Henk de Jong Chair

Dr Jaap Dekker is Professor of Bible Research and Christian Identity at the Henk de Jong Chair. This Chair was established in 2014 due to the Netherlands Reformed Ministerial Training at the Theological University of Apeldoorn. In 2018, this was moved to the Theological University in Kampen.

The educational mission of the Chair is to explore and hermeneutically think through the questions raised by modern and postmodern bible research in relation to the Christian identity of the church. In this, we connect to and continue to build on the work of Dr Henk de Jong (b. 1932; student adviser at the Theological Study Guidance of the Netherlands Reformed Churches from 1969 to 1998 and an Honorary Doctor at TU Kampen as of 2019).

De Jong has made an important contribution to the search for a Christian hermeneutic of the Old Testament. While this contribution is primarily related to identity, it is also worth being brought into the current academic debate, discussed and adjusted, deepened and made fruitful within modern- and postmodern Bible research, which tends to be somewhat fragmented. The research of the current Chair holder focuses on the biblical-theological outlines of the book Isaiah and is part of the research programme Discriminating Love of the research group Biblical Exegesis and Systematic Theology (see here)