VANCOUVER, BC-In an April 26 announcement, Hans Boersma was appointed to fill the J.I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, effective September 2005.

Boersma, 43, has been teaching at Trinity Western University (TWU) since 1999, where he is associate professor of Religious Studies.

The Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College was established by the many admirers of J.I. Packer in the hope of extending the biblical, evangelical and Reformation-oriented theological emphases characteristic of his teaching and writing.

Packer’s own teaching role in Regent College has been reduced for some time. The current occupant of the Packer chair, Paul Helm, formerly of King’s College, University of London, is himself soon due to retire and return to the U.K.

A native of the Netherlands, Boersma emigrated to Surrey, B.C. in 1983 after training as a school teacher. After a stint in the classroom, he completed a Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Lethbridge in 1986.

The pastor’s son then planned to take theological training with a view to foreign missionary service. Yet while enrolled at the seminary of the Canadian Reformed Churches in Hamilton, Ontario he fell in love with historical and systematic theology through the instruction of Jelle Faber, a favourite professor.

Boersma went back to Holland for doctoral studies in theology at the University of Utrecht where he did intensive research into the theology of the 16th century English Puritan, Richard Baxter. Returning to Canada in 1993, Boersma again taught school in Manitoba before being called to pastor the Canadian Reformed Church of Aldergrove, B.C.

Invited to join TWU’s Religious Studies department in 1999, Boersma has been busy both in and out of the classroom. His teaching interests have ranged from Medieval Latin and Reformation and Post Reformation Thought, to Liberation Theology and the Theology of the Atonement.

He has organized the popular annual "Lamblight Lectures" which draw prominent lecturers such as Marva Dawn, Jeremy Begbie, Robert Webber and Miroslav Volf from well outside the region.

He has also been busy with academic publishing. His first major publication was his Utrecht doctoral research project, and the latest of his five major academic projects, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Baker Academic), will be released in September.

Boersma shares certain interests with Packer, though their relationship has never been one of teacher-pupil. Both wrote doctoral dissertations on the charitable Puritan, Richard Baxter. While both are at home in the broadly evangelical and Reformed tradition, Packer is an Anglican while Boersma is a member of the Christian Reformed Church.

Boersma sees his role, at both TWU and Regent, as one of "seeking, wherever possible, for convergence in faithfulness to the broad Christian tradition." He says he will continue to work with "colleagues from all kinds of different traditions; the diversity is not a drawback but something quite positive."

In his judgment, "one of the strengths of Regent is its ability to incorporate people from a variety of backgrounds around ‘mere Christianity.’"

Ken Stewart is Professor of Theological Studies in Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia.