12 Conservatism: Holding on to What is Good
12
Conservatism: Holding on to What is Good
Packer was a conservative Christian thinker. Yet though this observation is easily stated, it needs careful and attentive unpacking. The idea of being ‘conservative’ has come to have cultural and political associations which are not helpful in understanding what it means to describe Packer in this way. It is certainly true that Packer identified himself as both a ‘conservative Christian’ and a ‘conservative evangelical’. He also had certain views – on the role of the family or the ministry of women, for instance – that would mark him off as a conservative thinker. But Packer saw his commitment to such views as resting on his reading of the Bible, rather than on a conservative ideology.
The best starting point in gaining an understanding here is the biblical text which underlies so much of his thinking on this question: ‘test everything; hold fast what is good’ (1 Thessalonians 5:21). This text does not speak of an uncritical affirmation and acceptance of everything, but of a critical process of sifting and refining, aimed at capturing and then preserving what is ‘good’ and that which really matters. The British philosopher Roger Scruton was one of the most able and reflective conservative philosophers of our age. In his influential book Conservatism, Scruton puts his finger on two themes that lie at the heart of a conservative way of thinking: ‘the conviction that good things are more easily destroyed than created, and the determination to hold on to those good things in the face of politically engineered change’.The same conviction and determination are evident in Packer’s writings.
For Packer, this is often expressed in terms of inhabiting, exploring and expressing the ‘Great Tradition’. The word ‘tradition’ comes from the Latin term traditio which encompasses such significant notions as ‘handing over’, ‘handing down’ or ‘handing on’. Understood in this sense, it is a thoroughly biblical idea. Paul reminded his readers that he was handing on to them core teachings of the Christian faith which he had received from others (1 Corinthians 15:1−4). The term ‘tradition’ conveys two related senses, as it can refer to both the action of passing teachings on to others – something which Paul insists must be done within the Church – and to teachings themselves which are passed on in this manner. Tradition can thus be understood as a process as well as a body of teaching. The Pastoral Epistles in particular stress the importance of ‘guard[ing] the good deposit entrusted to you’ (2 Timothy 1:14).
Yet there is an issue here that needs further reflection, which was neatly expressed by Jaroslav Pelikan during his period as an historical theologian at Yale University: ‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.’ Pelikan’s point is that we can only too easily allow ourselves to become enslaved by the past, feeling we have to repeat and affirm everything said or practised by earlier generations as a mark of fidelity to our tradition, or as an affirmation of the trustworthiness of a traditional interpretation of the Bible. Theologians and church leaders in the past have made mistakes. Sometimes they developed habits of thought and practice that worked well in their cultural contexts, but no longer work in our very different present-day situations. To give an obvious example: Calvin’s ministry in Geneva in the 1540s and 1550s was at many points genuinely innovative and creative; but why retain his particular structures and practices today, given that many scholars believe they were developed with the specific Genevan context of the 1540s and 1550s in mind?
We need to find a way of being able to approach the legacy of the past critically yet constructively, filtering out what we might now consider to be mistaken or irrelevant, and holding on to what is good, right and useful. If we get this wrong, we find ourselves needlessly and pointlessly locked into the past; if we get it right, we are able to draw on the treasures of the legacy of the theological past, such as its reading of Scripture, allowing it to enrich our ministries and thinking today.
Let’s return to Packer’s period as a curate at St John’s Church, Harborne, in the early 1950s. At that time, St John’s stood firmly within a conservative evangelical tradition. This was obvious in several ways, such as William Leathem’s commitment to expository preaching, and his concern for evangelism. The church’s alignment with a classic Protestant outlook was also signalled visually: St John’s was what was then known as a ‘Black Gown’ church, in that its clergy followed the pattern set by John Calvin and other sixteenth-century Genevan reformers in wearing dark gowns, rather than clerical robes, when preaching.
In the twenty-first century, few if any evangelicals in the Church of England wear black gowns, regarding it as a tradition that no longer serves any useful purpose. It may have been important once, but by the 1960s it was coming to be seen as a liability – a visual signal of being locked in the past and unwilling to adapt to a rapidly changing cultural context. Yet a commitment to expository preaching and a concern for evangelism remained integral to evangelicalism during this period of transition. We therefore need to decide what aspects of the past are essential, and which are optional, and ask when does a traditional practice become a liability, having once been an asset?
