Henk de Jong Chair

Dr. Jaap Dekker is Extraordinary Professor of “Biblical Research and Christian Identity” at the Henk de Jong Chair. This special chair was established in 2014 on behalf of the Dutch Reformed Seminary at the Theological University in Apeldoorn. In 2018, it was moved to the Theological University of Utrecht.

Prof. dr. Jaap Dekker

The teaching assignment of the Henk de Jong Chair involves exploring and thinking through hermeneutically the questions raised by modern and postmodern biblical research in relation to the Christian identity of the church. In this the research program of the chair connects to and builds on the work of Dr. Henk de Jong. He was born in 1932; from 1969 to 1998 study supervisor at the Theological Study Guidance of the  Dutch Reformed Churches  and, since 2019 in honorary doctor of TU Utrecht. Jaap Dekker became his successor in 1998. 

De Jong has made an important contribution to the search for a Christian hermeneutics of the Old Testament. That contribution is primarily identity-related, but it is also worthy to be brought into the current academic debate, discussed and fine-tuned, deepened and made fruitful within the modern- and postmodern-biblical research tending toward fragmentation. The current chair’s research focuses on the biblical theological contours of the book of Isaiah and includes a PhD project on the hermeneutical model of Henk de Jong. The research is part of the TU research program on Vulnerability and Hope and of the Crucial Commitment research program of Biblical Exegesis and Systematic Theology.