5 The Theological Educationalist: Tyndale Hall, Bristol
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The Theological Educationalist: Tyndale Hall, Bristol
Bristol, a port city on the River Avon, is the most important population centre in England’s west country. Its port played an important role in developing trade between England and North America. The slave trade brought prosperity to the city, but at a high moral price. The city’s fortunes were given a further boost in the 1830s, when Isambard Kingdom Brunel developed the Great Western Railway, allowing direct travel between London and Bristol. The origins of higher education in the city can be traced back to the establishment of University College, Bristol, in 1876, which later became the University of Bristol in 1909.
The origins of Bristol Baptist College, the oldest institute of theological education in the city, can be traced back to the early eighteenth century. Methodism had significant roots in the region, following John Wesley’s preaching ministry in the city during the great Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. After the Second World War Wesley College, Bristol, was founded to prepare students for ministry in the Methodist Church. Yet despite its regional importance, the Church of England had no centres of theological education in the area until the 1920s.
By the 1930s, however, Bristol had gained three Anglican institutions of theological training, all linked with the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society (BCMS). The first to be established was the Bible Missionary Training College in 1925. In 1930, the BCMS established a second training college for women nearby, named Dalton House. In 1932, a serious disagreement arose between the Principal of the Bible Missionary Training College and the BCMS, which led to the Principal and his staff leaving and founding their own rival training establishment, to be known as ‘Clifton Theological College’. While there were initially fears that this would reduce the numbers of students enrolling at the Bible Missionary Training College, these proved unfounded. All three colleges remained viable after the Second World War, each having developed its own distinct identity.
Some prominent evangelical theological colleges in the Church of England were named after English Reformers – such as Wycliffe Hall, Oxford (named after John Wycliffe, the ‘morning star of the Reformation’) and Ridley Hall, Cambridge (named after Nicholas Ridley, a Protestant bishop martyred under Mary Tudor in 1555). In 1952, the Bible Missionary Training College decided to follow suit. It changed its name to ‘Tyndale Hall’, after the English Protestant Bible translator William Tyndale, who was martyred in Antwerp in 1536. This helped to highlight both the College’s connections with the west of England, where Tyndale had been born, and its commitment to biblical studies.
In January 1955, following a period of four months as a visiting lecturer, Packer finally joined the staff team at Tyndale Hall as its full-time residentiary Tutor in Christian Doctrine. There were only two other residentiary members of staff at this time: the Principal, J. Stafford Wright, who specialised in the Old Testament, and the Vice-Principal, John Wenham, noted for his clear teaching of New Testament Greek. Wenham’s textbook on this subject, published in 1966 by Cambridge University Press, became the standard text in England for a generation of theologians and ordinands. It was a relatively new staff team. Stafford Wright had only served as Principal since 1951, having previously been Senior Tutor at Oak Hill College from 1945 to 1950. Wenham was also a recent arrival, after serving as Vicar of St Nicholas’ Church, Durham, from 1948 to 1953.
Most of the students at Tyndale Hall at this time were Church of England ordination candidates, who would go on to ministries in the national Church after leaving the College. As Tyndale Hall was not accredited to award its own degrees, the College registered its students for recognised theological qualifications offered by other academic institutions, most notably the University of Bristol’s Bachelor of Arts in Theology, the University of London’s Bachelor of Divinity and the University of London’s Diploma in Theology. All the College’s ordinands were registered for the General Ordination Examination (GOE), which was the recognised professional qualification for ministry in the Church of England at this time. Tyndale Hall generally had a student body of about fifty-five to sixty during most of the period when Packer was on the teaching staff.
So what subjects did Packer teach? His main commitments were to teach early church history, the history and theology of the Reformation, biblical theology and a general doctrine course. One early outcome of this focus on the Reformation was the collaboration between Packer and Raymond Johnston to produce a new translation of Martin Luther’s 1525 reforming treatise The Bondage of the Will. This translation, which was published in January 1957, included a substantial theological introduction stressing the ways in which contemporary evangelicalism seemed to have lost track of many of the insights of the Reformation.
But perhaps Packer’s most significant contribution in his first period at Tyndale Hall was a critical review he published in 1955 in the Evangelical Quarterly of Steven Barabas’s So Great Salvation, a work promoting the Keswick holiness teaching of that period. As we noted earlier (see p. 11), Packer had come to the view that this rested on a theologically deficient understanding of our ability to make the critical decisions necessary to our sanctification. For Packer, we need good theology if we are to avoid the kind of loose thinking that arises from uncritical personal piety. His one-liner in that review stands out for its clarity and concision: ‘Pelagianism is the natural heresy of zealous Christians who are not interested in theology.’
What exactly did Packer mean by speaking of ‘Pelagianism’ in this way? The reference is to a debate which broke out in the Western Church in the early fifth century over a number of issues relating to grace and freedom – including the natural abilities of human beings to break free from the power of sin. The Keswick holiness teaching rested, in Packer’s estimation, on an incorrect and potentially misleading understanding of the ability of fallen human nature to remedy its own situation. We have no natural ability to discern and choose what God wants; only the grace of regeneration can free us from this bondage to sin. Holiness is not a human achievement, no matter how much it may demand human effort. It is a work, an achievement, of the Holy Spirit, who informs, prompts and energises our efforts.
Packer’s brutally incisive review alienated some and irritated others, mostly within the ‘Old Guard’ of British evangelicalism – including some older supporters of Tyndale Hall, who threatened to withdraw their support for the institution as a result of Packer’s criticisms. Nothing, however, seems to have come of these threats. Many younger evangelicals had been privately expressing their dissatisfaction with the pastoral and theological weaknesses of the Keswick teaching for some time, while the ‘Old Guard’ appeared unable to respond to the main points of Packer’s lucid and penetrating critique. Looking back, Packer’s review can be seen to mark a turning point in evangelical attitudes on this question.
‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (1958)
During his time at Tyndale Hall, Packer became heavily involved in the work of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, the British evangelical student organisation. On average, he would speak two or three times a term at university Christian Unions around England, and gained a considerable following in the evangelical student world. In 1957, Packer was asked to give an address to the Graduates’ Fellowship meeting at London with the title ‘Narrow Mind – or Narrow Way?’. This title reflected a growing climate of hostility towards evangelicalism within the English churches, partly as a result of the massive Billy Graham crusades in the North London borough of Harringay in the first three months of 1954. More than two million people attended these events, which generated renewed interest in Christianity and caused a surge of numbers of people wishing to explore Christian ministry. Yet some senior church figures now openly criticised evangelicalism as anti-intellectual, holding uncritical attitudes towards reading the Bible and core Christian beliefs.
The word ‘fundamentalism’ now came to be widely used to refer to evangelicalism in general and the views of Billy Graham in particular. In 1956 the Bishop of Durham, Michael Ramsey, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote an article with the alarmist title ‘The Menace of Fundamentalism’. He accused Billy Graham and his English followers of being lightweight and sectarian, using forms of evangelism that relied on emotional manipulation rather than reasoned argument. This, Ramsey declared, could only lead to ‘the alienation of thoughtful men and women from the Christian faith’. Graham’s formulaic phrase ‘The Bible says . . .’ was seen by his critics as simplistic and potentially misleading.
John R. W. Stott, who was then emerging as a significant spokesman for the growing evangelical constituency, responded to this clamour of criticism with a pamphlet entitled Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, which countered some of these attacks. He followed this through with a series of articles arguing for a judicious and thoughtful formulation of the traditional evangelical belief in the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture, helping to blunt perceptions that ‘fundamentalism’ was necessarily belligerent. But more needed to be done. Earlier generations of English evangelicals had not given enough attention to offering a theological account of the authority of the Bible. A pamphlet would not be enough; it would have to be a book – one that was both theologically informed and intellectually accessible.
Those were Packer’s views as he reflected on what he should do with the 7,000-word text of the lecture he had delivered at the Graduates’ Fellowship meeting in London. He could publish it as a pamphlet yet every question he answered seemed to raise new questions, which simply could not be addressed in such a short space. Ronald Inchley, then Publishing Director of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, expressed an interest in the work, and offered to consider it for publication. Inchley was clearly expecting Packer to present him with a 6,000-word text suitable for publication as a pamphlet. The package that eventually arrived on his desk in 1957, however, was a 55,000-word book.
Inchley realised that he had been presented with a challenge that was actually an opportunity. Up to that point, Inter-Varsity Fellowship had not published paperbacks. However, these were becoming increasingly popular in the secular marketplace. Penguin and Pan launched first-edition softbacks for the first time in the late 1950s. Inchley felt that the moment was right for Inter-Varsity Fellowship to do the same, and published six titles in paperback simultaneously in 1958 as ‘IVF Pocket Books’. These included John Stott’s Basic Christianity, which went on to sell more than a million copies, and Packer’s ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God. Both titles became landmarks in British evangelical circles, and both also achieved significant success in North America.
