13 The Golden Years: Ministry in Vancouver
13
The Golden Years: Ministry in Vancouver
Packer began his teaching at Regent College, Vancouver, in September 1979. By then, the reputation of the school was soaring; 140 students had registered for that academic year. Yet Regent College was in the process of change. James Houston was no longer the Principal, having been replaced by Carl Amerding, who brought in a series of measures designed to enhance the appeal and profile of the College, most notably setting up an MDiv course.
In the mid-1970s, Regent was a tiny institution, using borrowed rooms; by the end of the 1980s, the College was the largest graduate institution of theological education in the region, with a new purpose-built home on a premier site on the University campus. There is no doubt that Packer played a major role in ensuring the continuing rise in fame of the school; his presence at Regent College considerably increased its reputation in North America and beyond, and acted as a powerful draw for student recruitment. The year 1985 was a landmark for Regent, in that it secured accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools in the face of intense opposition from other Canadian schools (including Vancouver School of Theology) who clearly regarded Regent as a major competitor.
As numbers burgeoned, the old buildings came increasingly under strain. In 1985, the year in which accreditation was achieved, the College was attracting nearly 450 students. Two converted fraternity houses were simply not able to cope with these large numbers and it was clear that new premises were required. After careful negotiations with the University of British Columbia, a suitable building site (consisting of the old fraternity house site and the adjacent vacant corner lot at the intersection of Wesbrook Mall and University Boulevard) was secured and funds raised. The completed building was opened in 1989, a tangible symbol of the new strength of the College and the ethos which it represented. The imposing building, fronted by a small park and occupying a prime site on the eastern perimeter of the University campus, physically expresses the College’s embeddedness within the wider University community.
The distinctiveness of Regent College has been framed in different ways over its history, as its self-understanding has crystallised. Its original qualification was the Master of Christian Studies. Many senior academics track their origins back to this qualification – such as Janet Martyn Soskice, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge, and Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. The school portrayed itself as a school of theology for the laity, helping its students to integrate their faith with real life. Although the College gained the right to offer an MDiv – the core qualification for seminarians – from 1980, most Regent graduates actually went on to become lawyers, doctors, business leaders or authors.
Although Packer’s primary focus in England had been on the education of future clergy, he adapted easily – and, it must be said, enthusiastically – to the education of intelligent and reflective lay people, who wanted to develop a coherent and satisfying Christian framework and apply this to their lives. Packer’s approach in Knowing God proved meaningful and helpful to such students. Throughout his time at Regent College, Packer’s primary teaching commitment was in historical and systematic theology. He offered four main lecture courses, each directly based on teaching which he had carefully developed and perfected during his time at Trinity College, Bristol:
Systematic Theology I: Knowledge of God;
Systematic Theology II: Doctrine of God, Creation and Man;
Systematic Theology III: Christology and Soteriology;
Systematic Theology IV: Ecclesiology and Eschatology.
Packer also offered additional courses, particularly for the Regent College summer schools. In addition to this demanding teaching programme, Packer and Kit were involved in the pastoral care of students. A College ‘Community Group’ would meet weekly at their home at 2398 West 34th Street, while Kit was also active in the College wives’ group.
Packer’s initial appointment at Regent College was as Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology. However, his reputational capital was such that ten years later, on 11 December 1989, Packer was formally installed as the first Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology. This chair (which was almost invariably referred to as the ‘Chee Chair’ in internal Regent discussions) had been endowed by two prominent members of Vancouver’s increasingly significant Chinese community in memory of their father. It was Regent’s first endowed chair. This endowment was an important confirmation of the growing importance of the Cantonese Christian community, which was also reflected in other developments at Regent around this time, including the initiation of a Chinese Studies Programme in 1985. Packer remained Chee Professor until his retirement in 1996, at the age of seventy.
