Brief Bio
David L. Johnston grew up with American missionary parents in France where he did all his schooling in local public schools. A graduate of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA, with a B.A. in Philosophy, he completed his MDiv at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachussetts in 1978 and moved to Algeria. He served for sixteen years as a pastor and teacher in Algeria, Egypt and the West Bank. He completed a PhD in Missiology with an emphasis on Islamic studies from 1997 to 2001 at Fuller Theological Seminary. He then furthered his Islamic studies as an affiliate post-doc at Yale University (2001-2006). He and his family then moved to Philadelphia where he taught five courses in Islamics at the University of Pennsylvania and remained an Affiliate researcher until 2018. He also taught 3-4 courses a year at Saint Joseph's University in the Theology and Religious Studies Department from 2007 to 2022.
He remains an Adjunct lecturer at Fuller Theological Seminary. His research mostly focused on the intersection of Islamic law and theology and on Muslim-Christian dialogue. He has more recently written a book now accepted for inclusion in a series at Brill Publications, “Theology and Mission in Global Christianity” (The City Where All May Flourish: The Holy Spirit in Mission and Global Governance). It is now in the review process (as of August 2025).
Johnston has published over a dozen articles in several peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of Earth, Empire and Sacred Text: Muslims and Christians as Trustees of Creation (London: Equinox, 2010, paperback in 2013); and of Muslims and Christians Debate Justice and Love (Equinox, March 2020). Two years later, his translation of Rached Ghannouchi’s Public Freedoms in the Islamic State was released by Yale University Press (Arabic to English, 550 pages) in their series, World Thought in Translation. Ghannouchi wrote most of it in a Tunisian prison in the 1980s and is arguably the most influential politician in Tunisia today. Johnston blogs on his own website, www.humantrustees.org.