The importance of Packer’s book lies in several of its features. For a start, it was clearly written, and engaged not only the attention of its readers but also the questions of the moment. Furthermore, Packer provided a carefully reasoned defence of an evangelical understanding of the authority of the Bible, rather than simply asserting it. While he drew on classic Protestant resources – particularly the works of the Protestant reformer John Calvin and the Princeton theologian Benjamin B. Warfield – Packer was careful to address contemporary questions about the place of the Bible, particularly those raised by A. G. Hebert in his 1957 book Fundamentalism and the Church of God.
Packer had already chosen a title for his book: The Faith Once Delivered. Inchley, however, felt a more provocative title was needed, signalling the work’s significance for the controversies of the day. Packer’s sustained critique of Hebert’s book led Inchley to suggest the title ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God. The deliberate use of quotation marks around the word ‘fundamentalism’ was intended to call into question the legitimacy of using what was seen as a disparaging and inappropriate term to refer to mainline evangelicalism. As Packer saw it, ‘fundamentalism’ was a theological modernist’s deliberately provocative and pejorative way of referring to what he saw as the evangelical ‘maintenance, in opposition to modernism, of traditional orthodox beliefs’.
Packer’s extended argument in this work went beyond the authority of the Bible to touch on wider issues – such as how the Bible is to be presented in order to communicate effectively with modern culture: ‘Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms. Our business is to interpret and criticize modern thought by the gospel, not vice versa.’ Packer was also careful to note that asserting the authority of the Bible does not predetermine how the Bible is to be interpreted, nor does it ‘flatten’ the various distinctive literary genres found in it.
Packer’s book was an important landmark in his career. Up to that point, he had been seen primarily as an advocate of Puritan theology and spirituality, with an expertise in John Owen and Richard Baxter. While both these writers are noted in ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God, they play only a small part in its argument. The two writers who play the most significant role in shaping Packer’s thesis are John Calvin and Benjamin B. Warfield. Packer here emerges as a scholar capable of developing a critical yet constructive account of a subject important to all evangelicals, rather than the somewhat smaller group who particularly admired the Puritans.
This, I must emphasise, is about a change in the way in which Packer was perceived. Packer did not suddenly reinvent himself as a mainstream evangelical theologian, rooted in the Reformed tradition, having hitherto lived and moved within a Puritan theological subculture. He did indeed have a particular liking and respect for the Puritans, but saw this as enriching and informing, not displacing, his evangelical convictions. Packer offered ‘a constructive re-statement of evangelical principles’, which both defended mainstream evangelicals against the charge of being ‘fundamentalists’, while at the same time showing evangelicals that they did not need to be fundamentalists in order to affirm and enact the authority of the Bible.
But we must here return to Packer’s admiration for the Puritans, which led him to intervene in a debate that began to cause anxiety to many evangelicals in the late 1950s. Many were grateful to Billy Graham for his evangelistic ministry in England in the first part of that decade; yet some awkward theological questions were raised, and not entirely resolved, by that ministry. To understand these concerns, consider this characteristic passage from Graham’s How to be Born Again:
God will not force His way into your life. The Holy Spirit will do everything possible to disturb you, draw you, love you − but finally it is your personal decision . . . He gave the Holy Spirit to convict you of your need. He gives the Holy Spirit to draw you to the cross, but even after all of this, it is your decision whether to accept God’s free pardon or to continue in your lost condition.
It was a powerful and popular message. Nevertheless, it left unanswered the question of the nature and extent of God’s involvement in human conversion, presenting it as a purely human decision whether to accept or decline God’s pardon. How can a sinful human being either recognise the need to come to God, or break free from the power of sin to receive God?
This, it must be said, is still a topic for debate among Christians, and it is not something that can be fully addressed here. There have been, and remain, important divergences of opinion within Christianity over this matter. Billy Graham’s evangelistic rhetoric raised particular issues for the Reformed theological tradition, which places an emphasis upon God’s initiative and sovereignty in all spheres, including conversion. Packer turned to deal with these in his second book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (1961), which is now seen as a classic study on the relationship between God’s sovereignty and the necessity of evangelism. Once more, we find him setting out a critical yet constructive theological proposal, aimed at resolving some tensions and difficulties that were emerging within student Christian circles in the mid-1950s. Let’s look more closely at this book and its context.
Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (1961)
Packer began to engage the question of evangelism seriously in 1955, when he delivered a paper on ‘Puritan Evangelism’. There were, Packer suggested, several different understandings of evangelism, such as the approach developed by the American Charles G. Finney in the 1820s which took the form of an ‘intensive evangelistic campaign’ and the ‘anxious seat’ – a front pew that was left vacant so that those who felt moved by the evangelistic address could come forward for counselling. ‘Finney regarded evangelistic preaching as a battle of wills between himself and his hearers, in which it was his responsibility to bring them to breaking point.’
For Packer, Finney’s approach to evangelism is essentially Pelagian: a battle to win people over to the Christian faith by force of argument. The grace of God plays no role in Finney’s approach. Earlier, I noted how Packer suspected the Keswick holiness teaching of ultimately resting on a Pelagian view of human nature; by 1955, he had also come to share Benjamin B. Warfield’s view that aggressive evangelistic campaigns such as Finney’s were likewise essentially based on a Pelagian foundation. Packer was careful to point out that this did not imply that all evangelists were Pelagians; his concern was to note this as a potential danger.
The second approach to evangelism noted by Packer is that of the Puritans. This does not involve demands for an immediate decision for Christ, but rather takes the form of a sustained preaching of the gospel over an extended period of time. ‘Preachers are to declare God’s mind as set forth in the texts they expound, to show the way of salvation, to exhort the unconverted to learn the law, to meditate on the Word, to humble themselves, to pray that God will show them their sins, and enable them to come to Christ.’ Packer points out that Puritans do not think in terms of specifically evangelistic forms of preaching, but rather see evangelism as an integral element of the preacher’s task: ‘Evangelistic preaching is not a special kind of preaching, with its own distinctive technique. It is a part of the ordinary public ministry of God’s Word.’
Packer set out his concerns about some influential evangelical approaches to evangelism in his 1959 lecture ‘The Puritan View of Preaching the Gospel’, delivered on 15 December at Westminster Chapel. Although neither Charles Finney nor Billy Graham are mentioned in this lecture, Packer expressed concern that, while ‘psychological pressures, skilfully handled, may produce the outward form of “decision”, they cannot bring about regeneration and a change of heart’. Approaches to evangelism which insist on an immediate response to the gospel can be counter-productive:
Evangelism must rather be conceived as a long-term enterprise of patient teaching and instruction, in which God’s servants seek simply to be faithful in delivering the gospel message and applying it to human lives, and leave it to God’s Spirit to draw men to faith through this message in His own way and at His own speed.
Yet Packer also noted an emerging and a worrying trend. Perhaps reacting against the theological unsophistication of Billy Graham, some were now arguing that the central Reformed doctrine that faith and repentance were given only to the elect was fundamentally incompatible with the public proclamation of the gospel. This became a particular issue in evangelical student circles in London in 1959, when the London Inter-Faculty Christian Union (LIFCU) set about planning a mission. Such events in the past had been very successful. In 1947, the LIFCU organised 170 student meetings across London, typically with audiences of between five and six hundred. But it soon became clear that there were now significant differences within the leadership of the LIFCU over whether it should encourage or organise any form of evangelism. Some held that no theological justification could be offered for vigorous evangelistic activity, or for making evangelistic appeals to the audience. Others believed it was unthinkable that there should not be some form of appeal.
Given his high profile in student circles, Packer was invited to speak at a pre-mission meeting arranged for 24 October 1959 at Westminster Chapel, to address and attempt to resolve the disputes involved. It was clear to Packer that this issue would not go away and needed a thorough airing. He therefore expanded his short talk into the book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. Realising that the issue of evangelism was of especial importance in student circles, he again arranged for the work to be published by the Inter-Varsity Fellowship. (It was not until 1969 that Inchley launched InterVarsity Press as the rebranded IVF publishing operation.)
The book’s core argument is easily summarised. The Bible’s teaching relating to the book’s core theme may be stated as follows: human beings are responsible creatures, and God is sovereign. Packer has no difficulty in assembling an arsenal of biblical texts in support of these two statements. The question is how they are to be held together when they appear to be in tension with each other, if not mutually contradictory. We assume that divine sovereignty and human responsibility are incompatible; in fact, this reflects our limited grasp of these truths, and our excessive reliance on the standards of human wisdom. Packer asks us to make it ‘our business to believe both these doctrines with all our might, and to keep both constantly before us for the guidance and government of our lives’.
