J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future (Beeson Divinity Studies)

The Impact of His Life and Thought

George, Timothy, Timothy George

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780801033872
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441205216
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

J. I. Packer is one of the most significant evangelical theologians of the last one hundred years. In this book, a team of leading scholars--including Chuck Colson, Mark Dever, Timothy George, Bruce Hindmarsh, Edith Humphrey, James Earl Massey, Alister McGrath, David Neff, and Richard John Neuhaus--assesses Packer's impact on evangelicalism over the past half century and asks what more we can learn from him about ministry and the evangelical future. J. I. Packer himself offers a response and reflection. The book also includes a full bibliography of Packer's writings, which is the most comprehensive listing of his writings in print.

1

The Great Tradition

J. I. Patcker on Engaging with the Post to Enrich the Present

ALISTER E. MCWATH

J . I. Packer identifies himself on a map of Christian possibilities using a multiple series of coordinates: he is, he affirms, “an Anglican, a Protestant, an evangelical, and in C. S. Lewis’ sense a ‘mere Christian.’”1 The agenda underlying this volume is both honorific and analytical—setting out to celebrate the achievements of this major evangelical theological and spiritual writer (and there is much to celebrate) while at the same time asking how he helps evangelicalism, Protestantism, and what I like to call “Great Tradition Christianity” strategize for the future. Neither I nor any of the distinguished contributors will be able to do justice to Packer’s immense literary output, the quality of his theological analysis, and the shrewdness of many of his judgments in the limited space that is available to us. I shall have to content myself with scratching the surface.

I count it both a personal and professional privilege to address this topic. As one who taught historical and systematic theology for more than twenty years at Oxford, primarily but not exclusively to those who would enter pastoral ministry or serve as missionaries, I have often reflected on how difficult it is to teach theology in a way that maintains its integrity as an academic discipline while at the same time stimulating, guiding, and nourishing the life of faith. I can only claim modest success, I think, in my attempts to do so. Yet if one speaks to students who attended Tyndale Hall, Bristol, during the 1950s; Trinity College, Bristol, during the 1970s; or Regent College, Vancouver, at just about any point during the last quarter of a century, one will hear them acclaim Packer as a master of this art. There is a popular saying in England that is partly born of cynicism and partly out of the dreadful reality of experience: “Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach.” Packer is a rare example of an original thinker with a genuine gift for teaching who confounds this piece of popular wisdom.

Packer and I also have one or two shared areas of experience. We both served as principals of leading theological colleges of the Church of England. Perhaps I should not say too much about this, save to remark that running such institutions is not particularly conducive to either one’s sanity or one’s capacity to get some serious research done. I take great comfort from the fact that Packer went on to achieve so much after moving on from such a position.

My professional admiration for Packer as a historical theologian is grounded not simply in his excellent historical analyses but in the use to which he puts history. When I first read his doctoral thesis on Richard Baxter, I was gripped by the rigor of Packer’s analysis but also sensed the importance that he attached both to the questions that Baxter was handling and to Baxter himself as an important (though far from infallible) guide to these issues.2 Packer is able to popularize from profundity; his accessible accounts and applications of leading theological and spiritual themes are grounded in a deep knowledge of the issues.

While not agreeing with Packer at every point, I find in him someone whose views are so well biblically and theologically grounded, so well defended, so well articulated, and so well applied that one could wish for no better dialogue partner in wrestling with the great theological issues of our own age as well as of the past. This is one of the reasons that I suspect future generations will continue to find him a significant resource. In my view, Packer shares a combination of properties I also see in George Whitefield and Charles Had-don Spurgeon—a commitment to a clear Reformed theological position along with a personal graciousness that enables dialogue and collaboration with others.

In this essay, I want to focus above all on one topic: Packer’s distinctive and, in my view, critically important insight that evangelical theology is both enriched and stabilized by attentiveness to the past. I have chosen to focus on this topic for a number of reasons. Perhaps very obviously, it resonates strongly with my professional interest as a historical theologian. It is always nice to find someone else who thinks that the study of the past might actually be theologically useful. My second reason is perhaps equally obvious; having read J. I. Packer’s works over many years, I have noticed and respected his engagement with the past, and his capacity to enrich our own grasp of God’s glory and greatness by a principled dialogue with those who made that discovery before we were around. But my third reason is perhaps the most significant, and it requires a little further discussion. I believe that evangelicalism as a whole needs to listen to Packer’s approach to theologizing—and I use the verb deliberately—in the light of the present challenges that face the movement.

One of the most interesting themes that I discern within evangelical history during the past fifty years is its growing interest in issues of theology. The acceleration of such interest reflects a number of factors. One such factor is the existence of role models who have demonstrated the utility of theology and its capacity to illuminate and inform the life of faith. Evangelicalism has always been somewhat pragmatic in its evaluation of individuals and methods. To put it rather crudely, the core criterion used in this process of evaluation has often been: Will this work? Will this make any difference? Will this help me grow in faith? Will this help the ministry of my church? And while I would wish to enter a note of caution about these concerns, I think they must be respected. Through his writings, and especially through his classic work Knowing God, Packer has demonstrated the utility of theology to a rising generation of evangelicals, who had hitherto tended to see their intellectual commitment to the gospel as restricted to reading a few biblical commentaries.