While Packer’s reputation as a classic Reformed theologian in the tradition of the Puritans was a significant draw to a large constituency, his interest in spirituality was valued by many others. Packer frequently teamed up with James Houston, and subsequently also with Eugene Peterson following his appointment to the James M. Houston Chair of Spiritual theology from 1993 to 1998, to run seminars and classes on evangelical spirituality, concentrating on the issue of retrieving past resources for present-day Christian living. Many clearly saw Regent College as being both innovative and traditional in its approach, while addressing the needs of lay Christians seeking to lead authentically Christian lives in complex and often conflicted situations. As I know from many personal conversations, Regent College summer schools in the 1990s were seen by many lay Christians and pastors as oases of spiritual refreshment, often featuring headlining presentations by Packer, Peterson and Houston.
Packer, however, also developed a significant teaching and ministerial role beyond Regent College, which extended both his and the College’s reach. After allowing himself the fall of 1979 and all of 1980 to settle in at Regent, Packer resumed a full speaking schedule. Major lecture series included the Ryan Lectures at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky (1982); the Staley Lectures at the Lutheran Bible Institute in Seattle (1982); the Day-Higginbotham Lectures at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas (1985); and the Reformation Heritage Lectures at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama (1994). Packer also undertook visits to a large number of divinity schools, including Canadian Theological Seminary in Regina, Saskatoon (1981), Westminster Theological Seminary, Escondido, California (from 1982), Conservative Baptist Seminary in Denver, Colorado (1982) and the Bible Institute of Hawaii (1983). He also served as a visiting professor (generally involving extended or repeat visits) at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi (from 1985) and at New College, Berkeley (from 1985).
Although Packer’s role was primarily positive and constructive, especially in his teaching at Regent College, he nevertheless became involved in controversies. Some of these reinforced a wider perception that Packer was the gatekeeper of traditional evangelical orthodoxy; some pointed to Packer stretching the envelope of traditional evangelical attitudes and practices in ways that have subsequently become more widely accepted. We have already noted an example of the former – Packer’s 1991 essay ‘Let’s Stop Making Women Presbyters’ − which took some by surprise on account of its apparent unwillingness to acknowledge a legitimate diversity of evangelical opinions on this matter in a shifting cultural context. But some would say that a better example lies to hand in Packer’s engagement with the growing debate over universalism and conditional immortality within evangelicalism.
The Controversy over Conditional Immortality
Packer’s early article ‘The Problem of Universalism Today’ drew a sharp distinction between two senses of the term ‘universalism’: the ‘universal Christian claim’ on humanity, grounded in Jesus Christ as the one and only Saviour, and the universal need for redemption; and as the universal restoration of humanity ‘to the fellowship with God for which Adam was made, and from which he fell’. Packer notes that it is the first form of universalism which establishes the credentials of Christianity as a world religion and gives a solid intellectual foundation to its missionary outlook; the second, however, threatens to erode the distinctiveness, authenticity and integrity of the Christian faith, and rob it of its evangelistic thrust.
Yet the debate intensified and moved to somewhat different questions in 1988, when two leading conservative evangelicals – John Stott and Philip E. Hughes, a former librarian of Latimer House – published works setting out their hitherto private doubts concerning the traditional understanding of the nature of hell and eternal punishment, and tentatively advocated annihilationism as a serious option for evangelicals. Hughes served as Professor of Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, and was one of the editors of Westminster Theological Journal – positions which placed him at the heart of conservative evangelical orthodoxy in the United States.
Stott made it clear that he stated his views with some hesitation, partly on account of his ‘great respect for longstanding tradition which claims to be a true interpretation of Scripture’ and partly because of his high regard and concern for ‘the unity of the worldwide evangelical constituency’. The veteran English conservative evangelical John Wenham, who had been Vice-Principal during Packer’s first period at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, then declared that he had privately come round to this way of thinking as early as 1934, partly through the influence of Basil Atkinson, widely regarded as a bastion of orthodoxy in evangelical student circles. As early as 1973, Wenham had publicly stated that evangelicals should consider themselves as being ‘under no obligation to defend the notion of unending torment until the arguments of the conditionalists have been refuted’.
