6 The Bible: Authority, Interpretation and Translation
6
The Bible: Authority, Interpretation and Translation
During his time as tutor in doctrine at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, Packer gained a reputation as a careful and thoughtful theologian who tried to weave together the Bible and Christian theology, refusing to see them as separate and non-interacting compartments of the Christian mind. He has maintained this position throughout his career. The large archive of recordings of Packer’s presentations at Regent College, Vancouver, includes a rich array of items on systematic theology, spirituality and biblical exposition. For example, in the summer of 2016 he offered two courses of lectures at the Regent College summer school: one on the Anglican heritage; the other on Paul’s Letter to the Colossians. There is always a risk that systematic theology becomes independent of the Bible. Packer’s principled attentiveness towards the biblical text is a clear theological virtue for evangelical writers and preachers.
I benefited from his wisdom in the early 1990s, when I served as general editor of the NIV Thematic Study Bible. This work set out to help its readers identify the great themes that criss-cross the books of the Bible, as an aid to preaching and personal devotion. It was a substantial work and needed the advice of someone who knew the biblical texts well and recognised the importance in bringing out the Bible’s theological and spiritual unity. Packer agreed to act as a consultant editor to help forge and consolidate the vision for the project. It was obvious that this was something close to his heart, and the whole project was enriched by his advice and encouragement.
Packer also played a significant role in developing the English Standard Version, a new translation of the Bible published in 2001. Like any good Protestant writer, Packer insisted that the Bible must be understood by its readers. Every Christian ought to have access to the text of the Bible, even if they were unfamiliar with the chief biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew. Packer himself preferred more literal translations of the biblical text, such as the English Standard Version, aware that paraphrases tended to conceal genuine issues of interpretation.
How, then, does Packer integrate the Bible into his vision of Christian life and thought? One of the first publishing projects with which Packer became involved was writing a series of articles for the New Bible Dictionary. This major work traced its origins back to a proposal of 1953, which noted the need for a new Bible ‘dictionary and/or encyclopaedia’. Initially, the publishing division of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship in London considered updating an existing American edition, before deciding that a completely new work was required. James D. Douglas (Editor-at-Large for Christianity Today) was duly appointed as editor, with F. F. Bruce (Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester), R. V. G. Tasker (Professor of New Testament Exegesis at King’s College London), D. J. Wiseman (Professor of Assyriology at the University of London), and Packer as consultant editors.
Packer was the least experienced of the team of editors, but quickly proved his worth. It was a major undertaking, both in terms of planning the structure of the project and commissioning the articles themselves. The work was not published until 1962, when it established itself as a major resource. Packer himself contributed eighteen articles on topics such as ‘Authority’, ‘Conversion’, ‘Earnest’, ‘Election’, ‘Incarnation’, ‘Inspiration’, ‘Predestination’ and ‘Revelation’.
More than fifty years later, Packer was again involved in the production of detailed studies of aspects of the Bible. As theological editor of the 2,750-page English Standard Version Study Bible (2008), he was responsible for a series of detailed annotations to the biblical text, helping readers understand the meaning of specific passages. Yet this attention to detail never distracted Packer from something more important – seeing the ‘bigger picture’, of which these individual details were a part. In 2018, Packer set out some principles which he himself found helpful in reading the Bible and grasping its full significance.
Most importantly, get the big picture. Don’t worry too much at first about specific sentences you don’t quite understand. The details fit when you’ve got the big picture. That is my first and fundamental exhortation with regard to Bible reading and study.
Packer here sets out a way of reading Scripture which respects the unique place of the Bible, while at the same time helping us understand the role of theology in distilling and safeguarding its central themes.
Packer’s basic point is simple: enjoy looking at the trees – but make sure you can see the forest as well. Packer put this well in his 2008 introduction to ‘Reading the Bible Theologically’ in the English Standard Version Study Bible: ‘Scripture is no ragbag of religious bits and pieces, unrelated to each other; rather, it is a tapestry in which all the complexities of the weave display a single pattern of judgment and mercy, promise and fulfilment.’
This has been a constant theme of Packer’s writings since 1954. Theology, he pointed out in one of his earliest articles, is a unitary discipline, which is grounded in and expresses the fundamental unity of Scripture as a whole. The details of individual biblical passages and themes matter – but so does the bigger picture, which positions each of these details in proper context and allows its overall significance to be better appreciated.
So how is this ‘big picture’ developed and applied? Although Packer uses several frameworks to explore this question, one of his earliest focuses on the journey from biblical exegesis to theological synthesis and finally to practical application. The first stage is exegesis. Packer understands this as ‘bringing out of the text’ – not reading into the text! – all that it contains of ‘the whole expressed mind’ of the biblical writer. This leads into synthesis – a ‘process of gathering up, and surveying in historically integrated form, the fruits of exegesis’. And finally, this in turn leads to application, in which the preacher asks what God might say and do to us, given what God said and did in the past.
So important is this theme of the theological synthesis of Scripture to Packer that he explores and expounds it at multiple points in his works. Consider, for example, this particularly lucid exploration from a 1991 article considering the relation of theology and spirituality:
The first task is exegetical. Treating the biblical material as God’s own didactic witness to himself, given in the form of the didactic witness to him of the Bible writers, we are to draw from the canonical text everything we can find relating to the Creator, and receive it as pure truth from God’s own mouth . . . The second task . . . is synthetic. All the data about God that exegesis has established must be brought together in a single coherent scheme, just as a historian schematizes all his facts into a single flowing narrative.