Packer sets out his own approach in his 1992 essay ‘The Comfort of Conservatism’, a highly accessible account of the potential role that tradition might play in the stabilisation of evangelicalism.As he rightly notes, the term ‘conservatism’ has two ‘tones’ or meanings: a ‘heroic resolve to preserve whatever in one’s heritage one sees to be truly valuable’; and a stubborn ‘adherence to what is old and conventional just because it is old and conventional’. Packer’s vision of conservatism parallels Scruton’s. It demands a ‘responsible use of one’s intelligence and critical judgement, and also to swim against the cultural tide when necessary’.
For Packer, conservatism is not traditionalism – a ‘backward-looking fixity’ − a misguided though understandable attempt to retreat to the safety of the past, but to live meaningfully and authentically in the present through being rooted and anchored in a living tradition. It involves a process of sifting and reflection, respecting but not revering the past, aiming to identify and affirm what needs to be valued, treasured and preserved. The Christian past consists of an extended engagement with the Bible, which can be helpful to us as we consider our interpretative options, but which cannot be seen as normative for us. Every reading of Scripture, past and present, needs to be judged against the biblical text itself: ‘We can gather from the early Fathers to the present an invaluable resource for understanding the Bible responsibly. Nevertheless, those interpretations (traditions) are never final; they need always to be submitted to Scripture for further review.’
Like Pelikan, Packer is aware of the danger of traditionalism – the ‘absolutizing of formulations and fashions that are human, not divine, and, because human, provisional and open to change’. Such a ‘culture-defying traditionalism’ is easily represented as Christian faithfulness, when it is little more than a refusal to engage with the phenomenon of cultural change. It leads to a ‘magic-word mentality’, which identifies Christian orthodoxy with using the right theological terms or formulae (Packer has in mind here debates about biblical inerrancy, which often concentrated on the word ‘inerrancy’, rather than its intended meaning).
Having rejected this unworkable traditionalism, Packer sets out an approach by which he believes that what is wise, good and true from the past can be discerned, and gladly and joyfully reappropriated by today’s Church: ‘Tradition allows us to stand on the shoulders of the many giants who have thought about Scripture before us.’ Rediscovering the historic and corporate dimensions of our faith makes the great treasures and resources of the Christian past accessible and available to the present, thus enriching the life and witness of modern evangelicalism. We are enabled, as Packer puts it, to ‘receive nurturing truth and wisdom from God’s faithfulness in past generations’.
In commending the recovery of tradition as an antidote to individualism or an excessive reliance on the theological or cultural norms of the present, Packer is aware that he might be open to misunderstanding. A concern for tradition is not, he stresses, equivalent to ‘traditionalism’; that is to say, a nostalgic and backward-looking approach to the Christian faith which ‘can quench the Holy Spirit and cause paralysis and impotence in the church’ by demanding that we blindly repeat exactly what evangelicals did and said back in the 1950s, the 1920s, the 1820s or the 1730s (or whatever period in evangelical history happens to be regarded as a ‘golden age’ by its advocates).
Packer is quite clear that a concern for tradition does not violate the evangelical emphasis upon the sole and supreme authority of Scripture. Tradition serves the Church in a ministerial mode and does not exercise authority magisterially. Packer’s position is characteristic of the mainline Reformation of the sixteenth century, represented by both Luther and Calvin. It differs, however, from the movement known as the ‘Radical Reformation’ or ‘Anabaptism’, which was strongly critical of allowing any role to tradition. For Packer, tradition is there to help and to guide, but not to command. ‘Scripture must have the last word on all human attempts to state its meaning, and tradition, viewed as a series of such human attempts, has a ministerial rather than a magisterial role.’ In the end, all interpretations of Scripture must be judged in the light of Scripture itself, acknowledging that the Church – including evangelicals – has misunderstood the Bible in the past.
We are all beneficiaries of good, wise, and sound tradition, and victims of poor, unwise, and unsound traditions. This is where the absolute ‘last word’ of Scripture must sort out the wheat from the chaff. Hence the apostle Paul’s counsel: ‘Test everything. Hold on to the good’ (1 Thessalonians 5:21).
As Packer pointed out in his earliest major writing, ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (1958), the Christian past provides a resource for the evangelical present. As we seek to interpret Scripture and unfold its many treasures, we can learn from the wisdom of the past.
The Spirit has been active in the Church from the first, doing the work he was sent to do – guiding God’s people into an understanding of revealed truth. The history of the Church’s labour to understand the Bible forms a commentary on the Bible which we cannot despise or ignore without dishonouring the Holy Spirit. To treat the principle of biblical authority as a prohibition against reading and learning from the book of church history is not an evangelical, but an Anabaptist mistake.
