If ever "a workman" "stud[ied] to shew [him] self approved unto God," it was Raymond Forrest Cottrell. And the last phrase of 2 Timothy 2:15, "rightly dividing the word of truth," so aptly describes the efforts toward a reliable interpretation of scripture that our lately departed friend called his "unending quest."

Ray Cottrell worked as easily in the Hebrew as in the Greek, but he seems to have misunderstood the Psalmist in chapter 90, verse 10 to be saying that "The days of your labor are threescore and ten." Because he was a most cheerful workaholic decades before the term was coined.

Born in 1911 among what then were the strawberry fields of south central Los Angeles, Ray's work and study habits first appeared as he approached adolescence, following his family's move in 1919 to Shanghai, where his father had been encouraged by Roy Franklin Cottrell, Ray's China missionary uncle, to come and sell Hupmobiles, the creation of one of Henry Ford's early employees.

The boy Ray created his own map of Shanghai, which was then a city of 250,000 people. And during his first two years at the American high school there he was so taken by his Latin classics that he translated Caesar's Gaelic Wars longhand, into English-just for fun! "It filled four handwritten notebooks," his surviving brother, Leland, recalled recently.

Leland's most significant memory from their childhood in Shanghai is of the evening when, as an early teen, Ray approached the dinner table where his parents were dining alone. "He looked at Father and Mother at the table, only he was seeing something farther away. And . . . he held up his hands, just like somebody [trying] to get their attention. But he was looking past them. 'Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears. I have decided to give my life to Jesus.' And he just broke out crying. And, of course, Dad and Mom jumped up from the table and came to comfort him. It was a tremendous incident that I had witnessed. And that explains his whole career in working for God."

Ray followed this commitment with action. As young as he was, Ray seemed to have the run of the dynasty. He would ride his bicycle or take the bus through Shanghai to the jetty along the Huangpu River where American, British and French warships frequently stood at anchor. For a few pennies he would hire a skiff that would take him out to the destroyer, cruiser or battleship of his choice. There he would climb the gangway up the side of the ship to the main deck and provide the sailors with truth-filled literature.

It was also in Shanghai that he began his lifelong love of astronomy and cosmology. His father bought him a very high-quality telescope that he used at one point to focus the sun on a drawing board across which he plotted the movement of sunspots over a period of weeks.

A few months after the birth of his third brother, Kenneth Grayson, in December of 1925, the Charles Cottrell family returned to the United States, settling in Riverside.

Through farm, maintenance, monitor and cafeteria jobs, Ray worked his way through the last two years of high school at La Sierra Academy and two years of junior college at what is now La Sierra University.

During his senior year of academy Ray taught second-year Latin to a class of one, so that Leland would not have to waste the year of Latin he had taken in Shanghai and have to begin again his two-year language requirements in Spanish, French or German because La Sierra had no one to teach Latin. In his final year at Southern California Junior College, Ray became the founding editor of the College Criterion; and, through no fault of his own, graduated one major piano recital short of a double major.

While at the junior college Ray learned Spanish well enough to ingather in that tongue and hold Bible readings in the home of a Mexican family in Wineville, which has since changed its name to Mira Loma, and where Ray's early contacts resulted in the first American, Spanish-speaking SDA Church. Ray and his theology major friends also participated in various outreach efforts in Pedley, Norco, Sunnymead and Corona, all of which resulted in Adventist churches.

Raymond had begun in college to read books omnivorously, something like thirty volumes a year. As he read he compiled a list of words (along with their definitions) that he encountered in his reading. Around 1930 he wrote an essay on simplicity using almost exclusively the "simple" words from his vocabulary notebook. Three months ago he recited the first sentence of that essay to his biographer:

"Transcending the meticulous austerity among the genus homo, I descry an inscrutable resilience permeating the fortuitous prescience of adamantine anthropomorphism."

Straight out of junior college Ray was asked to be principal of nearby San Bernardino Colton Junior Academy that later became Fairview Academy. He had been all set to attend Pacific Union College, but the depression got in his way.

The next year he accepted a pastoral internship in Arizona, where he met a young nursing student named Elizabeth Landis, who shared her flashlight with him while Christmas caroling. Ray and Elizabeth were married on December 16, 1932, in the 9th Street Phoenix Seventh-day Adventist Church by Sofus Tony Borg_a union that endured four months shy of 70 years. Within months the newlyweds moved to Yuma, Arizona, and then Ogden, Utah, pastoring a few months in each field until, late in 1934, they accepted a call to mission service in Manchuria.