Hughes, Stott and Wenham were former colleagues of Packer, with whom he had worked closely in the past, especially in connection with Latimer House. It was not an easy situation for Packer, in that his personal regard for the people concerned had to be set against his fundamental belief that their ideas were wrong. Packer responded to these developments in the annual Leon Morris Lecture, delivered to the Evangelical Alliance in the Australian city of Melbourne on Friday, 31 August 1990, which dealt with ‘The Problem of Eternal Punishment’.
The lecture is interesting in many ways, not least because it implicitly raises the question of whether evangelicalism is to be defined primarily by a love of the Bible, and a determination to set it at the heart of Christian thinking and living, or additionally or alternatively by certain specific intellectual outcomes of reflection on the Bible. To put this another way, is an evangelical committed to particular interpretations of the Bible, rather than to simply making the Bible the starting point and ultimate judge of all doctrinal affirmations? If evangelicals regard no human authority as standing above the Bible, how can the reliability of various competing interpretations of the Bible be judged without placing a human authority – such as a committee or influential preacher – above that of the Bible?
Such questions were addressed at a consultation co-sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in May 1989, during which Packer spoke on these issues, setting out essentially the same points he would make a year later in Melbourne. In responding to Packer’s article, John Ankerberg and John Weldon argued that believing in eternal punishment was a litmus test which showed up whether someone was an evangelical or not: ‘The doctrine of eternal punishment is the watershed between evangelical and non-evangelical thought.’ Packer was here cited as a touchstone for authentic evangelical beliefs.
Yet it was not long before Packer was accused of being thoroughly unevangelical by many of those who had cited and commended him with such approval. The cause of this opprobrium was Packer’s involvement in ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’.
The Controversy over Evangelical Collaboration with Catholicism
During the 1990s, a group of senior evangelicals in North America came to the conclusion that they ought to begin discussions about possible limited cooperation with individual senior Roman Catholics. The election of Bill Clinton as the forty-second President of the United States in 1992 was seen by many Americans as marking the rise of secularism and hostility towards Christianity in the public arena. Although this perception is now generally regarded as having been misplaced, the threat seemed real enough at the time. It persuaded some senior evangelical Protestants and Catholics that they had some serious talking to do. Packer was in the forefront of these discussions.
Why? It might at first seem deeply implausible that a leading evangelical theologian, steeped in the heritage of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, should commend conversations and potential collaboration with Catholicism. But Packer was convinced that his experience of working with Anglo-Catholic critics of liberalism in England could be transposed to North America. There was no question of evangelicals abandoning the Reformation or endorsing Catholicism. For Packer, a rising tide of secularism mandated dialogue and collaboration between individual evangelicals and individual Catholics on how to engage and counter such developments, while at the same time acknowledging the differences between them.
Two books helped to create this impression of a potentially beleaguered Christianity in North America and offered assessments of possible ways ahead. Richard John Neuhaus’s Naked Public Square (1984) was widely acclaimed as a study that demonstrated the way in which religion was being systematically eliminated from the public life of the United States. Neuhaus, a Lutheran who had become a Catholic, stressed the need for a Christian witness in this ‘naked public square’ of American public life. The book was widely welcomed by committed Christians across a range of denominations. The debate was taken further by Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict (1987). Colson, a Reagan White House staffer who was converted to evangelical Christianity in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, sounded a similar note, which was developed still further in his The Body: Being Light in Darkness (1992).
Two broad potential strategies emerged within North American evangelicalism during the 1990s in response to the perception that American culture was moving into new and uncharted territories, characterised by an increasingly secular outlook. Catholicism might be an ally in such a struggle. But could an alliance of this kind be sustained without theological compromise and the dilution of evangelical identity? What about the Reformation heritage, which remained important, if not defining, for many within the American evangelical movement?
The first strategy envisaged evangelicals resolving to have nothing to do with Roman Catholics on account of the continuing doctrinal disagreements associated with the agenda of the Reformation. This approach had the merit of the total maintenance of doctrinal integrity. For many evangelicals of the early 1990s, Roman Catholicism was to be seen as a deformed version of Christianity, if it could be described as Christianity at all. Yet this seemed to rule out collaboration with others in the face of a rising tide of secularism.
