J. I. Packer

His Life and Thought

Alister McGrath

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780830841776, 9780830841776
• eBook ISBN: 9780830841783
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

J. I. Packer was one of the most influential evangelical theological and spiritual writers of the twentieth century, best known for his classic work Knowing God. In the 1990s Christianity Today readers named him one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, second only to C. S. Lewis. But who was Jim Packer, and what is the story of the man behind the writings?

Alister McGrath, a bestselling author and friend of Packer, tells the story of Packer's faith and how it sustained him during his time in England and Canada. Along the way he explores Packer's many contributions to theology and spirituality, alternating narrative with reflection. By engagingly setting out Packer's ideas and the central themes of his work, McGrath helps to explain why Packer and his writing continue to be so helpful to millions on the journey of encountering God.

This beautiful recollection of a giant of the Christian faith is both a celebration of his life and the perfect introduction to his thought and writings for a new generation of readers.

1

The Beginnings of a Journey: From Gloucester to Oxford

James Innell Packer was born in the English cathedral city of Gloucester on 22 July 1926, the son of James Percy Packer (died 1972), a clerk at the divisional headquarters of the Great Western Railway, and Dorothy Mary Harris (died 1965), who had trained as a schoolmistress in Bristol. Packer’s sister Margaret was born in 1929 – the year of the Wall Street crash. The effects of this financial crisis on Britain were severe. By the end of 1930, unemployment in Britain had more than doubled from 1 million to 2.5 million. The Packer family, however, managed to cope with this austerity, living modestly in rented accommodation close to the city’s railway station.

In September 1933, Packer began to attend the National School in London Road, Gloucester. He did not fit in easily with other boys at this junior school, and within days had become the victim of playground bullying. On 19 September, Packer was chased out of the school grounds onto the London Road – one of the busiest traffic thoroughfares in Gloucester. Perhaps the driver of a passing bread van was inattentive, preoccupied with his delivery schedules; more likely, however, he simply did not have time to react when a seven-year-old boy suddenly ran into his path. As a result of this collision, Packer suffered a major head injury. He was taken to the nearby Gloucester Royal Infirmary and rushed into an operating theatre.

Packer’s condition was serious. He had suffered major damage to his skull on the right of his forehead, leading to injury to the frontal lobe of his brain. The resident surgeon at the hospital was able to extract fragments of bone from inside Packer’s skull, leaving him with a small hole in his right forehead, some two centimetres in diameter. This injury would remain clearly visible for the rest of his life. After three weeks in hospital, Packer was allowed to return home, where he would spend six months recovering from the trauma of his injury. It was not until the spring of 1934 that he was allowed to return to the National School. Packer had to wear a protective aluminum plate over his injury, making it impossible for him to join in normal schoolboy games and sports.

During his period of convalescence away from school, Packer developed a love of reading which remained with him ever after. Packer’s grandmother was an admirer of Agatha Christie and began to lend him some of her own books, including The Mystery of the Blue Train and The Secret of Chimneys. This appetite for books may have been a great asset for his later academic career, but at the time it probably reinforced the perception that he was a ‘bookish’ child who did not fit in easily with other children. Packer has freely admitted that he is ‘something of a bookworm’, devouring a wide range of literature that is reflected in many of his occasional pieces.¹

After his return to the National School, Packer fell into the habit of accompanying his father on Saturdays when he returned to his office at Northgate Mansions, close to Gloucester Railway Station, to make sure the week’s paperwork had been properly completed and filed. Packer later described his father to me as ‘a railway clerk in charge of another clerk and two typists’. As a result, there were two typewriters in his father’s office. His father used one of these to do his paperwork and, as nobody else was in the office on a Saturday afternoon, Packer was allowed to play around with the second. Noting how much their son enjoyed this typewriter, his parents gave him an old Oliver machine for his eleventh birthday in July 1937. Packer had secretly hoped to be given a bicycle, like all other boys of his age, but the risk of worsening his head injury through a fall made this impossible. He happily mastered the use of the typewriter and was soon typing out his own stories.

In September 1937, Packer left his local National School and moved on to the Crypt School in Greyfriars, Gloucester. The school had a long and distinguished history going back to 1539 and counted among its former pupils the great English preacher and evangelist George Whitefield (1714−70) and Robert Raikes (1736−1811), the founder of the Sunday School movement. On entering the school’s sixth form, Packer chose to specialise in classics – the study of the language, literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome. He was the only pupil in his year who wished to take this option; as a result, he was taught on a one-to-one basis by the Headmaster of the school, David Gwynn Williams.

