Keynote Speaker
Albert Wolters, Ph.D.
Albert Wolters, Ph.D., is a professor of religion and theology and classical studies at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada, and wrote the seminal book on the Christian worldview, Creation Regained.
He was born in 1942 in the Netherlands, and immigrated with his parents to Canada in 1948. In 1961, he applied for the preseminary program at Calvin College—but with a letter explaining that at that time he was an agnostic! During his three years at Calvin he came to faith, partly through the teaching of charismatic philosophy professor H. Evan Runner. Under Runner’s influence, he felt that God was calling him to philosophy rather than to the ministry, and he went to the Free University in Amsterdam from 1964 to 1972 to study the history of philosophy. He completed his studies with a dissertation on Plotinus (the third-century founder of Neoplatonism), and returned to Canada. After some nonacademic odd jobs, he taught philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto from 1974 to 1984.
During those years, he taught a yearlong introductory course in Christian philosophy, which began with an intense two-week “boot camp” in August, in which he laid out “the biblical basics for a reformational worldview.” These introductory lectures subsequently became his book, Creation Regained.
However, during all this time, he continued to cultivate an interest in professional biblical studies (learning biblical Hebrew on his own, for example), and began publishing in this area. Then he had the opportunity to work as a professor of Bible and Greek at Redeemer College (now Redeemer University College). This move was facilitated by the fact that he 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, he has been at Redeemer, and is working on a commentary on the book of Zechariah. He has also done work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular the Copper Scroll, which is a list of buried treasure that was probably taken from the temple in Jerusalem in New Testament times.
