This piece is as much a personal account of some of my earlier years as it is a discussion of some recent events taking place in American theological education. Given that I just learned that Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Chicago will be coming to an end soon (see more on that in a moment), I thought some of my own experiences might be worth recounting here.
Just the other day I had started a piece on the late great evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry (1913-2003). But before completing that piece, I discovered I already had done an article on him for my “Notable Christians” series. Oh well, I am getting old. Here is the earlier piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2022/04/05/notable-christians-carl-f-h-henry/
In the early 1970s Henry was a visiting professor at TEDS, along with so many other things he was involved in, from becoming the first president of the National Association of Evangelicals, to helping establish Fuller Theological Seminary and Christianity Today.
I had become a Christian in 1971, and as an avid reader I soon became aware of all the leading lights in the evangelical world, including Henry. The other day as I was reading through his 1986 autobiography, Confessions of a Theologian, so many very familiar names appeared.
After my conversion, I worked for four years and conducted Bible studies back home in Wisconsin. I then decided to head off to an evangelical liberal arts school. So from 1975 to 1977 I studied at Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois. Just across the road was TEDS.
I probably did not help my social life there, partly because I was a bit older than most of those college kids. Plus I was much more drawn to TEDS, so instead of using the college library I would always use the seminary library. And quite often I would cross the road and listen to the many great professors there.
Once when I was sitting in a hermeneutics class by Walter Kaiser class at TEDS, I asked if I could have a set of his class notes. He kindly agreed. With my beard and being slightly older, he asked me if I was a lecturer at the college. I told him I was just a student. But I think I still have his large set of lecture notes.
My third year of school was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, still majoring in philosophy. My student days were interrupted with some five years of missionary service with YWAM, first in California and then in Holland. But that was a good break, as it was in Holland that I met my wife to be – an Australian gal. We married in January of 1982.
I eventually thought I better get back to at least finishing my BA. So we considered where to go in 1984. Going back to Trinity was one option, but they seemed to have no married couples’ housing, except for a room in the women’s dorm! So we ended up going to another famous Christian school in the Chicago area: Wheaton College.
I finished my BA in philosophy there with highest honours, and then we had to decide where to go to get my MA in theology. The big three back then of course were Fuller in LA, Trinity in Chicago, and Gordon-Conwell in Boston. Part of what swung it for me was my foreign language abilities, something I always struggled with.
While I had two years of New Testament Greek, I believe TEDS was requiring students to have at least Greek, Hebrew, and maybe one other language. So with slightly easier entrance requirements, my wife and I decided to move to Boston for two years and study at GCTS. Not long after that we moved back to Melbourne, Australia.
One more quick story before moving on to the fate of TEDS. Early on when I was at Trinity College, visiting as I always did the seminary library, I learned that Carl Henry had donated his personal library of 72,000 volumes to the school! Hmm, my 8000-plus volume library seems like small change in comparison.
The end of Trinity Seminary
Just today I saw a social media post from a friend which had these words:
This is essentially the end of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) as we knew it. It is very sad. My Trinity MDiv (1976) under Dean Ken Kantzer was the strongest MDiv I have ever heard of. My professors included Ken Kantzer, Carl F. H. Henry, J. I. Packer, John Warwick Montgomery, Walt Kaiser, Gleason Archer, Harold O. J. Brown, I. Howard Marshall, John Gerstner, and John Woodbridge; the next generation of students would get people like Don Carson and Kevin Vanhoozer.
Economics did her in. She could not compete with other rising conservative schools, often packed with her grads as faculty, that were able to offer much lower costs to students. But God used her mightily for a time, and I am very grateful to have been there in her golden age.
Ministries and ministers come and go. Trinity is essentially gone; in another decade or two I will be also. The Gospel remains. Let us serve it while we can.
Thanks for the tip Donald Williams. Several articles explain all this in more detail. It appears that TEDS will merge with Trinity Western University (TWU) in British Columbia, Canada, and the Chicago campus will come to an end after the 2025–26 school year.
