George Guthrie

Dr. George Guthrie Testimony

My story really starts before I was born. My mom had had three miscarriages before I was born and she really wondered whether she was going to be able to have a child. So the doctors gave her lots of drugs and just to try to keep me in the womb until I was full term.

But 1959, I was born 10 weeks early. It turned out I had a one in 10 chance of living. I weighed three and a half pounds.

I started out at about four pounds and went down to three and a half pounds, had one lung working, and they put me in an incubator for 30 days. The doctors actually told my grandmother that she shouldn't expect to have a grandchild because they didn't think I was going to make it. But my mom went out on the front porch of our home and she cried out to God and said, God, if you will just let him live, then you can have him.

And I think God took her up on that because my earliest memories were of being interested in the things of the Lord. And I had a big red Bible story book that my parents would put out in the middle of the floor, and I was always just very interested in the things of God. So when I was six years of age, about two weeks before I turned seven, I was really grappling with what I understood about the gospel and about faith in Jesus.

And I had a very basic, childlike understanding of that. But at that point, on the basis of what I understood, I gave my life to Christ and I was baptized in the First Baptist Church of Dyersburg, Tennessee. And I began my journey of being God's person in the world.

And as I grew up, especially as I got into high school, kind of got off track some spiritually, but I was still going to church and finally came to a place where I got very serious about my faith, about my junior year of high school. And a friend of mine had gone off to play college football, had come to Christ and that experience and then come back home. And I was the guy who he knew as a Christian.

We had played football together. I was quarterback of the football team. And so we started going around singing.

We were preaching in the jails that were in our area. We would talk to anybody about Jesus. So we would go to a restaurant and then go back and back to the people who were cooking the food and sing for them.

So we had a great time and began traveling around. I ended up going to a Christian university where I started studying Greek and the Bible and really fell in love with the Greek language. I fell in love with biblical studies.

When I went off to seminary, I came to a place where I really didn't know specifically what I was supposed to do, but I thought that I was maybe going to be a teacher somewhere. I never had a sense that I was going to be a pastor of a local church as my full time thing, but I really had a sense that I wanted to have an impact in the world, perhaps through teaching people and using teaching as a platform for discipleship, where I would encourage people in their walk with Christ and in their faith. I got to the end of a Master of Divinity degree at the seminary I attended.

And as I came to that place, I was struggling with how I was going to focus. And that same friend that I had gone to high school with encouraged me and said, you know, you love Greek and the New Testament. You really ought to focus and do a Ph.D. in the New Testament.

And it was like the Spirit of God used that moment to capture my heart. I had a chance right after that to go to Trinity Divinity School in Chicago and to do a master's degree there. I was working with a man named Robert Coleman in discipleship and evangelism and kind of working as an assistant with him.

But at the same time, I was doing a Master of Theology degree on the New Testament with the professors there at Trinity. And while I was taking a course on German, I was introduced to the book of Hebrews and the Psalms in the book of Hebrews. That led me to do a master's thesis on the question of how Psalm 110-1 fits into the book of Hebrews.

That launched me into a question of the structure of the book. And I ended up going back to the seminary where I had done my first master's degree to do a Ph.D. And there I focused my dissertation on the structure of the book of Hebrews. Since that time, I've been very privileged to work on a lot of different material.

I've written various commentaries on Hebrews. I've also had the opportunity to write commentaries on 2 Corinthians and Philippians and the book of James. I've participated in a biblical literacy initiative with Likeway Publishers, helping people to read the Bible more effectively and now have a new book coming out called A Short Guide to Reading the Bible Better.

By God's grace, I've also had a wonderful network of friends in biblical studies and have been able to participate in a number of Bible translation projects, mostly as a consultant on the book of Hebrews. But here's the thing that I'm most excited about is I love teaching the Bible to students. I've had the chance to do that over 32 years to undergraduate students for many years and now with graduate students and their families.

And I think biblical studies is done best in the context of Christian community. These books of the New Testament were written out of Christian community for the sake of mission in the church. And they have come to us as something that we can engage in study from that same vantage point.

We can experience very good, advanced, rigorous study of the New Testament documents. But I believe these documents ultimately need to be approached for their place that they play in prompting us to be better disciples of Jesus who are a part of the church on mission for Christ in the world. So I'm very excited about the opportunity to be involved with biblical training because I see biblical training as a platform that's being used greatly to advance the cause of Christ in the world.

So I'll look forward to you joining me in some of the classes that we have here on the biblical training website. And I hope to see you at some point in the future. And I hope that you will have gained encouragement from our time of study together.

In my first year of Ph.D. work, I actually made the best decision I've ever made in my life. And that was I married my wife, Pat Guthrie. In fact, my dad used to say that the best day's work I ever did in my life was the day I married Pat.

And that's true. Pat and I are best friends. We have always just enjoyed one another.