Tradition, for Packer, is thus something that must be judged, not received uncritically. It can all too easily shape our readings of Scripture, highlighting some ideas and obscuring others. All Protestants, Packer suggests, stand within traditions, whether Anglican or Baptist, Pentecostal or Dispensationalist, Reformed or Lutheran, Methodist or Mennonite, which open our eyes to some things and close them to others: ‘All traditions function as blinders, focusing our vision on some things at which we have been taught to look constantly and that we therefore see clearly, but keeping us from seeing other things that other traditions grasp better.’ As a consequence, Christians of different traditions ought to talk to each other, helping each other identify and rectify blind spots, and ensuring that the totality of Scripture is illuminated and applied to life and thought.
As a historian, Packer is aware how tradition predisposes us to read the Bible in certain ways, without realising how that seemingly ‘obvious’ or ‘self-evident’ interpretation of the Bible actually gains its power or plausibility from tradition. A time-honoured way of reading the Bible is not necessarily right! Perhaps just as importantly, Packer points out how past controversies cast their long, lingering shadows over contemporary readings of the Bible: ‘Many Protestants have so reacted against Roman Catholic sacramentalism as to mistrust the sacraments entirely and in practice to deny their importance.’
Packer suggests that there are three ways in which engaging positively and critically with tradition opens the way to proper biblical interpretation and theological reflection.
1. By liberating us from our own thoughts. We need to be challenged by alternative perspectives: ‘We need the discipline of learning with the saints, past and present, in the ways noted above, to counterbalance our lopsidedness and to help us break out of the narrow circle of our own present thoughts into a larger vision and a riper wisdom.’
2. By helping us avoid being locked into today’s ways of thinking. Packer argues that attentiveness to the past liberates us from ‘chronological snobbery’, and alerts us to the richness of past readings of Scripture. ‘Keeping regular company with yesterday’s great teachers’ opens our eyes to wisdom that is otherwise denied to us.
3. By setting us free from the limitations of our own traditions. Developing his earlier argument, Packer stresses that ‘the tradition that shaped us had a narrowing as well as an enriching effect on us’. Illustrating this from his own Anglican heritage, he urges his readers to value what is good, yet identify what is weak – and that means listening to other perspectives, past and present.
Packer’s intimate knowledge and experience of North American evangelicalism led him to appreciate the dangers of individualism, which seemed to him to engender a dangerously superficial and ephemeral form of Christianity. For Packer, tradition is an antidote against precisely such an individualism. North American evangelicalism, steeped in individualism, often seems to have no real sense of historical ‘belonging’ or rootedness. As such, it is radically prone to destabilisation.
Too often, as Packer comments, the North American evangelical has been ‘a spiritual lone ranger who has proudly or impatiently turned his back on the church and his heritage’. Rediscovering the corporate and historic nature of the Christian faith reduces the danger of entire communities of faith being misled by charismatic individuals, and affirms the ongoing importance of the Christian past as a stabilising influence in potentially turbulent times.
Packer’s approach to conservatism invites evangelicals to rediscover their connection with historic Christianity. It is an important strategy, which resonates particularly with some problems within American evangelicalism – most notably, its historical rootlessness. This concern prompted many evangelicals in North America to convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy (such as Peter Gillquist, the former leader of the evangelical organisation Campus Crusade, and Frank Schaeffer, son of the noted Calvinist apologist Francis Schaeffer).
This approach has much to offer the Christian churches, especially evangelicalism. It encourages a process of respectful yet critical dialogue with the past, determined as a matter of principle to learn from its wisdom, while being liberated from mechanical and wooden repetitions of its judgements. Its vision of theology is corporate, rather than individualist, while creating space for individuals to make a difference to how the community perceives and articulates its foundational beliefs. It is rigorously grounded in Scripture on the one hand, while taking into account the long history of faithful Christian engagement with the Bible on the other. Packer’s critical distinction between ‘magisterial’ and ‘ministerial’ approaches to tradition enables us to see writers like Luther, Calvin and Jonathan Edwards as helpful in informing and nourishing our faith, without displacing or undermining the place of the Bible itself. The Bible retains its authority, which is served and illuminated by its wise interpreters.
Packer’s approach allows some of the anxieties within the evangelical community over the concept of tradition to be addressed and resolved. In particular, he deals with two issues that are known to be a difficulty to some. The first is that tradition can be seen as a human invention or fabrication, in opposition to the Word of God. The New Testament certainly notes this type of tradition and is vigorously critical of both the notion itself and its consequences. Packer’s critical approach allows such inappropriate traditions to be identified and sifted out.