Packer’s point is that biblical threads need to be woven together to disclose and display a theological pattern; that is to say, according to Packer, a way of reading the Bible ‘with a focus on God’. Back in 1985, Packer found a neat way of expressing this approach: he was ‘first and foremost a theological exegete’.
Precisely what does Packer mean by this? And how does he understand the relation of theology and the Bible? Many have expressed concern that the academic discipline of systematic theology often seems to proceed without any sense of connection with, or dependence upon, biblical texts. Packer, however, sees a seamless and organic connection between the practice of theologising – an active verbal form that he frequently prefers over the static noun ‘theology’ – and the reading of Scripture.
I can schematize my use of the Bible in theologizing as follows. I make use of the Bible (1) in personal devotion, (2) in preaching and pastoral ministry, (3) in academic theological work. Use (3) underlies use (2) and is fed by use (1). I approach the Bible in all three connections as the communication of doctrine from God; as the instrument of Jesus Christ’s personal authority over Christians (which is part of what I mean in calling it canonical); as the criterion of truth and error regarding God and godliness; as wisdom for the ordering of life and food for spiritual growth.
Packer’s approach (which he finds especially in the writings of John Calvin and John Owen) affirms the central importance of the Christian Bible, while insisting on the need to take intellectual trouble to ensure that both preaching and theology present an integrated, not fragmented, account of the larger vision of reality that lies within the biblical texts – ‘a total, integrated view built out of biblical material’. And such an ‘integrated view’ serves both to maintain Christian identity and act as a criticism of prevailing – yet ultimately shifting – secular norms which can only too easily become incorporated into Christian thinking. It is, Packer warns, facile to convert ‘the study of sacred theology into a venture in secular ideology’. Like C. S. Lewis, Packer expresses concern about an ‘intellectual idolatry which absolutizes the axioms of contemporary culture’.
Yet ‘theological exegesis’ is a process that ultimately rests on a theological understanding of the Bible. As we saw when considering ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God in the previous chapter, Packer was also concerned to establish a solid theological foundation for understanding the distinct identity and purpose of the Bible. In what way was the Bible to be distinguished from other religious books? What was different about it? Packer has consistently contended that the Bible is to be seen as inspired by God, using individual human authors to bear witness to the nature and purpose of God.
All Scripture is witness to God, given by divinely illuminated human writers, and all Scripture is God witnessing to himself in and through their words. The way into the mind of God is through the expressed mind of these human writers, so the reader of the Bible looks for that characteristic first. But the text must be read, or reread, as God’s own self-revelatory instruction, given in the form of this human testimony.
Linked with this is Packer’s insistence on the need for the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of the Bible. Noting that the term ‘illumination’ is often used to refer to this aspect of the work of the Spirit, Packer comments that such illumination ‘is not a giving of new revelation, but a work within us that enables us to grasp and to love the revelation that is there before us in the biblical text as heard and read, and as explained by teachers and writers’. But Packer recognises that discussions of biblical interpretation and application are often difficult, and that disputes about how to interpret biblical passages are neither resolved nor marginalised by an appeal to the notion of biblical infallibility.
Questions of inerrancy and interpretation must be kept separate. Acknowledging that whatever biblical writers communicate on any subject is God-given truth does not commit you in advance to any one method or school of interpretation, nor to any one way of relating Scripture to science, nor to any one set of proposed harmonizations of inconsistent-looking texts.
Evangelicals, Packer comments, sometimes let themselves speak ‘as if everything immediately becomes plain and obvious for believers in biblical inerrancy, to such an extent that uncertainties about interpretation never arise for them’.
One of the many criticisms often directed against evangelical interpretations of the Bible is that they tend to be highly individualist readings – what Packer himself described as a ‘Lone Ranger’ approach, adopted by people who have ‘proudly or impatiently’ turned their backs on the Church and their heritage. While it is clearly important to ground biblical truth in the lives of individuals, there is a danger that individual perspectives and judgements become theologically determinative. This is the way I see things – so this is how things really are.
What, then, can be done about this? Packer stresses the importance of ‘keeping regular company with yesterday’s great teachers’, who can help us discern wisdom that might otherwise be denied to us, and challenge us about our own skewed or biased readings of the Bible. He offers a conceptual framework which allows us to see writers like Luther, Calvin and Jonathan Edwards as helpful in informing and nourishing our faith, without displacing or undermining the Bible itself. To use Packer’s own words, writers like Edwards can play a ministerial, not a magisterial, role in our theologising. The Puritans’ reading of the Bible, and the way in which they applied it, can help us today, yet without disconnecting or distancing us from Scripture itself. The Christian past is like a quarry; we are invited to explore, appropriate and apply its riches, critically but also positively. We can even learn from past mistakes about the interpretation of the Bible – mistakes that are sometimes made for the best of reasons.
Packer’s overall vision thus holds together the core importance of the Bible itself and the long Christian process of engaging, understanding and applying the Bible. The way in which others have ‘synthesised’ the core themes of the Bible can remain valuable to us today, so long as we exercise prudence and caution in assessing these. Figures of wisdom from the past can help us with biblical exegesis, with weaving together biblical threads into a theological tapestry, and with applying this theological synthesis to the basis of living. We shall explore these themes further later in this volume.
We now rejoin our narrative of Packer’s life, as he reflected on what opportunities for service and ministry might lie beyond his work at Tyndale Hall, Bristol.