Packer frames this approach by asserting that simultaneously affirming divine sovereignty and human responsibility represents an ‘antinomy’ – that is to say, ‘an appearance of contradiction between conclusions which seem equally logical, reasonable or necessary’. As he notes, this causes us rational discomfort since ‘To our finite minds this is inexplicable.’ So why does this perception of inconsistency arise? Packer notes four factors that create difficulties for us at this point: an unhelpful intrusion of rationalistic speculations; an understandable but misplaced passion for systematic consistency; a reluctance to acknowledge the existence of mystery and allow that God is wiser than we are; and the improper imposition of human logic on the interpretation of the Bible.
Packer rightly notes that we like to tie up everything into ‘neat intellectual parcels’, with all appearance of mystery dispelled and no loose ends dangling at any point. For this reason, we are often tempted to eliminate antinomies from our minds by questionable and misguided means – such as suppressing or abandoning one truth in the supposed interests of the other, and for the sake of a neater and tidier theology. ‘What should one do, then, with an antinomy? Accept it for what it is, and learn to live with it.’
Packer’s resolution of this tension − learning to live with these two fundamental principles, affirming both and holding them together in our reflections and actions − means we should refuse to regard the apparent inconsistency as real, and must attribute an appearance of contradiction to the deficiency of our own understanding. We should not think of the two principles as rival alternatives, but as being complementary to each other in a way that we cannot fully understand. Christians are called to think and live within the creative tension of these two core affirmations, holding them together in a balanced unity and exploring how they are to be applied. Packer is thus critical of those who give an excessive – and occasionally exclusive – emphasis to human responsibility, and others who give too much weight to divine sovereignty.
As an example of the second error, Packer reminds his readers of the response of some of the audience to William Carey’s suggestion in 1786 that missionaries should be sent out to unevangelised areas of the world. ‘Sit down, young man, when God is pleased to convert the heathen, he will do it without your help or mine!’ As Packer noted, a misplaced zeal to glorify God and to acknowledge his sovereign grace can all too easily lead us to lose sight of the Church’s responsibility to evangelise.
For Packer, it is our duty to proclaim salvation, while never losing sight of the fact that it is God who saves: ‘Our evangelistic work is the instrument that he uses for this purpose, but the power that saves is not in the instrument: it is in the hand of the One who uses the instrument.’ His insistence that we hold together human responsibility and divine sovereignty recognises that these two principles often seem to pull in opposite directions. For Packer, if we cannot entirely resolve that tension, we can at least agree to live with and work within its framework.
Packer also made a point that many noted with interest. The New Testament, he suggested, did not lay down precise stipulations on how best to go about evangelistic preaching, or developing an evangelistic ministry.
The best method of evangelism is the one which serves the gospel most completely . . . which bears the clearest witness to the divine origin of the message . . . which makes possible the most full and thorough explanation of the good news of Christ and his cross . . . which most effectively engages the minds of those to whom witness is borne . . . What that best method is in each case, you and I have to find out for ourselves.
Rather than lay down a normative template, Packer set out some guidelines that would enable entrepreneurial ministers to develop and share their own methods, adapted to their own gifts and situations.
Moving On
Packer was clearly a valued and respected member of the teaching staff of Tyndale Hall. When I was researching my biography of Packer back in the 1990s, I got in touch with many of his students from Tyndale, who shared their memories of Packer’s approach to teaching theology and how it had affected their ministry and preaching. One of the things they particularly treasured about Packer was his willingness to talk about theology over the college breakfast table. The students would ask him about the great theological questions of the day – the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom, to give one obvious example. Packer did not give them pre-packaged answers; instead, he showed his theological working. In effect, Packer taught them how to theologise – how to do theology, rather than simply presenting them with the outcomes of that process. It was a rare gift, and one that Packer would consolidate over his long career as a teacher.
But although Packer was happy at Tyndale Hall, his growing reputation as an informed, constructive and critical exponent of evangelicalism was beginning to open up new horizons for him. The publication of his two books secured him a significant national and international profile. He was clearly marked for a position of intellectual leadership. But where? And what form might this take?
We shall pick up our narrative shortly. Once more, however, we need to pause as we survey Packer’s career to consider his thoughts about the place of the Bible in Christian life and thought. Being such a major theme of Packer’s ministry, it demands further reflection and exploration.