DTS has campuses in Dallas, Houston, and Washington, D.C., as well as extension sites in Atlanta, Austin, San Antonio, Nashville, Northwest Arkansas, Europe, and Guatemala, and a multilingual online education program.

DTS was founded as Evangelical Theological College in 1924 by Rollin T. Chafer and his brother, Lewis Sperry Chafer, who taught the first class of thirteen students, and William Henry Griffith Thomas,[2] who was to have been the school's first theology professor but died before the first classes began.

[5] DTS has continually published a quarterly entitled Bibliotheca Sacra initially edited by Rollin T. Chafer since 1934.

In 1983, a complete collection of articles was published as a book commemorating fifty years of the journal.

"[2] Systematic Theology, his eight-volume work describing this approach, was first published in 1948 and is still a required textbook for some courses at DTS.

[2] Notable theological beliefs of the school include: premillennialism, dispensationalism, and Biblical inerrancy.

The school considers itself non-denominational within Protestantism, and offers classes in all 66 books of the Protestant Bible.