In thousands of churches around the world, one thick volume holds a place of honor on the pastor’s shelf: Systematic Theology, by Wayne Grudem. Before becoming an evangelical classic, however, he was just a boy from rural America who learned to love the Scriptures in childhood.
Grudem was born on February 11, 1948, in Jim Falls, in the American state of Wisconsin, the son of parents who read the Bible aloud every night. At thirteen, he renewed his commitment to Christ at a Billy Graham evangelistic crusade in Minneapolis.
He graduated in economics from Harvard in 1970 and completed his Master of Divinity at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1973. In 1979, he earned a doctorate in New Testament studies from the University of Cambridge, with a thesis on the gift of prophecy in 1 Corinthians, supervised by C. F. D. Moule.
Beginning in 1977 he taught at Bethel College, and from 1981 to 2001 he was a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, eventually chairing the theology department. In 1987, alongside theologian John Piper, he founded an organization dedicated to what came to be called complementarianism, the conviction that men and women hold distinct roles in the church and the home.
In 1994 he published Systematic Theology, a work of more than twelve hundred pages that has already sold over one million copies. Starting in 1999 he served on the translation committee of the English Standard Version, and from 2005 to 2008 he served as general editor of the ESV Study Bible.
Grudem also argued, alongside theologian Bruce Ware, that the Son is eternally submissive to the Father within the Trinity. The thesis sparked intense academic controversy in 2016, when Reformed theologians such as Liam Goligher and Carl Trueman publicly warned that it departed from traditional Nicene Trinitarian doctrine, in a debate that divided the complementarian camp.
In 2019, after hearing accounts of spouses who had suffered decades of physical abuse and humiliation in silence, he publicly revised his position on divorce. He came to recognize severe, ongoing abuse as a legitimate biblical ground for marital separation, alongside adultery and desertion.
Reformed, Baptist, and convinced that spiritual gifts remain active today, Grudem has repeated since the preface of his major work that theology must not be dry: it must be lived, prayed, and sung. As a research professor at Phoenix Seminary, he continued teaching for nearly two decades even after receiving a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis in 2015, until the illness and treatment for prostate cancer led him to announce, in May 2024, the end of his public teaching ministry.