A second possible strategy involved evangelicals collaborating with Roman Catholics on a limited range of issues, while allowing that crucial differences remained on others. This approach maintained doctrinal integrity by means of an explicit acknowledgement that disagreements remain, while at the same time permitting collaboration on a series of moral, social and political issues, and the mutual defence of Christian orthodoxy against secularism, liberalism and non-Christian religions. Yet it left unresolved the question of how the core doctrinal disagreements of the sixteenth-century Reformation were to be handled. Could they just be ignored? Or understated for pragmatic reasons?
The document ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’ represents a manifesto for the second of the two approaches just outlined. The document was issued in March 1994, and built on the work of Colson and Neuhaus, who had gradually brought together a network group of individual evangelicals and Catholics who were sympathetic to the idea of collaborative witness in the public arena. The network was never intended to represent denominations or denominational concerns, but was envisaged as a working group exploring the ways in which individual Christians might work together in the face of what appeared to be an increasingly hostile public arena. This was a distinctively American discussion; evangelicals in Britain, embedded in a somewhat different cultural context, did not experience the sense of secular encroachment or a threat of overt secularisation of the public arena to the same extent.
A number of leading evangelicals publicly endorsed the ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’ statement, including William Abraham (Perkins School of Theology), Os Guinness (Trinity Forum), Richard Mouw (Fuller Theological Seminary), Mark Noll (Wheaton College), Thomas Oden (Drew University), Pat Robertson (Regent University) – and Packer himself. In many ways, Packer here adopted the same basic principles in dealing with Catholicism in 1994 as he had in his earlier dealings with Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England around 1970 (see p. 94). This was not a new development in Packer’s thinking, but the extension of an existing understanding of the manner in which evangelicals should relate to other Christians. It represents an excellent example of what Packer termed ‘grassroots co-belligerence’. As he would put it, the ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’ document ‘identifies common enemies (unbelief, sin, cultural apostasy) and pleads that the Christian counterattack on these things be cooperative up to the limit of what divergent convictions allow’.
From Packer’s perspective, the statement built a platform on which evangelicals and Catholics who shared a common faith in the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement and new birth could unite and work together in reaching out to an increasingly secular society. In this context, Packer reaffirmed the words of C. S. Lewis: ‘When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground.’ For Packer, it was important to occupy that ‘common ground’ by seeking substantive convergence on issues of major cultural importance, without forfeiting or fudging any specific historical theological truth-claims. It came as a surprise to him to learn that the document was being read as some kind of mandate for the convergence of churches. For Packer, it seemed quite clear that ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’ was a parachurch document in which individual evangelicals and Catholics agreed to work together for limited yet strategic purposes.
In Packer’s view, the present needs of both Church and community in the Western world called out for some such collaboration across denominational divides. Two main considerations prompted this conclusion on his part. First, that the ‘slide into secularism and paganism that is so much a mark of current culture’ demands that there should be some kind of ‘alliance of all who love the Bible and its Christ’. A united Christian witness is necessary in the face of an escalating secular cultural situation. Packer stressed that he is not advocating official collaboration between denominations, but individual alliances across denominational divides, along the lines of the parachurch coalitions already existing within evangelicalism itself.
Second, the historic division between ‘relatively homogeneous Protestant churches and a relatively homogeneous Church of Rome’ reflects a situation which no longer pertains. A new division has emerged within Christianity, which is of considerably greater importance – the division between theological conservatives (whom Packer prefers to term ‘conservationists’) who ‘honour the Christ of the Bible and historic creeds and confessions’ on the one hand, and ‘theological liberals and radicals’ on the other. This division can be seen within both the Protestant and Catholic Churches. Why should not conservatives form an alliance across their denominations to fight liberalism and radicalism within their denominations, and more broadly? ‘Domestic differences about salvation and the Church should not hinder us from joint action in seeking to re-Christianize the North American milieu.’ Again, this represents the consistent application of Packer’s understanding of ‘co-belligerence’ which he had worked out within his original English context back in the 1960s (see pp. 93−4).
