Professor of Religion and Theology/Classical Languages, Redeemer University College, Ancaster (since 1984)
I was born in 1942 in the
Netherlands, and immigrated with my parents to Canada in 1948.
(Incidentally, I am very proud of the fact that, during the
Second World War, when I was a baby, my parents hid a Jewish family of
four in our home for two-and-a-half years, and were later honored as
"righteous gentiles" by the Israeli government.) In 1961 I applied for
the preseminary program at Calvin--but with a letter explaining that I
was at that time an agnostic! During my three years at Calvin I came to
faith, partly through the teaching of the charismatic philosophy
professor H. Evan Runnner. Under his influence I felt God was calling
me to philosophy rather than the ministry, and I went to the Free
University in Amsterdam to study the history of philosophy (1964-72). I
completed my studies with a dissertation on Plotinus (the third-century
founder of Neoplatonism), and returned to Canada. After some
non-academic odd jobs I taught philosophy for ten years at the
Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto (1974-84). During those
years I taught a year-long introductory course in Christian philosophy,
which began with an intense two-week "boot camp" in August, in which I
laid out "the biblical basics for a reformational worldview." These
introductory lectures subsequently became my book Creation Regained.
However,
during all this time I continued to cultivate an interest in
professional biblical studies (learning biblical Hebrew on my own, for
example), and began publishing in this area. Then I had the
extraordinary opportunity to be hired as a professor of Bible and Greek
at Redeemer College (now RedeemerUniversity College) in Ancaster,
Ontario (just south of Toronto). This unusual move was facilitated by
the fact that I was a founding member of the association that
established Redeemer, served on its board both before and after it
opened its doors in 1982, and knew many of its original faculty. Since
1984 I have been at Redeemer, and am currently working on a commentary
on the book of Zechariah. I have also done work on the Dead Sea
Scrolls, in particular the Copper Scroll, which is a list of
buried treasure (probably taken from the temple in Jerusalem in New
Testament times).
I am married, have two grown-up children,
and like reading Swedish whodunits. I'm also interested in the
charismatic movement, which I think has a lot to teach the established
Christian traditions.