One piece begins with these words:
For more than a century, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) has stood at the crossroads of faith and scholarship, a place where the authority of scripture and the transformative power of the gospel have shaped generations of pastors, missionaries, and theologians. What began in 1897 as a small institution in a church basement devoted to training ministers for what became the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) found a new home in Deerfield, Illinois, in 1963. Under the leadership of Kenneth Kantzer, TEDS became more than a denominational seminary; it became a hub of evangelical thought, drawing faculty and students from across evangelical theological traditions. It was, in Kantzer’s words, “the Free Church’s love gift to the worldwide church of Christ.” Kantzer’s vision was always for TEDS to be a divinity school providing theological influence within a larger Christian university.
Meanwhile, on Canada’s west coast, a parallel vision was taking shape. The EFCA appointed a committee to explore founding a liberal arts college in Fraser Valley, British Columbia, with a clear mission—to develop godly Christian leaders. The dream finally took flight in 1962 when Trinity Junior College opened its doors, setting the stage for what would become Trinity Western University (TWU). https://www.tiu.edu/divinity/singular-vision/
Another says this:
Leaders of TEDS and TWU affirmed that the memorandum of understanding unanimously approved by both boards would preserve TEDS’ 128-year legacy of ministry training while championing a continued mission to equip Christian leaders from around the world.
Trinity Western University was first approached by TEDS’ leadership because both share a common heritage within the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA). As faith-based establishments, TEDS and TWU uphold the same doctrinal commitments as the EFCA and maintain strongly aligned values, making this next move both a strategic and ideal fit for both institutions. https://www.twu.ca/news-events/news/trinity-western-university-and-trinity-evangelical-divinity-school-expand-impact
And one former TEDS student, Collin Hansen said this in part about the end of an era:
TEDS, as it rose to prominence under its second dean Kenneth Kantzer and employing other post-war evangelical leaders such as Walt Kaiser and Carl F. H. Henry, helped American evangelicals recover from the fundamentalist/modernist controversies of the early 20th century, as well as the inerrancy dispute that erupted at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1962. By the early 21st century, TEDS alumni including David Wells, Mark Noll, Doug Moo, and Craig Blomberg held research positions in other seminaries, while Michael Oh led the Lausanne Movement.
TEDS also hosted the first meeting of The Gospel Coalition nearly 20 years ago, in May 2005, when Carson and Tim Keller convened several dozen North American pastors who shared their concern for restoring a confessional core to evangelicalism. TGC held its first national conference at TEDS in 2007, shortly before I left my job at Christianity Today and enrolled at TEDS. I first met Keller in the TEDS chapel, where he delivered his famous address on gospel-centered ministry. TEDS hosted several subsequent meetings of TGC’s Council, and Carson hired me at TGC upon my graduation from TEDS in 2010.
With this history of evangelical leadership, the reason for the closing of the TEDS campus near Chicago is ironic. TEDS couldn’t survive the growth and spread of neo-evangelicalism across the United States in the last half-century. When Kantzer stepped down as TEDS dean in 1978, the evangelicalism we know today—populated and sometimes dominated by prosperous Southern Baptists—didn’t yet exist. That same year, a group of concerned Southern Baptists led by Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson met to discuss how they could shift the largest Protestant denomination in a conservative direction. That plan began to unfold in 1979 with the election of Adrian Rogers as the convention’s president. But it took until 1993 for that strategy to result in Mohler’s presidency at SBTS. And where did Mohler turn for a speaker at his inauguration? Henry, who reunited with Billy Graham, his longtime collaborator in such neo-evangelical ventures as Christianity Today.
TEDS couldn’t survive the growth and spread of neo-evangelicalism across the United States in the last half-century. For much of Mohler’s 32-year tenure, SBTS has been the largest SBC school and one of the largest seminaries in the world, with 3,281 students. By contrast, in about a decade between 2013 and 2022, TEDS’s full-time equivalent enrollment declined by more than 40 percent to 491. According to the most recent reports, SBC schools educate nearly 20 percent of all theology students in the United States. And they do so in a way that more closely resembles the TEDS of Kantzer than SBTS before Mohler.
He concludes:
As a TEDS alumnus, I mourn the end of the school that trained me for ministry, even as I hope for what God might do in a new form for its future. I still wonder if better decisions by leaders could have avoided this outcome that weakens a longtime pillar of evangelicalism, not only in the Midwest and United States but in the entire world. Students today, ministering in confused and often hostile cultures, need more seminary training, not less. I couldn’t have prayed for a better preparation for ministry, in everything from Greek exegesis to Christian history. And almost every day, I thank God for the generous donors who made that education possible.
