A Loss

Dan Treier, 1972-2025

In our first years of marriage, my husband was a graduate student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. While he was there, he deeply admired and eventually befriended a PhD student who was a few years older named Dan Treier. Our lives diverged — Dan became one of the most respected evangelical theologians, teachers, and writers working today, and directed the PhD program at Wheaton College, our alma mater; Jon went into tech and runs a software company in San Francisco, where his theology reading happens mostly in the early morning hours these days — though we kept in Christmas-card touch, and Jon was looking forward to talking with Dan about an upcoming writing project on theology and AI.

Dan died on December 22. And while Jon knew him much better than I did, I find myself deeply mourning this loss. When my mother-in-law died almost three years ago, we were surprised and moved by how many people we didn’t even know sent letters, cards, and emails telling us in great detail just how much she meant to them. The reach of her life was so much more than any of us knew: and I think, honestly, she would have been surprised, too. I wonder if that is something of what St. Paul was getting at when he wrote in his letter to the Romans that “if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom 8:11). I mean, he’s talking about the final resurrection, sure, but also: there’s a kind of divine amplification of life that some people have. Their presence and influence are somehow multiplied beyond what is immediately apparent, beyond what feels finitely possible for just one person. Maybe it’s the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead, invisibly expanding or intensifying lives that are still on this side of winding down.

My mother-in-law was one of those people. And I think the depth of my sorrow over Dan’s death — a sorrow that I know is shared by hundreds of people at various points of proximity to him and Amy — testifies that Dan was, too. So while there are lots of folks closer to him and more well suited to reflect on his life and legacy, I want to add my own small witness to a loss that diminishes us all.

It’s a small thing, I know, especially compared to his impact as a father, a husband, a teacher, a colleague, and a friend. But Dan gave me hope for academic, evangelical theology as a thing that could both be and do good in the world. Knowing that he was directing PhD candidates from around the world at Wheaton made me proud of a school where, honestly, I probably couldn’t teach. Most people in a pew on Sunday morning aren’t going to pick up The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology or read an academic paper on Ephraim Radner and the figural interpretation of Scripture. (Though if they did, they’d be treated to Dan’s excellent prose, delightfully apt sports metaphors, and an unexpected sense of humor.) But their pastors are trained by people who do — people like Dan, and the theologians he mentored and oversaw. I don’t care where you fall on the theological spectrum, or how you feel about the descriptor “evangelical”: it is objectively better for churches to have pastors formed in the kinds of virtues Dan modeled. He knew, and loved, and believed the words of Scripture, and he knew, loved, and believed in the Lord to whom they witness. His writing was marked by humility, insight, charity, and the pursuit of true understanding.

And in a period when “evangelical” has come, in the outside world, to be associated with the very worst excesses of cruelty and intolerance, Dan was kind. Dan was thoughtful, and curious, and intellectual without being intimidating or weird about it. He made it seem perfectly normal to be interested in biblical hermeneutics while also keeping tabs on his fantasy football team and cheering for the Tigers. He believed things, deeply: but unlike so many of us who are Christians in America, he seemed immune to the temptation towards power or coercion as the way to bring others around to his way of seeing. He wrote as someone who believed Jesus and his Spirit could do their work like they said they would, thank you very much: through the faithful and self-forgetful work of disciples attempting to walk in Jesus’s way.

Jon and I went to the AAR/SBL annual meeting in Boston in November, and one of the sessions we were most looking forward to was a roundtable that Dan was scheduled to moderate as well as deliver a paper. He couldn’t make it (due to an as-yet undiagnosed cancer that would take his life just a month later), and I was surprised at how disappointed I was — given that neither of us had seen him in person in over ten years. My disappointment has shifted to grief: first for his wife and daughter, so quickly and unexpectedly bereaved. For his extended family and close friends, and for his students and colleagues. I’m grieved for the loss of his winsome and thoughtful theological writing, and for the gift Dan was to the church tradition that raised me. But I’m sad, too, because a life that was Spirit-amplified, bearing fruit that he probably had no idea was even in bud, is for now dormant in the grave. A graced presence in this devastated world has been lost, and we are left on the side of hoping for its recovery. Rest in peace, Dan. And may you — may we all — rise in glory, by the power of the one who raised Jesus from the dead.

You can read Dan’s obituary here; and Alan Jacobs wrote a lovely remembrance of him as well here.