Donald Shriver’s moving conversations with his life provide pastoral and prophetic windows into the soul of a remarkable Christian ethicist, teacher, minister and institutional leader (president for 16 years, Union Theological Seminary, New York). They nourish us with the wisdom of maturity. He is 84. And they prompt us to ponder our own life journeys and commitments.
Throughout these musings, Shriver points to the enormous influence of the German pastor, theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who taught him “a new way of living in the presence of God — solidly in the world, in the suffering of one’s neighbors.” Moreover, these essays and Shriver’s long career are laced with the theme of translating the forgiveness of sins into personal and social understanding, as he has “explored the radical two-dimensional teaching of Jesus that divine and human forgiveness are inseparable and interdependent.”
Shriver follows three initial essays about cherished books, friends as sacred gifts and Beethoven’s profound music with a chapter on critical gratitude to the church for the lifelong nurture of persons, realism about personal and institutional sins, passion for justice, encouragement to live into our special vocational identities, the interrelatedness of all humanity, Christ’s existence as community and hope in “our Creator’s intention to save us in spite of ourselves … .”
An intimate and vulnerable account of the wrenching life journey of the eldest Shriver son Gregory (who helped write Chapter 6, on “The Peace Education of a Father and Son: 1969,” and to whom this book has been dedicated, in memoriam) begs us to revisit and ingest “the meanness and cruelties” suffered by gifted, critical and angered youth during the tumultuously divisive 1960s. Many will also identify with the wounded and fallible parental love that persisted through the subsequent years of a child’s accomplishments and heartbreaking experiences.
In an ecological essay on a “personal” 30-year dialogue with 10 acres of family retreat property, Shriver renders respect to dirt, trees, gardens and rivers as his invaluable “educators.” A commentary on servant leadership commends leaders adept at absorbing hostility, who refuse “to settle down comfortably in the present” and who model “the courage to forgive and to be forgiven.” A chapter on economic justice asserts that his “only envy of the wealthy is for the privilege of giving money away … .”
In a final conversation with his imagined great-grandchildren, Shriver bequeaths his theology of hope: that they will be alive and well in 2060, daily grateful, honored to belong to a worldwide human family, deeply in love in a permanent marriage of companionship and fidelity, and faithfully aware that they are greatly loved and empowered to love by a “love divine, all loves excelling.”
This past March, Don and his beloved wife Peggy Ann Leu Shriver flew to New Zealand, there joining judges and penal system authorities in bold and compassionate forgiveness and restorative justice strategies for many offenders. To this day, he remains among the most thoughtful and inspiring public theologians of his generation and beyond.
DEAN THOMPSON is president and professor of ministry emeritus at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