Perhaps this is an idiosyncrasy on my part, but I am firmly convinced that an integral part of the walk of faith is a “discipleship of the mind.” Paul talks about renewing our minds (Rom. 12:1–4), and this seems to me to be an integral part of our conversion—the reshaping and recalibration of our ways of thinking in accordance with the patterns of reality disclosed in Christ. At this point, I would like to offer a case study, drawn from an early point in Packer’s rich and varied career, which seems to me to help us appreciate his insistence on the importance of theology in relation to faith and, above all, to engagement with the Great Tradition.

The example is Packer’s 1955 critique of certain aspects of the “victorious living” theology associated with the Keswick Convention.3 This critique was prompted by a specific occasion—the publication of a book promoting this approach that seemed to Packer to be seriously deficient. Packer’s early love of the Puritans, which developed in the 1940s, had persuaded him that there were already approaches available to address the problems of personal holiness that were considerably more realistic than the one he found in the Keswick teaching.

Yet such was the influence of this school of thought in England at the time that Packer believed it needed to be criticized at a much deeper level—not so much its pastoral effectiveness as its fundamental theological ideas. He had no doubt that Keswick’s fatal weak spot lay in the idea of the human ability to make the critical decisions necessary to facilitate sanctification. For Packer, this was an uninformed Pelagianism, based on a hopelessly optimistic view of fallen human nature. For Packer, the Keswick teaching offered an understanding of salvation that is “attenuated and impoverished,” resting on a theological axiom that is both “false to Scripture and dishonouring to God.”4

Most important of all was Packer’s suggestion that a theologically naïve Pietism inevitably lapsed into a Pelagianism of this kind. “Pelagianism is the natural heresy of zealous Christians who are not interested in theology.”5 Although Packer later took a more conciliatory attitude toward the Keswick school,6 this early criticism shows his passionate awareness of the pastoral and spiritual importance of theology. Well-meaning pastoral approaches and well-intended spiritual techniques may actually harm the life of faith if they are not securely grounded in theology. It is a theme that we find throughout Packer’s writings and one that I believe is not only important in itself but of particular importance within an evangelical culture that tends to regard validation as resting on practical outcomes.

Yet Packer’s emphasis on the importance of theology does not lead him into the somewhat dry and dusty approaches to theology that treats it as essentially abstract theorizing about God. The noted American Presbyterian writer James Henley Thornwell (1812–62) had no doubt of the danger of these kinds of excessively rationalist or cerebral approaches to theology. His comments bear repeating:

It gave no scope to the play of Christian feeling; it never turned aside to reverence, to worship, or to adore. It exhibited truth, nakedly and baldly, in its objective reality, without any reference to the subjective conditions which, under the influence of the Spirit, that truth was calculated to produce. It was a dry digest of theses and propositions—perfect in form, but as cold and lifeless as a skeleton.7

Such an approach to theology divorces it from the realm of experience—and hence from the reality of everyday Christian life, especially among believers who did not find intellectual analysis natural or easy.

Packer’s approach to theology is grounded in the Puritan tradition, that particularly English variant of Reformed theology that so often showed an exquisite sensitivity to the pastoral needs and spiritual realities of fallen human life. While his understanding of theology is perhaps best seen in Knowing God, I would like to single out his 1989 inaugural lecture as the first Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology at Regent College, in which he reflected on the nature of theology and its relation to spirituality. The lecture offers an important vision of the nature of theology and above all a corrective to excessively rationalist understandings of theology that severely truncate its scope. Theology and spirituality, he argued, are intimately connected, not because of the will of theologians to try and make artificial connections with the totally different discipline of spirituality, but because theology, when rightly understood, leads into spirituality. Theology is to be understood, he writes, as “a devotional discipline, a verifying in experience of Aquinas’ beautiful remark that theology is taught by God, teaches God, and takes us to God.”8

There is, Packer rightly maintains, a real need for systematic theology within the church, synthesizing the biblical witness to God into a seamless garment. Biblical exegesis is to be commended—and also correlated. All the data about God that exegesis has established must be brought together in a single coherent scheme. Packer commends such an enterprise but counsels against any understanding of theology that is limited to the cataloging and indexing of revealed truths about God. Theology cannot, and should not, be detached or dissociated from the relational activity of trusting, loving, worshiping, obeying, serving, and glorifying God.9 Yet reaction against an inadequate vision of theology must not lead us to reject what is right in such an impoverished account—and to construct another that is equally impoverished, yet in diametrically opposed ways. “Reaction against dry and heavy theology has made some of us woolly and wild, valuing feelings above truth, depreciating ‘head knowledge’ by comparison with ‘heart knowledge’ and refusing to allow that we cannot have the latter without the former, just as reaction against overheated emotionalism has made others of us cool, cerebral and censorious to a fault.”10

So how did Packer develop this interest in the role of tradition in theologizing? I suspect that we probably cannot point to any one defining moment when this appreciation of the significance of the theological past for nourishing the present was crystallized, although it is certainly possible to point to some landmarks in the process. One of these dates from Packer’s days as an undergraduate at Oxford, studying “Greats”—Oxford’s term for the literature, language, and philosophy of the classical world—at Corpus Christi College. He became a Christian a few weeks after his arrival, as a result of hearing a sermon that helped him appreciate the importance of saving faith.