On a layover en route, the young couple visited a public aquarium where, Ray wrote home, "the biggest fish we met . . . was Babe Ruth in person, who had just arrived on the 'Empress of Japan.'" The voyage to Yokohama, Japan, on the SS President Lincoln took a little over three weeks. "The only time I ever gambled in my life," said Ray. There were one-arm bandits on the ship, and the young pastor "had a guilty conscience until I put what I won in the Sunday offering."

After a year of immersion in the study of Mandarin and some other duties, Ray's titles accumulated: Director, Kirin Mission; Principal, Manchuria Union Training School; Educational Secretary, Manchuria Union Mission and Director, Central Manchuria Mission. For several of their Manchuria years, Ray and Elizabeth lived in Hsingking, literally next door to Henry Pu Ying_the last emperor.

By 1940, six years into a seven-year commitment, hostilities involving the Japanese occupation made mission work more than difficult, and dangerous as well. Along with the other missionary women and children, Elizabeth returned to the States; and in early 1941, Ray and the other remaining missionary men had to evacuate.

The returned China hands moved to PUC where Ray taught fulltime at PUC Prep, and then in the College religion department, while completing his Bachelor of Arts degree and graduating with a Masters degree, along with longtime friend and colleague, Graham Maxwell, in 1944. And it was at PUC in the late 1940s that Ray and Elizabeth adopted Richard and Peggy.

Beginning in 1948 Ray devised and directed the Personal Evangelism Crusade that involved more than 550 students and faculty of PUC once each month in highly organized visitation and literature dissemination to thousands of homes in a 160 by 80-mile corridor between San Francisco and Sacramento. The crusade lasted several years and resulted in the establishment of several new Seventh-day Adventist churches.

Ray taught in PUC's religion department quarter after quarter for ten years, with no summer breaks. During that decade, Ray served as the founding secretary of the Bible Research Fellowship (the first professional association of Adventist Bible scholars) from 1943 until 1952, when it disbanded over conflicts with the General Conference president regarding (especially) the identity of the King of the North.

Ray's proposal to replace the BRF with a Biblical Research Committee under the auspices of the General Conference was approved by the GC Committee in 1952, the same year that Adventist Review editor F.D. Nichol called Ray to join him, along with Don Neufeld, in the Herculean task of creating a Seventh-day Adventist Bible commentary. For the next several years Cottrell and Neufeld, the duo that Ray termed the "galley slaves," worked six days a week from 4:30 in the morning . . . well, from dark to dark. In 1957, their "long march" resulted in a monumental, lasting and most useful achievement.

In 1959, while working as associate editor of the Review, two Rays-Cottrell and Moore-were instrumental in planting a new church in the growing neighborhood of Wheaton, Maryland. Ray served as associate pastor there on a voluntary basis for many years.

The Cottrell youngsters, Richard and Peggy, grew up around Takoma Park. Although Ray enjoyed traveling and giving lectures on a variety of topics, until the children began academy at Blue Mountain, he traveled minimally, and then only when he could take his family with him. Both Peggy and Richard recall how Ray regularly took the effort to make Sabbaths special-with trips to zoos, parks, museums, historic sites, or weekends camping in nature where God's creation was on display.

Although sometimes distracted, he was always kind to them and they could absolutely count on his word. And neither will forget the image of dad in his missionary (pith) helmet towing Richard and friends behind their ski boat.

Some of Ray's colleagues have described him as a twentieth-century Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), minus the inflated ego and the biting sarcasm. A review of their respective lives reveals a considerable list of parallels between Ray and the fifteenth-century Des who lived to mourn the execution of his friend Sir Thomas More. The fitness of the analogy remains to be made in his biography, along with his controversial friendship with another well-known Des.

Like his Albigensian and later Seventh-day Baptist forebears, Ray was a reformer, albeit a most gentle one. He encouraged, in his modest and pleasant way, reform in our methods of corporate Bible study, toward a scripturally sound defense of the sanctuary doctrine, in a consistent and valid use of Ellen White's writings, in our understanding of the relationship between science and theology, in church structure and governance and in the place of women in the institutional church. Although he played strictly by all of the explicit_as well as the many unspoken_rules of the church hierarchs, Ray's unswervingly kind and long-suffering responses to the mistreatment he received by some of those in positions of authority is a poignant lesson in loving your enemies.