The document (and particularly Packer’s endorsement) gave rise to angry criticisms from many senior American evangelicals, who saw Packer as a traitor to the Protestant and evangelical causes. They argued that Catholics and Protestants were antithetically opposed, with the result that neither could legitimately regard the other as being Christian with any integrity or honesty. Protestants should therefore treat Catholics as non-Christian or anti-Christian (and vice versa). It was a single-shot response, in that once this point had been made, no further discussion was possible. The result was that those who believed that such dialogue was dishonest refused to have anything to do with it, leaving those who disagreed with them to get on with their discussions. The dialogue thus continued, without those who objected to it.
But why limit this approach to collaboration with individual Catholics? What about Orthodoxy, then emerging as a major presence in North America through immigration from Greece and other parts of Eastern Europe? In the spring of 1995, Packer took this strategy a stage further. He was invited to attend the Aiken Conference, organised by Orthodox Christians, which had been convened to test whether an ‘ecumenical orthodoxy’, solidly based upon the classic Christian faith, can become the foundation for a unified and transformative vision to the modern age. Packer’s response to this question was strongly affirmative and developed further his policy of ‘collaboration within and across “great-tradition Christianity” ’.
Retirement: The ‘Last Crusade’
Packer finally retired as the first Sangwoo Yountong Chee Professor of Theology at Regent College in the summer of 1996. His formal retirement did not, however, end his relationship with Regent College. He was appointed to a Board of Governors Professorship of Theology, and continued to play a role in the College’s teaching ministry for two further decades, particularly through its summer schools. That same year, the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association awarded him the Jordan Lifetime Achievement Award for his exceptional contribution to the Christian publishing industry. Other awards flowed in throughout his retirement – for example, in 2012 Packer was awarded the Bavinck Prize for Outstanding Reformed Contribution to the Church, the Academy or Public Life. Regent College itself honoured Packer further in 2006 by establishing the ‘J. I. Packer Chair in Theology’, with the aim of continuing Packer’s theological legacy.
For Packer, of course, the word ‘retirement’ meant little more than disengagement from administrative and formal teaching commitments at Regent College. He continued to remain an active member of the College community, and used his new freedom to accept speaking engagements and writing commitments which he would previously have had difficulty accommodating in his calendar. Packer continued to act as a theological advisor and contributor to Christianity Today, and played a major role in developing and promoting the English Standard Version, a new translation of the Bible published in 2001. Packer was a Canadian citizen and continued to reside in Vancouver throughout his retirement.
Yet in his retirement, Packer took on a project which he designated his ‘last crusade’ – catechetics. As I reflected on Packer’s remarkable range of writings and his extensive lectures some years ago, I tried to find a single word that summarised his focus and achievement. I eventually settled on the word ‘theologiser’, meaning someone who actively does theology, and is concerned with the communication and enactment of Christian ideas. While Packer did not raise any objections to being labelled in this way, he suggested to me that there might be a better description – namely, that he was a ‘latter day catechist’. We need to take him seriously when he quipped in 2010 that ‘Packer’s last crusade’ would be a call for the Church to rediscover its lost art of catechesis.
So what led Packer to this conclusion? The word ‘catechesis’ is unfamiliar to many and is likely to leave some readers baffled. For Packer, however, it designates something that needs to be recovered and respected – that is, the church’s ministry of grounding new believers in the rudiments of Christianity. But catechesis is not simply about helping new believers to inhabit the landscape of the Christian faith; it is an act of discipleship on the part of mature believers, leading to the ‘growing of God’s people in the gospel and its implications for doctrine, devotion, duty, and delight’. Accordingly, the intended outcome of catechesis is therefore a body of ‘Christians who know their faith, can explain it to enquirers and sustain it against skeptics, and can put it to work in evangelism, church fellowship, and the many forms of service to God and man for which circumstances call’.
