2 Old Books and Deep Wisdom: The Importance of the Christian Past
2
Old Books and Deep Wisdom: The Importance of the Christian Past
Packer’s 1945 discovery of the personal spiritual value of the writings of John Owen clearly came as a surprise to him. Confronted with an inadequate twentieth-century response to an age-old problem, his initial instinct might have been to look around for another recent solution that seemed more palatable or workable. Yet Packer’s accidental encounter with the Christian past helped him to acknowledge that most questions arising from Christian faith have been engaged with before. So might some of those classic responses remain helpful today, capable of guiding and informing our own thinking?
Packer certainly thought so. Back in the 1970s, when I was developing a research project that focused on theological writers of the Middle Ages, I came to know many of Oxford’s medievalists, who kindly offered me advice and guidance as I began to research the field. Many of these scholars, I noticed, seemed to be more at home in the Middle Ages than in 1970s’ Britain. To all intents and purposes, they found in their scholarship a means of escape from modern reality, allowing them to inhabit a more congenial parallel universe. I never felt like that in the late 1990s when I spent time with Packer in his Vancouver office. The bookshelves were filled with classic works of theology and spirituality, most dating from the seventeenth century; yet Packer saw these as a way of resourcing and enhancing his engagement with the questions and concerns of the 1990s.
Reading Owen as a student revealed to Packer the rich theological legacy of the past. Today’s Christians can, he came to appreciate, learn from those who have made the journey of faith before us. C. S. Lewis made much the same discovery, and frequently wrote about the importance of the past to the life of faith and the tasks of theology. Perhaps his best discussion of the issue is found in Lewis’s introductory preface to one of the most influential works of Christian theology, dating back to the fourth century – Athanasius of Alexandria’s treatise on the incarnation. For Lewis, this represents a classic discussion of the theme, which transcends the barriers of culture and history. It has become a central reference point for contemporary discussion, precisely because it sets out the issues so well and incisively.
Lewis began to read Christian classics as a result of his interests in English literature, and soon realised that books become classics for a reason – namely, that people continue to find in them something of value and excellence, to which they return again and again. Classic writers help us to break free from our naive assumption that the most recent is the best, that somehow the wisdom of the past is discredited or eclipsed by more contemporary writing. More recent books are in the process of being assessed; some will stand the test of time, and others will not. The greatest challenge a book faces is perhaps not how it is judged today, but how it will be judged a generation from now. Will it be valued? Will it be remembered at all?
Christian classics – such as Athanasius’ treatise On the Incarnation or Augustine’s Confessions – possess the ability to tether us to our collective past, offering us resources that not only inform us about our faith but also reveal the blind spots of our own chronological parochialism. They anchor us to a continuous tradition of reflection, allowing us to see the great questions and problems of our own time and culture through the eyes of others. As Lewis observed in his own introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, we need to ‘keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books’. One of the chief values of old literature lies in its ability to challenge some of the assumptions that we take for granted as self-evidently correct, but which are actually culturally situated, and will one day seem strange to future generations.
Packer had great respect for Lewis, whom he saw as ‘a fellow-Oxonian, a fellow-Greats man, and a fellow-Anglican, whose clarity of mental and moral insight, both as a human being and as a Christian, continues to astound me the more I read and re-read him’. Like Lewis, although with his own distinct focus, Packer maintained and developed this strategy of critical appropriation and retrieval throughout his career, seeing himself as someone who garnered riches from the pasturelands of the past in order to make them available, intelligible and accessible to a new readership today. Here is how he described his own approach to theology 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.
For Packer, ‘keeping regular company with yesterday’s great teachers’ helps us to open our eyes to wisdom that might otherwise be denied to us.
As Packer rightly saw, this has important implications for how we approach historical theology. In studying the past, we can think of ourselves as stepping into the laboratory of faith, seeing how ideas were developed and explored, and checked out against their biblical moorings, their apologetic potential and their capacity to deepen our love for God – to mention just three criteria, to which more could be easily added.
This kind of respect for classics is not a form of antiquarianism, a nostalgia for a bygone age which values the past because it is old, or because it diverges so much from today’s patterns of thought and value. Not every old book is a classic. What makes a book special is the quality of its vision of life, its capacity to help us grasp the grace of God and the love of Christ, or to challenge our own tendency to limit the gospel to what we can understand. And when we find such a book, we want to hold on to it, and share its wisdom and vision. That’s why Packer typed out a twenty-page précis of Owen’s arguments during his third year at Oxford. He wanted to capture Owen’s vision of the Christian life and share it with others. ‘Look what I have found! Does this help you as much as it has helped me?’