But from the broader historical vantage point, TEDS was caught between two eras. Indeed, TEDS helped rescue evangelicals from one era and deliver them into another. TEDS never benefited from the ample endowments that propped up other Protestant schools such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Duke despite their declining enrollments and liberalizing doctrine. Nor did TEDS benefit from the generous support of the largest Protestant denomination as its conservative turn transformed seminaries and delivered record enrollments.
For a time that feels too brief for those who love her, TEDS gave evangelicals an academically rigorous, confessionally serious alternative to death-dealing liberalism and soul-stifling fundamentalism. In the end, TEDS helped midwife another new evangelicalism that spanned the Mason-Dixon Line, with brighter prospects than Kantzer and Henry probably ever imagined. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/teds-midwife-movement-legacy/
TEDS will be missed. Even though I was never an actual student there, I have a lot of fond memories of this great theological institution and the many gifted scholars who taught there.
Life keeps changing. And that includes theological education. Things like online learning are also changing things quite a bit. Earlier on when I first came to Melbourne I ended up teaching at four different Bible Colleges. I think they have all pretty much merged with other schools or come to an end.
The times they are a changin’. But as Donald Williams reminds us, the gospel remains. Let us all seek to faithfully serve our Lord and share the gospel in whatever way he calls us to.
3 Replies to “On American Evangelical Seminaries and Theologians: My Story”
Thanks Bill, yes the decline is almost inevitable. It is not only people that need to be born again, but also the great moves of God that have compromised with the “wisdom” of the human ingenuity that seeks to “improve” each of them. Sadly I have seen the disastrous decline in the Methodist/Uniting Church even though the foundation of that decline was well anchored in place before I was a young man. Now also MBI/MST are showing serious signs of compromise from the meagre info that I get. How we need again teachers of integrity like John Searle and J Graham Miller.
“How the mighty have fallen,” although the press release is upbeat and obfuscating. Yes, a divinity school will remain, but likely eviscerated, and transferred to Canada. TEDS was known for scholarship, not pizzaz. It was never trendy. It trained scholar-pastors, not celebrity pastors or church management gurus. It’s denomination is small, unlike the Southern Baptists, whose seminaries are thriving.
I taught at Denver Seminary, 1993-2024. When I began it was still a Conservative Baptist school, but later dropped that affiliation and became generically evangelical, while still drawing from the Conservative Baptist world, which is small. The last ten years I was there, we were told repeatedly by leadership that schools such as ours were struggling to survive and that we were on the hook. We stayed afloat, but I cannot say how that school is doing now, since I left for Cornerstone University and Seminary in 2024.
The demise of TEDS is not heartening for the Evangelical world, since it indicates that a seminary that prized scholarship could not draw enough students to survive.
Thanks Bruce and Doug. Yes there is decline all around us, and the fate of evangelical theological education is especially a real worry.
Thanks Bill, yes the decline is almost inevitable. It is not only people that need to be born again, but also the great moves of God that have compromised with the “wisdom” of the human ingenuity that seeks to “improve” each of them. Sadly I have seen the disastrous decline in the Methodist/Uniting Church even though the foundation of that decline was well anchored in place before I was a young man. Now also MBI/MST are showing serious signs of compromise from the meagre info that I get. How we need again teachers of integrity like John Searle and J Graham Miller.
“How the mighty have fallen,” although the press release is upbeat and obfuscating. Yes, a divinity school will remain, but likely eviscerated, and transferred to Canada. TEDS was known for scholarship, not pizzaz. It was never trendy. It trained scholar-pastors, not celebrity pastors or church management gurus. It’s denomination is small, unlike the Southern Baptists, whose seminaries are thriving.
I taught at Denver Seminary, 1993-2024. When I began it was still a Conservative Baptist school, but later dropped that affiliation and became generically evangelical, while still drawing from the Conservative Baptist world, which is small. The last ten years I was there, we were told repeatedly by leadership that schools such as ours were struggling to survive and that we were on the hook. We stayed afloat, but I cannot say how that school is doing now, since I left for Cornerstone University and Seminary in 2024.
The demise of TEDS is not heartening for the Evangelical world, since it indicates that a seminary that prized scholarship could not draw enough students to survive.
Thanks Bruce and Doug. Yes there is decline all around us, and the fate of evangelical theological education is especially a real worry.