Profiles

John L. Thompson taught at Fuller Theological Seminary from 1985 until 2019, serving as
Professor of Historical Theology as well as the Gaylen and Susan Byker Professor of Reformed
Theology. His campus leadership included chairing the Theology Division for fully twenty
years, and he taught at almost all of Fuller’s regional sites, including Orange County, Menlo
Park, Colorado Springs, Tacoma, Seattle, Phoenix, and Houston, as well as in St. Petersburg,
Russia.

Thompson’s research and writing interests address exegetical history and gender issues, as well
as the question of how the history of interpretation can serve as a resource for the proclamation
of the gospel. Among his many essays and reviews, he has contributed to A Companion to Paul
in the Reformation and The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, and has written popular
essays for Sacred History magazine and Modern Reformation. His study of the “texts of terror”
in the history of exegesis appeared as Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among
Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation in 2001, and he continued this line
of inquiry in a more popular vein in Reading the Bible with the Dead: What You Can Learn from
the History of Exegesis That You Can’t Learn from Exegesis Alone (2007). In 2012, he translated and edited the initial of The Reformation Commentary on Scripture, on Genesis 1–11, and
has recently contributed to Christianity and the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction (2021).Currently, he is working (with Albert Gootjes) on a critical translation of some of the unpublished poetry of Anna Maria van Schurman.

Thompson was a research fellow with the Pew Evangelical Scholars Program in 1994-1995 and
has twice received a Lilly Faculty Fellowship (1997 and 2003). In 1994 his essay, “Patriarchs,
Polygamy, and Private Resistance,” was awarded the Harold J. Grimm prize by the Sixteenth
Century Studies Conference. He was a Pew Christian Scholars Lecturer in 2003. In 2007 his
colleagues selected him to receive the C. Davis Weyerhaeuser Award for Faculty Excellence, and
in 2009 the Women’s Concerns Committee of Fuller Seminary selected him for their Bread and
Roses Award for “his commitment to empowering women in ministry.”

Thompson is a member of the American Society of Church History, the Sixteenth Century
Studies Conference, and the Calvin Studies Society, and participates in the International
Congress for Calvin Research. He served for six years on the governing board of the H. Henry
Meeter Center for Calvin Research and is on the editorial boards of several series, including
Texts in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought (Baker), Studies in Early Modern Religious
Reforms (Springer), and The Reformation Commentary on Scripture (InterVarsity Press). Prior to
beginning his graduate studies, Thompson spent seven years on staff with Inter-Varsity Christian
Fellowship in Washington and California, and he is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian
Church (USA).