Williams is of considerable importance to our story, in that he became something of an intellectual role model to Packer. He had studied classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. The close personal attention which he offered helped Packer to develop his own vision of what he wanted to do when he left the Crypt School. Like his Headmaster, he set his heart on going to Oxford University to study classics at Corpus Christi College. Williams’ expert tuition helped Packer to build the competence and confidence that would be essential if he was to achieve this goal. Yet if Packer was to study at Oxford, this would require more than academic brilliance on his part; given his family’s modest financial circumstances, he would need substantial scholarship support.

In March 1943, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, announced it would be awarding two major scholarships in classics for the following academic year: the Charles Oldham Scholarship, and the Hugh Oldham Scholarship. The scholarships, which would be awarded on the basis of a competitive examination to be held in Oxford on 7 September, were both worth £100 per annum, a very substantial sum at the time. Packer knew it was essential that he should win one of these scholarships; without this support, his family simply would not have been able to afford to send their only son to Oxford. Packer duly travelled to Oxford to sit the examinations, and shortly afterwards learned that he had been awarded the Hugh Oldham Scholarship – a remarkable achievement for someone who had only just turned seventeen.

Yet Packer’s future at Oxford was still not certain. All able-bodied British males aged between eighteen and forty-one were liable to compulsory military service for the duration of the Second World War. If called up, Packer would have been able to begin his studies at Oxford that October but would have to interrupt them to serve in the armed forces when he turned eighteen. However, a medical examiner considered that Packer’s head injury of 1933 exempted him from compulsory military service. That injury might have disqualified him from military service; it clearly did not impact on his intellectual capacities.

In the end, Packer decided he would defer entry to Oxford by a year. He would only have been seventeen in October 1943; it would, he concluded, be preferable to wait until he was eighteen and better prepared for the rigorous intellectual environment he knew he would experience there. This meant that he remained at the Crypt School. While everyone else in his year group left to go to college or take up jobs, Packer spent a third year in the sixth form, using the time and the school’s library resources to read some of the classics of literature in preparation for his time at Oxford.

At this stage, Packer had little interest in Christianity, tending to regard it as probably true, but of little significance. Yet his interest was piqued by C. S. Lewis who, he later remarked, led him to ‘something approaching orthodoxy’. He had read Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet in 1939 during a phase when he devoured stories about space-travel, and in his final years at the Crypt School read The Screwtape Letters along with the three smaller books that were later brought together to become the classic Mere Christianity.

Yet the young Packer remained puzzled by Christianity. Although he saw himself as doctrinally orthodox, something seemed to be missing from this rather cerebral account of the Christian faith. One of his schoolfriends tried to explain to him what it was all about. Eric Taylor had entered the sixth form at the Crypt School at the same time as Packer, and the two had struck up a friendship. While Packer stayed on at the school until the summer of 1944, Taylor had left a year earlier to study at the University of Bristol. During his first year at Bristol, Taylor was converted to Christianity through the ministry of the Bristol Inter-Faculty Christian Union. He wrote Packer a series of letters, in which he attempted to explain how he had discovered a living faith.

Packer found these letters somewhat baffling. He recalls his difficulty in understanding why Taylor believed that formal assent to the Christian creeds was not enough to mark someone as a Christian. What more could be required? The two friends met up in the summer of 1944, as Packer was preparing to go up to Oxford University. Despite Taylor’s best efforts to describe the change that had taken place in his life, Packer was unable to comprehend it. In the end, Taylor suggested that Packer get in touch with the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union on his arrival and attend one of their meetings – a suggestion to which Packer agreed.

Oxford University: Studying Classics – Discovering Christianity

In the second week of October 1944, Packer left his parents to begin his life as an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was a momentous transition. Packer would be living away from his parental home for the first time, and entering an environment in which he had no friends or family. Oxford was a mere shadow of its normal self at that time since most able-bodied students and academic staff were serving in the armed forces. There were only a few eighteen-year-old students who would be studying for the regular three or four years for Oxford’s undergraduate degree courses; most were undertaking truncated six-month courses before going on to undertake military service.