The profound theological heritage of the past can help us expand our vision of Christian truth by allowing us to see the gospel with a new awareness, and challenging our historical and cultural limitations. Lewis spoke of the capacity of literature to open our eyes to a richer vision of reality in a way that ‘heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality’.
My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others . . . In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.
Engaging with the wisdom of the past, Lewis suggests, enables us ‘to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own’. Packer transposed this general principle into a tool for the fresh appreciation and application of the Puritan legacy.
Now some will rightly raise a concern about Lewis’s approach – and hence also with Packer’s. Many will be sympathetic to their call to retrieve the legacies of the past, and allow these to enrich the life and thought of the present. Yet surely we need help here? How can we be certain that we have understood a past thinker, such as John Owen, for example? How can we work out which aspects of his thought can be applied to the present, and in what way? We clearly need an interpreter – someone who knows about Owen and can point us to the ways in which his ideas connect up with today’s challenges and opportunities. This person needs to be rooted in both past and present in order to construct an interpretative bridge between the resources of the one and the needs of the other.
In what must be seen as a moment of theological discernment and vocational clarification, Packer realised that he could become such a bridge-builder, filtering, interpreting and applying the wisdom of the past to the issues of the present. As Packer explained to me in our conversations of the late 1990s, this was what he believed God might be calling him to do. One of the reasons that Packer wanted to enter ministry in the Church of England was to reinvigorate that ministry through rediscovering its historical roots in the thought of the European Reformation – especially Martin Luther and John Calvin – as well as the Puritan writers of the seventeenth century. Even as a student, Packer could see ways in which Owen and other thinkers of the past could enliven the ministry and preaching of today’s churches. He felt he was called to exercise such a ministry of retrieval and reappropriation.
Looking back over Packer’s long career, it is now easy to see how this thread of thought is woven into most of his major publications. It is a central theme in the work for which he is best known – Knowing God (1973). At a more theological level, it plays an important part in Packer’s development of the idea of the ‘Great Tradition’ in which past theological wisdom continues to nourish, inform and challenge today’s churches, theologians and preachers. This does not entail believing that the old is necessarily the best, nor does it encourage a nostalgic retreat into the past; it is rather about allowing the past to challenge the present, in the expectation that this can only lead to the deepening and strengthening of the witness of the Church.
What theoretical frameworks, then, might help us understand this process of dialogue with the wisdom of the believing past? Up to about 1980, Packer seems to have developed his approach without drawing explicitly on any particular theory of interpretation. However, in 1980, a rising British evangelical scholar published a work exploring how the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s theory of the ‘fusion of the horizons’ of a past text and present interpreter could help with the interpretation of the New Testament. Anthony Thiselton’s The Two Horizons was widely read and used by evangelicals; both John Stott and Packer told me how valuable they had found the work in stimulating their ministries. Stott found The Two Horizons helpful in avoiding ‘the opposite pitfalls of unfaithfulness and irrelevance, and be able to speak God’s Word to God’s world with effectiveness today’.For Packer, the work helped him with his exegesis of the New Testament – but also offered an intellectual framework which affirmed the importance and legitimacy of what he was already doing with his notion of the ‘Great Tradition’.
What this means is that as the student questions the text he becomes aware that the text is also questioning him, showing him an alternative to what he took for granted, forcing him to rethink at fundamental levels and make fresh decisions as to how he will act henceforth, now that he has realized that some do, and he himself could, approach things differently.
For Packer, studying the Christian past – as in, for example, the writings of John Owen – forces us to acknowledge that there are alternatives to what we take for granted, and that we could review the way in which we approach things. Packer’s awareness of the enriching potential of the Christian past shaped his ideas about how best to teach theology – as we see, for instance, in his lectures at Regent College, Vancouver, during the 1980s and 1990s. Packer offers an excellent example of a ‘theology of retrieval’, which provides important insights into how Christians today can reappropriate the past without being imprisoned by it.
To read Packer is to see these ideas in action. His inspiration for establishing the Puritan Studies Conference lay in his conviction that the Puritans had wrestled with some of the great questions of Christian living back in the seventeenth century – and that their concerns could easily be connected up with today’s problems. His first book, ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (1958), retrieved concepts developed by John Calvin in the sixteenth century and put them to use in the controversies of Packer’s time, while his classic, Knowing God (1973), draws extensively on Calvin’s ideas about what it means to ‘know God’, allowing them to penetrate and inform later Christian reflections on the life of faith. Historical texts, then, could play a vital part in fashioning today’s Christian formation and, as we shall see (pp. 34−8), Packer developed a theological framework for ensuring that modern Christians could benefit from the deep wisdom of the Christian past without becoming trapped in a bygone era.
We must now resume our account of Packer’s career, to understand how he began to think of himself as a theological educationalist, and then go on to achieve this goal.