator of the General Assembly reviewing the church’s studies of human sexuality, and expressed praise for a church “not afraid” to raise difficult issues and find answers for them.
Isabel Wood Rogers was recognized by colleagues when she retired from Union-PSCE, June 1998. She was also recognized by The Presbyterian Outlook for her years of service on its board beginning in 1986; she served through 2000. Izzie’s devoted friends celebrated her life experiences in a volume entitled, Better than Mounds of Chocolate: Celebrating the Life Works of Dr. Isabel Rogers (1998). She proclaimed — “chocolate is the answer, who cares about the question.”
She vowed to continue to think, to teach, to ride her bicycle, play tennis, hike, care for the environment and above all, do justice in the world. She still loved her three “B”s, Bach, Beethoven and Barth, her two “C”s, Coleridge along with Calvin, her two “E”s, Eleanor Roosevelt and Queen Elizabeth.
Izzie, we will miss you.
James H. Smylie is professor emeritus of church history at Union Seminary — PSCE in Richmond, Va.