Everyone who comes to faith has a certain amount of mental readjustment to do. Packer found his thinking on a number of issues undergoing significant development—for example, in relation to the authority of the Bible. He also found himself reflecting on one of the great problems of Christian spirituality: how do we deal with the ongoing presence of sin in the life of the believer? Oxford undergraduate evangelicalism in those days was heavily influenced by what is known as “the Keswick teaching,” a matter on which we have already touched. The slogan “let go and let God” was certainly easy to remember; its theological basis and practical benefits seemed rather more elusive.

I am not sure whether we can say that Packer was actively seeking an alternative; yet, there is no doubt that he found one during the academic year 1945–46. While sorting through piles of old books that a generous retired cleric had given to the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, Packer came across the writings of the great Puritan John Owen. As he flipped through the volumes, he found himself struck by the titles of some of the treatises— above all, “On Indwelling Sin” and “On the Mortification of Sin.” He began to read them. Immediately, he found himself challenged by the realism of Owen’s analysis of both the problems arising from “indwelling sin” and the means of dealing with it (which Owen termed “mortification”). This was clearly transformational for Packer. So impressed was he with the approach that he went on to type out a twenty-page précis of Owen’s arguments, which he circulated to his friends.11

We see here the roots of Packer’s love for the Puritans, born not out of antiquarian curiosity but out of a burning conviction that there was gold in the Puritan hills. At the academic level, this led to what was easily the best scholarly analysis of Richard Baxter’s soteriology; at the popular level, it lay behind Packer’s superb popularizing of the Puritan vision in works such as A Quest for Godliness12 ; at the institutional level, it led to the establishment of the “Puritan and Reformed Study Conferences,” through which Packer and Martyn Lloyd-Jones were able to shape a rising generation of clergy who were looking for serious theological roots for their ministries and preaching.

It is impossible to read Packer—or to write about him—without appreciating his deep love for the Puritans; this, I suggest, is an excellent illustration of the deeper principle of the value of tradition for today’s church and today’s Christians. The importance of this point is now well established within evangelicalism as a whole. The new—and, I must say, very welcome—interest in Jonathan Edwards within evangelicalism can be seen as a continuation of this tradition of engagement with excellence.13 Positively, it represents a retrieval and reappropriation of wisdom from the past; negatively, it represents an implicit critique of some trends within evangelicalism that cause some concern, most notably the quest for cultural significance, which can so easily, despite the best of intentions, degenerate into cultural concession.

Yet Packer’s growing interest in the notion of tradition also took a more explicitly theological form. Packer has seen himself as an attentive, appreciative, yet critical participant in the great conversation about how best to articulate and defend the gospel that has continued throughout history. As he put it in 1996, “I theologize out of what I see as the authentic biblical and creedal mainstream of Christian identity, the confessional and liturgical ‘great tradition’ that the church on earth has characteristically maintained from the start.” On this view of things, the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century is to be seen offering “corrections” that “took place within the frame of the great tradition, and did not break it.”14

I share this approach, which I believe represents an important corrective to a vulnerability within contemporary evangelicalism.15 In celebrating the movement’s great strengths, it is also important to ask what can be learned to make it stronger through being more faithful. Packer’s answer is, in part, to listen to others who have sought to be faithful to God in their own generations and passed down t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1. The Great Tradition: J. I. Packer on Engaging with the Past to Enrich the Present
• 2. The Gifts of J. I. Packer: A Cool Head, a Warm Heart, and the Great Tradition
• 3. Pumping Truth: J. I. Packer’s Journalism, Theology, and the Thirst for Truth
• 4. J. I. Packer’s Theological Method
• 5. God Has Spoken: The Primacy of Scripture in J. I. Packer’s Ministry
• 6. J. I. Packer and Pastoral Wisdom from the Puritans
• 7. Retrieval and Renewal: A Model for Evangelical Spiritual Vitality
• 8. J. I. Packer: An English Nonconformist Perspective
• 9. Packer, Puritans, and Postmoderns
• 10. Christ without Culture
• 11. On Knowing God
• 12. Unde, Quonam, et Quemadmodum? Learning Latin (and other things) from J. I. Packer
• 13. Reflection and Response
• Appendix A: Bibliography of the Works of J. I. Packer: July 1952–August 2008
• Appendix B: A Tribute to J. I. Packer
• Notes