But she is my my best friend and partner in life and ministry in my teaching ministry. Pat has been so instrumental in my ongoing growth in the Lord. She reads more books than I do, and she is constantly stimulating my thinking as I read the Bible and talk about the various things that are going on in the world.

But she also is a wonderful person who mentors young women and helps them grow in their faith in Christ and helps them with issues in parenting and marriage. Pat and I have two wonderful children. Our kids are now grown.

Our son is an engineer who works for a building company in Tennessee, and our daughter is in Chattanooga, Tennessee, working for a large ministry as their graphic designer. So we have been blessed with a wonderful family, and our family has always been kind of a context out of which we have been able to do ministry. We really believe in the ministry of hospitality in our home and that giving a grounding to the ministry that I'm doing in the classroom.

Well, it's hard to answer the question of who are the people who have had the most influence on me, but I'll mention two. One, when I was doing my first master's degree, I had a friend and prayer partner named Dr. F.B. Huey. Dr. Huey was an Old Testament professor, Hebrew professor at the seminary, and yet he took time for me and he prayed for me and walked with me.

He was one of the kindest, wisest men who I had ever met and really had a tremendous influence on my life. In fact, when my wife Pat and I first met, Dr. Huey was one of the people who discerned the moment and really understood that God was doing something very special in my life at that moment. When I was writing my dissertation on the book of Hebrews, I reached out to a scholar named Dr. William Lane.

Dr. Lane was in the process of writing a two-volume commentary on the book of Hebrews that would be a very important commentary in the world. It was in the Word Biblical Commentary series, and I knew that he followed a man named Albert Benoit on the structure of the book of Hebrews because of his previous writings. And so I reached out to him.

He didn't know me at all. He was teaching at the time at Seattle Pacific University in the northwest. I initially called him on the telephone and I said, Dr. Lane, my name is George Guthrie.

I'm working on the structure of the book of Hebrews on my dissertation. I'm just wondering, do you still follow Albert Benoit on the structure of the book? And he said, yes, yes, I think Benoit, you know, so and so. And I said, well, can I tell you why I think he's wrong? And Dr. Lane said, sure, I would love you to send me some stuff.

So I sent him information that I was working on on the structure of the book, and he immediately wrote me a long handwritten letter back and said, I think you're really on to something here. In fact, I want to encourage you to ask your professors to name me as the external reader on your dissertation. And he did that.

He became my external reader and became a mentor to me for the last 10 years of his life. He died of multiple myeloma about 18 years ago now. And yet Bill was always available to me, always open to me.

One of my favorite stories about Bill really was at his funeral. And at his funeral, his daughter was holding Bill's grandchild and the grandchild turned to his mama and said, well, Mama, I guess now Grandpa knows who wrote the book of Hebrews. And I love that story, because anytime as a Hebrew scholar, anywhere you are in the world, if people don't know anything else to ask about Hebrews that were asked, well, who do you think the author was? Well, to understand that, you'll have to take my class on the book of Hebrews.

One of the people who I got to meet through my relationship with Bill Lane was the musician Michael Card. Michael Card is now an old friend of mine, a dear brother in the Lord. We've walked together as friends for many years.

The thing that I love about Mike is he integrates serious biblical study with music and ministry. And he's one of the best people I know in facilitating a network of people who are in community together. So my relationship with Bill Lane actually led to other relationships that have had a great influence on my life.

And Mike has been a formative influence because he's connected me to the world of arts and music, and I've had great joy in his friendship and many other friends as well. Bill Mounce, who is the head of biblical training, is also an old friend of mine. And, you know, one of the things that we're blessed with in this world of teaching the Bible is we have this amazing network of friends who influence us, who are doing great things for God in the world.

And one of the joys that I have in working with biblical training is that I get to work with my friend, my dear friend Bill, and also work with him on something that is really, really worthwhile. So for those of you who are out there who are getting exposed to this ministry, I want to encourage you to support the ministry of biblical training because it not only is benefiting you, but it's also carrying forward the work of Christ in the world through people like my dear friend Bill Mounce. I have several hobbies that I really enjoy.

I enjoy gardening, for instance, and my wife and I are part of a community garden in Vancouver, British Columbia, where we live now. But one of the main hobbies that I have at this point in my life is fly fishing. So when I was moving to Vancouver a little over four years ago, I really wanted to take up fly fishing because I knew that Vancouver and the broader British Columbia area was one of the greatest fisheries in the world.

And when I got there, I found that some of my colleagues also were already involved in fly fishing and going on fly fishing trips together up into the interior of British Columbia. So one of the joys that I have in life is being able to get out into God's beautiful creation and be with brothers in Christ to gather around the fire and talk about amazing things, but to go into fish to try to learn the technical nature of fly fishing. But it's mainly a way of building community with others and being out in God's beautiful creation.

And by the way, a lot of times we're doing catch and release to let those fish go. We do bring some home to eat, but we also let some of those fish live to see another day.