Second, tradition carries with it the sense of ‘traditionalist’ – the dead hand of previous generations, which demands that we continue to think and act in precisely the same manner as earlier generations, thus locking evangelicalism into a sixteenth-, eighteenth- or nineteenth-century worldview. To give authority of any kind to ‘tradition’ might therefore seem to run the risk of condemning evangelicalism to sleep-walking with the dead. In an age that is acutely aware of the importance of public perceptions of Christianity – witness the growth of ‘seeker-sensitive’ worship services – a concern for tradition seems totally out of place. Packer, however, argues that to value tradition, as he understands the notion, is about being rooted in and connected with the past, thus allowing the Church to be resourced by, yet not imprisoned within, its past. Like C. S. Lewis before him, Packer affirms that there is something about classic orthodoxy that gives it an appeal across time and culture.
Questions, of course, remain, on the application of the process of critical reflection that Packer identifies as underlying the responsible use of tradition in the life of the Church. His own view on a range of questions relating to ministerial practice and sexual ethics would be described as ‘conservative’. Packer’s 2002 decision to leave the Anglican Church of Canada over the change in policy of the Diocese of New Westminster on blessing same-sex unions reflects his conviction that the biblical warrant for the traditional position is so secure that it would have been impossible for him to remain within a denomination that treated the Bible in such a dismissive manner. Some suggested that this was essentially a ‘difference about interpretation’; Packer himself saw it as going beyond the ‘legitimation of sin’, basing this judgement on his reading of the New Testament as a whole, particularly its views on creation, sin, regeneration and sanctification.
Yet although Packer himself did not believe in the ordination of women to ordained ministry, he did not see the commitment of either the Church of England or the Anglican Church of Canada to this practice as requiring that he separate himself from them. In 1991, Christianity Today carried an article by Packer titled ‘Let’s Stop Making Women Presbyters’. Packer suggested that the fundamental reason why so many mainline denominations – including his own – were ordaining women as presbyters ‘owes more to secular, pragmatic, and social factors than to any regard for biblical authority’. The New Testament, Packer argued, envisaged a ‘presbyterate of manly men’. Why not remain true to this vision, rather than turning women into ‘substitute men’?
This essay, it may be noted, was not well received at Regent College, Vancouver, which had a relatively high number of women students. Gordon Fee, who served as Regent’s Professor of New Testament at this time, played a prominent role in Christians for Biblical Equality, and later authored a work entitled Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity without Hierarchy (2004). Packer’s critics pointed out that, in the first place, he was constructing a ‘universal church order’ on the basis of a few biblical verses, when other sections of the New Testament pointed in a different direction; and in the second, was inconsistent in the implementation of his own principles by allowing women to minister under male supervision. To his critics, Packer here seemed to be an ecclesial traditionalist.
But it is perhaps unfair to judge the value of Packer’s commendation of tradition because of potential difficulties in its application to such complex and contested issues. Roger Scruton makes similar points in his analysis of the potential of conservatism, highlighting the value of Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind (1953) in setting out an intellectually vigorous and defensible vision of conservatism, grounded in a firm belief in a transcendent order which was equally capable of inspiring the poetry of T. S. Eliot and undergirding political and social attitudes.
Perhaps, as Scruton suggests, conservatism is best seen as both a conviction and a process: a determination to hold on to what is good, lest it be lost; and a process of sifting which helps us identify what really matters, so that it can be preserved and applied to the needs of our day. If so, Packer offers us a luminous example of a reflective religious conservatism capable of development and expansion in the future. As Scruton points out, such a conservatism is too easily ridiculed as a nostalgia for an ‘old and misremembered way of life’ or a ‘failure of compassion’ towards new ways of living. Yet as Packer himself makes clear, when rightly understood, it provides a basis for life and thought which affirms and values what really matters. When all is said and done, however, what some may consider to be an insuperable difficulty remains – namely, how a good and valued principle formulated in one cultural context finds its proper implementation in historically distant cultural contexts.
Perhaps the abiding importance of Packer’s approach, though, is to sensitise us to the value of the past and to alert us to the need to value its ideas as much as those of the present. It is helpful to consider the wise remarks of Henry Mintzberg of the Canadian Centre for Management Development in this respect:
There is a terrible bias in today’s management literature toward the current, the latest, the ‘hottest.’ This does a disservice, not only to all those wonderful old writers, but especially to the readers who are all too frequently offered the trivial new instead of the significant old.
As we have seen, Packer’s approach highlights the constant value of seeking for the ‘significant old’ in matters of spirituality and theology, and being wary of the untested ‘trivial new’.
In the previous chapter, we considered how Packer came to join the faculty of Regent College, Vancouver. Now we shall return to that narrative to see how he developed this platform for his programme of theological reflection.