Bingham says writing makes him a better theologian, teacher
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Southwestern News.
D. Jeffrey Bingham thinks 21st century American evangelicals can learn a great deal from faithful second century Christians, and with that conviction, he has devoted a significant part of his scholarly endeavors to discover and share those practices with the evangelical academy.
With decades of ministry service, having written or co-edited seven books and more than 50 academic journal articles and book chapters, Bingham is a world class Patristics scholar, theologian, and educator with a deep passion for early Christian theology.
A world traveler who has visited every continent except one, Bingham speaks five languages, and his teaching career has spanned multiple institutions, with his scholarly work shaping theological studies today.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Bingham grew up moving from country to country across the globe, giving him a feel for international life and a wide variety of cultures, due to his father’s career with an international oil corporation. Beyond Venezuela, Bingham has lived in Qatar, Nigeria, Madagascar, Thailand, Tunisia, Italy, and finally in the United States in Las Cruces, New Mexico, when his parents retired.
He has also visited Australia for a theological conference and jokingly hopes to see Antarctica someday to complete his journey to all seven continents.
With this culturally eclectic upbringing, his journey to being an academic theologian was far afield from his originally intended destination. Initially, he pursued a degree in engineering, hoping to follow in his father’s footsteps, although he said that quickly fell through.
His first semester at New Mexico State University “pretty well showed me that Dad and I shared a whole bunch of things in common, but we did not share engineering,” he laughs. “So, I dropped out of college for about a year” and took a job at a furniture and cabinet company.
While working for this company, he found himself growing to love the details of running a business, so he decided to go back to school to pursue a degree in finance at New Mexico State with aspirations of entering the business field himself. However, after getting his degree, his deep engagement with biblical studies at his church in Las Cruces led him to seek greater knowledge at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS), where his theological journey accelerated.
Bingham had come to know Christ as a teen in a hotel room in Tunis, Tunisia. While waiting alone for his parents to return from some business, Bingham found there was nothing for him to read that was in English, except for a King James Bible given to him by his sister. Bored, he began to read, and he quickly began to pull from the text an understanding that he had never experienced.
“I continued to read,” Bingham explained during a chapel service at Southwestern. “All of a sudden, for no explicable reason, I believed everything that Matthew was saying about the Lord Jesus Christ was true, and I remembered what my sister had told me so many times. And it was that afternoon in Tunis, Tunisia, in the Hilton Hotel, that I was converted to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and began my relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.”
After beginning his theological study at DTS, Bingham developed a love for theology in a class taught by Craig Blaising, who would later serve in various roles at Southwestern, including provost. He currently serves as senior professor of theology.
“I took my first class with him and quickly realized that I loved theology, even though I really liked finance and investments,” Bingham says.
Initially attending seminary for personal growth, he found his calling was Christian service.
“And so, it wasn’t very long during that first semester that I changed my goal to in some way, whether in the pastorate or perhaps in teaching eventually, or in missions to go back overseas, I would be involved full time in Christian service,” he says.
After earning his Master of Theology, Bingham pastored a church in Kermit, Texas, for a time before feeling the call to return to DTS to pursue a PhD in theological studies with a specialization in early Christianity. It was during this time that Bingham would meet his wife, Pamela, who worked for the director of doctoral studies.
“I had to see her a lot as I worked in the doctoral program,” Bingham says. “I thought she was pretty cute, but it took me a year to get up enough courage to ask her out cold turkey, because we didn’t have any shared social context. But I asked her out at the end of my first year of doctoral studies, and after our first date together, we didn’t date anybody else, and we were married the following December.”
After receiving his doctoral degree, Bingham’s journey as an educator began with a teaching position at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas. His career would go on to span a range of schools, including Criswell College, DTS, Wheaton College, and Southwestern as dean of the school of theology. His administrative leadership was recognized when he was appointed interim president of Southwestern, 2018-2019. Today, Bingham serves as research professor of historical theology and holds the Jesse Hendley Chair of Biblical Theology.
As a widely recognized Patristics scholar, particularly concerning second-century Christianity, Bingham authored his first book, Irenaeus’ use of Matthew’s Gospel in Adversus Haereses (Traditio Exegetica Graeca).
In the book, Bingham analyzed how Irenaeus, a Greek bishop from the second century who played a prominent role in defining proto-orthodoxy, developed and studied material from the Gospel of Matthew in order to oppose heretics of his time and to help grow appreciation for Christ’s humanity.
