It seems especially important in these days to draw attention to a life lived well. Dr. Bruce Demarest, Senior Professor of Christian Theology and Spiritual Formation at Denver Seminary, led such a life.

My first exposure to Bruce was via his three-volume systematic theology, Integrative Theology, co-authored with his colleague Gordon Lewis.[1] As a young philosophical theologian, I loved the sound of an integrative systematic theology. I imagined a theology-as-queen-of-the-sciences type venture: philosophy, the sciences, and historical theology dialectically engaged with biblical exegesis. But after assigning the book for a theology class and receiving my desk copy, I realized that what Demarest and Lewis meant by ‘integrative’ was not quite what I had imagined. Their book had substance and was unique in its approach, but I found it more applied than truly integrative. I remember some of my students commenting that the book seemed a bit dry and stuffy. I suggested a reframe of “logically rigorous” and “rhetorically sharp.” Another student in the class reported having previously had Dr. Demarest as a theology professor and this student’s experience was that Demarest himself was a bit dry, stuffy, rigorous and sharp!

But by the time I met Bruce some years later, he was anything but dry and stuffy. He was quite warm, gentle and capacious. There was a twinkle in his eye that made me wonder if he “had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). As it turns out, he had. He told me his conversion story as we sat for breakfast in a hotel restaurant. Not his initial conversion, but his second one. He said, “Steve, I was burning out. I was past president of the Evangelical Theological Society, a tenured professor, well-published, and I was thinking about walking away from it all.” In that season of dryness, Bruce’s wife Elsie encouraged him to attend a series of classes at their church led by a Christian renewal team. While Bruce was reluctant to go, he at last relented and, as Bruce puts it, “it was to begin a quiet but utter transformation.”[2] Bruce describes it this way: