Remembering Karl Kutz (1962 - 2025)

I was in the first class Dr. Karl Kutz taught at Multnomah University in the fall of 1996. My best friend, Jill, and I sat near the front in the middle of the long row of chairs bolted to the floor with built-in desks in L101. The class was “History and Poetry,” where we studied the Old Testament books of Joshua through Song of Songs. It was a lot of ground to cover, and Dr. Kutz was fresh from his PhD program at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. He gave us copious notes on every book in this section of the Bible, always with charts. We were his guinea pigs. He was finding out in real time what undergraduates could handle and what he could expect of us. At the same time, we were finding out what we were capable of learning.

My most vivid memory—and even this is fuzzy 29 years later—was the day he taught about the Song of Songs. I can’t recall which approach he took to the book—whether he read it as an allegory for God’s love for Israel or as a human love poem. What I remember is that Jill and I raised our hands and asked lots of questions of whichever view he took, skeptical of whatever he had just taught. We had a good rapport by that point; our questions meant no disrespect. We were engaging in the kind of sparring that he welcomed in the classroom. What happened next I will never forget. Dr. Kutz tipped his head to one side and said, “Well, I’ll have to think more about this.” We moved on to the next topic. The next day in class, Dr. Kutz handed out new notes on the Song of Songs. He had spent his evening rethinking his view and changed his mind completely. His new handouts reflected what he now believed to be a better way of reading the book.

I was stunned. I grew up in a family where, when challenged, we doubled down to better prove our point. Karl modeled humility, curiosity, and teachability. He was not threatened by our questions. In fact, he was grateful for the way they made him think.

Karl was so devoted to teaching well that he was constantly revising the charts and timelines he made from scratch. These became overheads, thin plastic sheets paired with laser printed paper and fed through a machine that burned the ink into the plastic so it could be projected on a screen hung at the front of the classroom. Never one to waste, in years to come, Karl would give me the overheads he had updated for his own lectures. Eventually more than a foot of space on my bookshelf was devoted to 3-ring binders with his class notes and cast-off overheads. I’ve kept them all.

Karl invited me to be his TA. For several years I graded tests, created handouts, edited documents, and recorded grades in spreadsheets. Once he asked me to read through Chronicles alongside Samuel and Kings, highlighting any differences between them. Another time he gave me the entire semester’s worth of Greek reading for fourth year Greek (a class I had not taken). My assignment was to underline all the words I didn’t know so that he could create a glossary of unfamiliar words. Since I had taken 3 years of Greek, I was in exactly the position the average student would be entering that class. It was a sensible plan, since Karl had difficulty remembering that not everyone knew as much as he did. He regularly assumed that others contained mental dictionaries in multiple languages and that we had retained everything we ever read or heard in class, the way he did.

One day Karl and I talked about the possibility of me going on for more schooling. His advice was clear and direct. “Carmen, you should not pay for a PhD. By the time you get to that level, someone should be paying you to go to school.” That seemed terribly unrealistic. I thought he had again forgotten that we were not all as brilliant as he was. But he was right. He understood the academic world better than I did at that point. And eventually, someone was paying for my PhD and offering me a stipend besides.

Karl arrived at Multnomah having mastered Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Akkadian, Ugaritic, German, and French. I remember when Karl began teaching himself Chinese so he could read a manuscript related to martial arts. When I was a student he taught fencing as a PE class. Karl’s curiosity to learn new languages and skills was unquenchable.

As brilliant as he was, Karl was patient, others-centered, an encourager. And oh, how I’ll miss his infectious laugh! He and Laurie traveled all the way from Oregon to Colorado for our wedding at their own expense. He prepared a toast for the reception in true Karl fashion. Never one to work off the cuff, Karl had categorized all the “I” words in the English dictionary according to their part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.). Then he composed his toast using almost entirely words that began with “I” for Imes. That’s just how he rolled. 

One day a couple of years later we sat at his computer—I had pulled up an extra chair beside him—while we scoured a website of Hebrew baby girl names. I had graduated by then, and was pregnant and auditing his Hebrew class with my free alumnus audit. He found the name Eliana, which we both loved. My husband and I had lost our first child to miscarriage, and it devastated us. Karl sat with me in that sacred space of emerging hope that our second child would be born healthy. The name Eliana means “My God has answered”—such a meaningful name for the child who was an answer to our anguished prayers.

Eliana was born during spring break. I spent the rest of the semester recovering and adjusting to motherhood, so I wasn’t there on the day classes resumed after spring break. Students filed into the classroom nervous to find out how much Hebrew they still knew after a week away. Karl put a Hebrew passage on the overhead for them to translate together. They struggled through the unfamiliar words and expressions—“after only one-and-a-half hours in pain of childbirth in the house of the sick . . .”—until they gradually figured it out. [Note: I labored much longer than this—about 22 hours—but Eliana was born just 90 minutes after we arrived at the hospital.] Recognizing that all the students would want to hear the news, Karl had composed a birth announcement for Eliana entirely in Hebrew. A few years later, Eliana sat astride the rocking horse in his living room while we visited—a horse he carved himself as a gift to his wife.

