Bible scholar advocated women in ministry, turned battle with cancer into testament of faith

Midway through teaching the class in 2002, Scholer learned he had cancer. He could have kept the grim news private but that would have been out of character. Scholer was a man who loved people. He sent birthday cards to colleagues and the children of colleagues, officiated at his students' weddings and brought together people of various ages and denominations for regular "hymn sings" at his home.

Not sharing his struggle "wouldn't have been David's way," said Marianne Meye Thompson, a New Testament expert at Fuller who knew Scholer for 20 years.

Three years into Scholer's battle, his pastor, the Rev. Stephen Hasper, asked him to give a sermon about the realities of grappling daily with the cancer that had by then spread to both lungs. Scholer held little back. He admitted that on the first Sunday after his diagnosis he was so scared that he avoided his own church and attended services at one where he did not think anyone would know him.

He said that for a while he left Sunday services early, while the last hymn was being sung, because he "didn't have the strength to have everybody ask me how I was doing."

Scholer confessed that every morning after waking up he wished he could "have just one more normal day" and fought to find the will to keep going. He compared his disease to "having a terrorist bomb strapped on your back; you just don't know when it's going to go off."

He also spoke of the dividends, if there could be any, in knowing that his fight might soon be over. He discovered the importance of memory, reveling every day in recollections of the people he met and loved, the places around the world he visited. "The joys and the achievements of the past don't mean I live in the past," he said, "but I do celebrate with gratitude what has been."

As for faith, Scholer quipped that if he knew why a loving God allowed evil and suffering "I'd be on the cover of Time magazine next week." But he concluded that God was "not the author or cause of evil" but the giver of life, so it was OK to fight for life, here and now.

"I'm quite frankly not somebody who says, 'Oh, I can hardly wait until I die and can walk the golden streets.' I don't want to die! God is the giver of life! We should embrace it." He called himself a prisoner of hope.