I received advance notice that something was afoot. A reporter emailed me that the people at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School were about to make a major announcement and asked if I would be available to comment.
After graduating from Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois, in 1976, I worked for a nonprofit for a year before being hired in the development department at the divinity school. There, I worked for three years as editor of the seminary’s public relations magazine.
Concurrently, as an employee, I took advantage of free tuition and earned a master’s degree in church history. This is to say that I am an alumnus of Trinity College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Sadly, the college closed in 2023, and last week the seminary announced it would relocate what remains of the divinity school to Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. Both schools are affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church, where my late father served as pastor for more than four decades.
I recall visiting the campus of Trinity Western (then called Trinity Junior College) in the summer of 1962. Dairy cows were still roaming the campus just weeks before the school opened that fall. Trinity Western has flourished, while the older schools, Trinity College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, withered.
Why? I can’t speak much about the reasons for Trinity Western’s success, but I’ll weigh in on the factors behind the demise of the Deerfield schools.
Several observers have offered their speculations. Neither Trinity College nor Trinity Divinity School ever enjoyed robust financial support from its parent denomination, the Evangelical Free Church. Whereas the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, lavishly funds its seminaries, the much smaller Free Church simply couldn’t provide that level of support.
Minutes after I received the email announcing the closing of Trinity Divinity School, one of its board members called to brief me on the news. He cited the financial straits of the school, confirming that it was deeply in debt and that a multimillion-dollar note was coming due. The only viable solution, he said, was to relocate the school to British Columbia and sell the Deerfield campus, which is now under contract.
Daniel K. Williams has offered the perceptive observation that the center of American evangelicalism has shifted in recent years away from the Midwest—places like Wheaton College, Moody Bible Institute and Trinity—to the South. Liberty University in Virginia is now a colossus, and evangelicals headed for seminary typically gravitate toward places like Liberty, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville or Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City.
Those factors undoubtedly played a role, but other variables contributed as well. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the school’s president, Kenneth Meyer, embarked on an ambitious and ill-considered expansion campaign, adding a summer camp, a law school and several satellite campuses. Trinity simply didn’t have the financial resources to sustain that expansion.
It was about this time that Trinity grandly renamed itself Trinity International University—apparently rejecting the tongue-in-cheek suggestion of one of my classmates that it be called Trinity Intergalactic University.
But I wonder if theology played a role as well. The faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School—and especially my mentor, John Woodbridge—were fixated on the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, the conviction that the scriptures are entirely without error in the original manuscripts. Those manuscripts are no longer extant.
I wrote my master’s thesis on this topic, and I came to understand the appeal of biblical inerrancy. Ever since the Protestant Reformation did away with the church as the sole interpreter of scripture, Protestants have searched for their own source of authority. The notion of biblical inerrancy provides a kind of Platonic ideal of purity, even though the inerrant manuscripts are unavailable.
I came to doubt the utility of this singular focus on inerrancy, and for that—and, I suppose, other “crimes”—I became persona non grata at Trinity. I was fired from my job at the seminary in part because I dared to ask what might happen if we spent as much time worried about what this “inerrant” Bible actually said about topics like the poor and “the least of these” as we did about the doctrine of inerrancy itself.
Another rabble-rouser asked those same questions on the same campus several years before I did. While a student at Trinity Divinity School, Jim Wallis famously tallied that the Bible mentioned the poor two thousand times. He eventually left Trinity in 1972 (the same year I arrived) and started an organization now known as Sojourners.
As it happened, Wallis and I had dinner in Washington, D.C., the day after the announcement that Trinity Evangelical Divinity School was closing. He hadn’t heard the news, and I want to emphasize that neither of us gloated.
We did, however, share a laugh out of the Religion News Service story that listed the two of us, the two people the seminary had tried to disown for the past half-century, at the top of the list of Trinity alumni.
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An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