I was among the small group of students who sat around the lunch table with the two of them at the Old Spaghetti Factory to celebrate Karl’s 40^th birthday. Our birthdays were just one day (and 14 years) apart. He wasn’t quite old enough to be my father, but he was like a much older brother or fun uncle.

Karl was honest about his struggles. His wife’s health challenges absorbed much of their married years and made it impossible to think of having children. I remember those years as a dark cloud hovered over their home while they tried one unsuccessful treatment after another. Karl loved children, and it broke his heart not to be a father. He channeled his energies into his niece and nephew—his pride and joy—and into his students, counting us as part of his family. At his memorial service, his colleague Becky Josberger read a message he wrote to all his former students, telling us that we were like the children he never had.

Karl and his wife supported us monthly when we became missionaries. Later, when I entered fully into academic life we enjoyed catching up at conferences. I remember one such occasion when we sat on the floor in the conference center for a long talk. It was 2012. I think he had divorced by then. I remember him sharing openly with me about his wrestling with God. I don’t remember Karl teaching me in class about lament, but he lived it in a way that taught all who knew him. He was intellectually honest, which meant he had nothing to hide from his students.

Some seven years or more after I had graduated from Multnomah, I was reading a book in seminary whose approach to Genesis 1 was revolutionary. I wrote to Karl asking if he’d ever read the book or heard of this approach. I needed it to pass the Karl test before I embraced it. I knew he would not be threatened by a new idea. His response to my email was straightforward: “Yes, that’s how I’ve pretty much always read Genesis 1.” My jaw dropped. How had I studied and worked with him so closely for at least four years and not known this? How had we never talked about it before? The reason was simple. He arrived at Multnomah during my Sophomore year, after I had already taken Pentateuch.

Later he gave me a full set of his notes on the Pentateuch, just in case they would be useful to me. Now that he’s gone, I’m grateful that I’ve kept them all these years.

I was sitting at my desk at Biola University the day I got Karl’s email with his diagnosis and bleak prospects. I let out a cry of dismay and the tears started flowing. My husband responded to my plea instantly, coming across campus to my office to hold me and let me cry. Although Karl and I have rarely had the chance to see one another these past 10 years, just knowing he’s there for me has been enough. He believed in me, trained me, hired me as his TA, supported us financially, and cheered me on every step of the way. Karl never doubted that I would get a PhD and follow in his footsteps. When we saw each other at conferences he told me how proud he was of me. But after that initial email about Karl’s diagnosis, I never saw him again.

During the last year of Karl’s life, he stewarded all the energy he had left between chemo and radiation treatments for writing. In the week before he entered hospice care, he completed his commentary on Isaiah. At his memorial service, Becky shared the story of how on the day Karl announced he would no longer be able to send or respond to emails, his publisher had an emergency meeting. They offered him four contracts for books he had already written, which he signed on his deathbed.

The world of publishing has changed considerably in the almost 30 years since Karl started teaching. An author must not only be smart and able to communicate well, but they must have a public platform with a built-in audience. Not only was Karl nearly silent on social media, but now he’s no longer living. The fact that a publisher was not only willing to offer him one contract, but FOUR is a testament to the impeccable quality of his work and of his character. Karl wrote by teaching on paper, creating clear and helpful synopses of what he saw in the biblical text. He poured out his life for the sake of those around him, giving generously whatever he had. I’m so grateful that we’ll be able to continue learning from Karl in the years to come.

For most of his academic career, Karl studied the book of Job. He also lived it. His years of lament gave him strength of character and depth of empathy as well as a keen sense of his own need. Becky shared that in his last year on earth Karl finally felt like he was experiencing the end of Job’s story—seeing fruit where he had long waited empty handed.

Karl has been part of most of the major milestones of my adult life—our dating and engagement, our wedding, our miscarriage, the birth of our oldest daughter, our work as missionaries in the Philippines, my PhD journey, when I began teaching as adjunct faculty at Multnomah and we were finally colleagues, my move into a full-time position in Canada, the publication of my books. I received tenure just a couple of weeks before he died. In the week he died, Multnomah closed its doors forever.

The death of my alma mater will now perpetually be linked with the death of one of my dearest mentors. The tragedy of Multnomah’s closing means that I’ll never have to see what would become of Multnomah without Karl. His absence there is unimaginable to me.

How I would love to be a fly on the wall as Karl asks the Lord all his questions. I picture them walking through gardens, talking and laughing, and stopping to investigate each new discovery. By the time you and I arrive, Karl will have a 3-ring binder waiting with timelines and charts of all the things about heaven that he thinks would be helpful for newcomers to know. He’ll start with an apology for the things he got wrong in his class notes and then excitedly show us how things really are.

That’s just Karl. He was, and is, a gift to the world!