Working on a favorite them, "Faith and Reason as Coordinates," Ray gave the commencement address at Andrew University for at least the third time, in 1972, on which occasion he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree for the many ways he contributed his intellectual gifts to the church: his facility in three languages (three living and three dead), his staggering Commentary contribution, his self-taught expertise in astronomy, cosmology and geology, his various books and hundreds of reports and editorials for the Adventist Review and his shepherding of so many other manuscripts to publication as book editor for the Review and Herald Publishing Association. It is a datum that fills to overflowing the requirements of irony that Ray's doctoral certificate is signed by Willis J. Hackett.

Although Ray had reached retirement age in 1976, Kenneth Wood persuaded him to return to the Adventist Review to fill a vacancy for one additional year that concluded forty-seven years of denominational employment. But he retired sort of like old man river. He kept rolling along another quarter of a century-teaching, writing, editing and lecturing well into 2002, his 90th year.

Within two years of his retirement in 1977, Ray was confronted by an opportunity to engage more broadly the dialogue that for nearly thirty years he had limited to a select group of his scholarly peers regarding the legitimacy of the interpretation of the few biblical texts on which rested the uniquely Adventist sanctuary doctrine.

Quite coincidentally, Ray had addressed in a fairly comprehensive way his concerns about the state of biblical support for the sanctuary doctrine and its investigative judgment to a limited audience at Andrews University over the weekend of October 20, 1979, a week before Desmond Ford's unsettling presentation to a larger and more diverse audience at PUC. For the most understandable of reasons Ray played a significant role at the subsequent Glacier View conclave. He was an appointed delegate who contributed a white paper, who provided pre-and post-discussion polls of the delegates and who reported on the experience, based on his shorthand notes, in what remains the most comprehensive and accurate portrayal of this Adventist watershed available to this moment.

In his retirement Ray provided a number of significant services to the church at local, conference, division and world church levels. Beyond the variety of classes he taught, beginning in 1977, for both La Sierra and Loma Linda Universities, with Walter Specht, in 1983, Ray co-authored the first General Conference-sponsored effort to evaluate Mrs. White's use of sources in The Desire of Ages. For the Association of Adventist Forums first national congress in 1984 he produced a comprehensive, multi-factored comparative analysis of the structure and governance of Adventism with eleven other Christian denominations in North America. In 1992, fifty-two years after his founding editorship of the College Criterion, Ray, along with Loma Linda University professor of ethics, Jim Walters, co-founded Adventist Today, which deals with Adventist news and issues from an independent perspective. This was the same year that Ray produced for the Southeastern California Conference Constitution Committee a draft constitution, along with other support documents, in anticipation of the Conference's triennial session revision of its organizing documents. Ray also played a central role in 1996, on the Southeastern California Conference's Gender Inclusiveness Commission, providing support monographs that detailed the Bible Principles Relating to the Ordination of Women.

Throughout his retirement years Ray enjoyed scores of speaking engagements that addressed some of the topics just reviewed as well as those relating to his continued study of astronomy, cosmology and geology. He holds the record-an even dozen-for addresses to the most active Adventist Forums chapter in the world, the San Diego chapter, to which he presented a paper in February of 2002.

But his recurring theme_and his most ardent desire_was that his church would adopt and utilize consistent, valid hermeneutical principles in its study of the Bible. An accurate understanding of scripture, he said recently, was his life's "unending quest."

On faith Ray believed that "God will take to heaven anyone who would be happy there." His only concern for the interregnum would be that he will have missed a lot of work and the opportunity to tend his garden.

Ray was preceded in sleep by his two youngest brothers, Elwood and Grayson. He leaves behind his beloved brother Leland, his two adult children, Peggy and Richard, three grandsons, eight great-grandchildren, numerous nieces and nephews, a host of admiring colleagues, students, friends and a church that is so deeply (and largely unwittingly) in his debt.

It seems fitting to conclude Ray's life sketch by applying to him words he wrote in tribute upon the departure of a long-lived colleague.

As noble mountain majesty

Serenely near the skies

Inspires the soul with lofty thoughts-

You lifted up my eyes.

As waters of some mountain lake

Reflect a graceful tree

In vivid form and living hue-

You mirrored God to me.

As twilight sends its afterglow

In light almost divine

Enriching lake and tree and sky-

Your life illumined mine.

As with eternal majesty

The lofty mountains rise

Inspiring faith and hope and trust-

You lifted up my eyes.