Through writing, Bingham hoped he could improve his own ability to not just teach but to be a theologian.
“The important process is the writing, because it’s the writing that turns me into a better theologian, a more articulate and precise theologian, and that makes me better prepared for the ministry that I perform in a classroom,” Bingham explains. “It’s the reading and the writing, the pain and the agony and the struggle of saying something precisely and saying something accurately that is well-informed and a true representation. That is the purpose of writing. You write to refine yourself as a scholar and as a teacher.”
He further elaborated on the practical use that comes of this often-strenuous work.
“It’s the process,” he says, “because you take the end result of the process, not only in the book, which you farm out to others to make a contribution to how the academy is thinking, but you then take what you learned and the precision that you gained into the classroom, so that when you lecture to students, they are benefiting from the learning and the precision that you gained through the process, which can be an agonizing and difficult process. But they become the ultimate beneficiaries for the teacher.”
He admitted this goal can easily be overshadowed by the prestige of having a work published with your name on it.
“A lot of academics miss this,” he says. “A lot of academics think that the purpose of writing is to meet some kind of institutional expectation to where you have to publish to survive, and that is one objective. But what writing does is to make you a better scholar, a better teacher, a better Christian. It makes you a better servant of the educational community.”
Coleman Ford, assistant professor of humanities at Texas Baptist College, benefited from Bingham’s teaching while he was taking courses at DTS, adding that he continues to refer to notes from Bingham’s classes even after Ford himself became a professor.
“I would not be where I am today without his academic ministry,” Ford says. “And now to say I am a colleague of Dr. Bingham is something I could never have believed possible. I continue to benefit from his influence, his teaching, his writing, and his ministry to the students and colleagues of the SWBTS community.”
Bingham’s latest book, The Tyranny of Time?: Time, World, and Knowledge in Second-Century Christian and Christian-Gnostic Texts, is a scholarly exploration of second-century perspectives on history and the world, emphasizing God’s love for His creation and the biblical vision of renewal.
“The point of the book is to help scholars understand that period, certainly, but also to make the point that the Christian God loves the earth, that the Christian God loves the heavens, and that the Christian God loves history, and that His vision for redemption includes a new heaven and a new earth, because He loved the first one that humanity destroyed with its sin,” he says.
Bingham explains, “And so, He is moving history towards an end that says that ‘I love the heaven and the earth that I created. When I first created, I thought it was very good. Y’all messed it up. I spent the rest of history moving you and redeeming you so that I could ultimately bring you into an eternity of blessing in a new heaven and a new earth.’”
Bingham believes that some evangelicals fall short of properly appreciating the biblical teaching on God’s relationship with creation and he hopes to encourage a renewal in viewing them in a more positive and literal, physical sense.
“There are certain traditions within evangelicalism which want to discount the biblical teaching on the value that God places in His creation and instead want to envision purely some kind of an ethereal, celestial, immaterial state of what is perfect,” he says.
Bingham hopes that by viewing Christianity through a second-century lens, he might discern things that he might not through his modern one.
“I began to use the second century and the Christianity of the second century as a model for improving and informing contemporary American evangelicalism,” Bingham says. “There were ways in which I thought the spirituality of contemporary evangelicalism wasn’t quite up to what it should be. And the second century, I thought, had captured some of the strengths that American evangelicalism in the 20th and 21st century had missed. So, I began to study the second century as a library to inform me on how I might think about Christianity in a more fruitful way. And I asked of the second century that they help me read the Bible in a way in which my old 20th and 21st century biases may not allow me.”
“Dr. Jeff Bingham is truly one of the most gifted scholars on campus,” David S. Dockery, president of Southwestern Seminary, says of Bingham. “We are grateful for the many ways Jeff Bingham strengthens the Southwestern community. He brings a level of intellectual seriousness to theological faithfulness, which is always presented with gentleness and kindness from his generous heart. He loves the Lord Jesus Christ and radiates this love to others.”
Outside of academia, Bingham loves spending time with Pamela, going out to dinner, going for walks, and traveling.
“Pamela and I love to travel. Italy is our favorite country to be in,” he says enthusiastically.
Bingham’s journey to becoming a leading Patristics scholar is a testament to his dedication and passion to know God better. His work in early Christian studies and evangelical theology continues to shape modern theological discussion.
And as for Bingham himself, though he has served in various administrative roles and has written widely, his greatest passion remains teaching.
Reflecting on his “love” of teaching, Bingham says, “So, I want to be in the classroom as long as the Lord will allow me to stand.”