Like C. S. Lewis before him, Packer would study classical literature, history and philosophy. The two-part undergraduate course at Oxford which focused on these areas was popularly known as ‘Mods’ and ‘Greats’, although the University preferred it to be known as Classical Moderations and Literae Humaniores. While most of Oxford’s undergraduate courses lasted three years, the intellectual rigour of classical studies required four. The demanding linguistic, philosophical and historical training which Packer would receive during his time at Oxford unquestionably lies behind his ability to handle complex arguments with ease and clarity. Though his Oxford tutors were excellent, Packer could not help but feel that they lacked the flair and pedagogical commitment of David Gwynn Williams. He had, he realised, been very fortunate in having had Williams as a mentor at such a formative stage in his life.

Shortly after his arrival, Packer was invited to attend a meeting of the Corpus Christi College Christian Union. This turned out to be a rather uninteresting affair. However, mindful of his promise to his friend Eric Taylor, Packer subsequently agreed to go along to hear a Christian Union sermon on the evening of Sunday, 22 October 1944 – ‘Sunday of Second Week’, to use the traditional Oxford way of referring to days during a university term – at St Aldate’s Church in the centre of Oxford. The preacher, Earl Langston from the southern English coastal town of Weymouth, told his audience about his own conversion, which had taken place at a Boys’ Camp. He had been asked by one of the older boys if he really was a Christian. This unexpected challenge forced him to acknowledge that he was not, and subsequently led him to make a personal response to Christ.

Packer had found the first part of the sermon a little dull, but this narrative of conversion spoke to him deeply, appealing to his imagination. A picture took shape within his mind. He was looking through a window into a room where some people were partying, enjoying themselves by playing games. As he watched, he found he could understand the rules of the games they were playing. But he was outside, while they were inside. Packer recalled grasping his situation with crystalline clarity. He needed to come in.

The service ended with the singing of Charlotte Elliot’s famous hymn, ‘Just as I am’, with its constant emphasis on coming to Christ – ‘O Lamb of God, I come’. Packer made his decision: it was time for him to come inside. And so, not far from the place where the great evangelist George Whitefield committed himself to Christ in 1735, Packer made his own personal commitment.

Six weeks later, close to the end of his first term at Oxford, Packer had a second experience which he often recounted in his later writings. Thirteen years earlier, C. S. Lewis had described a ride with a friend to Whipsnade Zoo. At the start of this journey, he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God; at the end, he did. Lewis was not entirely clear how this radical change of mind happened. It was as if a series of disconnected ideas suddenly fused together, leading him to a compellingly clear conclusion. Packer considers something very similar to have happened to him concerning his views on the Bible.

In 1944 I went to a Bible study at which a vision from the book of Revelation (I forget which one) was expounded, and whereas at the start I did not believe that all the Bible (which I had been assiduously reading since my conversion six weeks before) is God’s trustworthy instruction, at the end, slightly to my surprise, I found myself unable to doubt that indeed it is . . . When, years later, I found Calvin declaring that every Christian experiences the inward witness of the Holy Spirit to the divine authority of Scripture, I rejoiced to think that, without ever having heard a word on this subject, I had long known exactly what Calvin was talking about.²

So was this some kind of experiential flash in the pan, an expression of religious enthusiasm lacking any real intellectual substance? Not in this case. Recognising his need to think through and consolidate what he had experienced, Packer turned to George Whitefield as a possible role model and mentor. After all, he had attended the same school as Whitefield, and both had been converted in the same city and university. Packer went to the city library and borrowed the two volumes of an 1876 biography of Whitefield. They would be his staple reading over the forthcoming Christmas vacation, which he spent with his family in Gloucester. Packer found that studying Whitefield was both enriching in itself, as well as serving as a gateway to the riches of the Reformed theological tradition.

Discovering the Importance of Theology

During the 1940s, the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Chri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Beginnings of a Journey: From Gloucester to Oxford
• 2 Old Books and Deep Wisdom: The Importance of the Christian Past
• 3 Preparing for Ministry: From Oxford to Birmingham
• 4 Learning from History: Retrieving the Puritan Heritage
• 5 The Theological Educationalist: Tyndale Hall, Bristol
• 6 The Bible: Authority, Interpretation and Translation
• 7 The Return to Oxford: Latimer House
• 8 Theology and the Life of the Church
• 9 A New Beginning? Trinity College, Bristol
• 10 Theology and Spirituality: Knowing God
• 11 The Move to Canada: Regent College, Vancouver
• 12 Conservatism: Holding on to What is Good
• 13 The Golden Years: Ministry in Vancouver
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Further Reading