Back in 1977, Packer set out his basic understanding of the importance of catechesis in his work I Want to be a Christian. That understanding of its potential forms and structures remains largely unchanged; what has altered is his perception of its importance. It has always been important; given cultural changes in the West in the twenty-first century, it is now vital. Christians need to be helped to grow into their faith – not moving on from the gospel, but rather moving on within the gospel.
For Packer, catechesis is essential for a Church that is to survive and prosper in a Western cultural context that sees Christianity as strange, if not alien or hostile. As Packer realised when he wrestled with the Keswick holiness teaching back in the 1940s, ‘well-intentioned minds and hearts will repeatedly go off track’ unless they are guided and guarded by good theology. The formulation of Christian truth is inseparable from its application in Christian living. For Packer, a failure to catechise can only lead to ‘undernourished’ Christians, and hence to an emaciated church, which is incapable of witnessing effectively to its faith on the one hand, and enacting that faith on the other.
Packer is someone who knows what he believes, knows why he believes it, and knows what difference it makes to life. A theologian can only too easily become a narrow specialist in limited areas of doctrine; a catechist invites us to discover the ‘fulness of God’s truth and wisdom’, and presents a ‘full-scale account of Christian truth as a whole’. Perhaps most theologians were catechists, before the academic professionalism which emerged during the nineteenth century led to the fragmentation of theology, without any attempt to hold its constituent parts together. What we need, Packer suggests, are Christians who can hold this greater vision of the Christian faith together, and enable others to grasp it and grow into it. For this reason, Packer threw himself into the recovery of catechesis in the life of the Church, serving as theological editor to the document To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism, produced by the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).
Yet this ‘last crusade’ is not to be seen as a new development in Packer’s thinking, but rather as a specific refocusing of his lifelong quest for a biblically grounded theology that is applied to the life of individual Christians and to that of the Church as a whole. Packer has always recognised the importance of engaging specific contexts and questions; the new situation in which the churches find themselves in Western culture demands a recovery of the rich intellectual content of the gospel, not simply a rekindling of our enthusiasm for its themes.
Conclusion
On Tuesday, 19 July 2016, both Regent College and St John’s Church, Vancouver, marked Packer’s ninetieth birthday, a few days in advance of the event. It was a happy occasion, with generous tributes to Packer from friends and colleagues, enlivened still further by a jazz band. The highlight of the occasion was the announcement that a special edition of the Regent College journal Crux would honour Packer’s ongoing contributions to the Church and the academy. In November of that year, Packer’s contribution as a theologian, ecumenist and churchman was recognised at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Antonio, Texas.
By then, however, Packer was in decline. Macular degeneration had already developed in his left eye; over the Christmas season of 2015, it developed also in his right eye and he was no longer able to read or write. This marked the end of a remarkable writing and speaking ministry. Perhaps it was anticipated in some of Packer’s final writings, which openly (and often movingly) engaged questions of human weakness and ageing, and how these were to be interpreted theologically.
In those reflections, Packer recalled his former Headmaster at the Crypt School in Gloucester in the early 1940s – David Gwynn Williams, known slightly irreverently as ‘Bill’ to his students. He had enquired about Williams’ health some years earlier, and had been told that he was ‘very low’. Having lost any Christian faith, he was simply ‘waiting for the end’. Packer saw this loss of hope on the part of his former role model as pointing to one of the most remarkable characteristics of the gospel − its capacity to create and sustain a life of hope. ‘If the light of hope goes out, life shrinks to mere existence, something far less than life was meant to be.’ For Packer, such a robust hope is the key to living meaningfully in the final stages of life.
I met Packer for the last time in his Vancouver home on the afternoon of Thursday, 20 September 2018. I had been giving a series of lectures at Regent College, which ended that morning. I was due to travel back to London by the late evening flight from Vancouver, so had the afternoon free. Although Packer had been suffering from pneumonia, he was well enough for me to visit him at his home. We spent an enjoyable afternoon reminiscing about Oxford and reflecting on his long period in England, as well as talking theology. His mind was as sharp as ever, his eyes twinkling as he spoke of the great theological themes that had so animated him throughout his career. We hugged each other when the time came for me to leave. I think we both knew we would never see each other again.