9. J. I. Packer on Theology and Spirituality
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J. I. Packer on Theology and Spirituality
In this chapter, I would like to reflect on the significance of J. I. Packer—“Jim” to his friends—for Christian discipleship. Let me begin with an obvious question. Some twenty years ago, I wrote a theological biography of Packer. So why did I do that? Indeed, why do I keep on writing theological biographies? After all, I recently wrote major intellectual biographies of C. S. Lewis (2013) and the neglected Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (2014). Well, let me tell you why.
All too often, we think of theology simply in terms of abstract ideas and of theologians simply as repositories of those ideas—people who carry disembodied ideas around in their heads and are capable of dispensing them on demand. By writing a theological biography, I find I am able to explore how the core ideas of Christianity change people, by becoming part of their lives. In other words, it helps me appreciate and illuminate the capacity of Christianity to transform lives—including the way we think. In Romans 12, Paul therefore urges his readers not to be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewal of their minds.
As I talked to Packer back in the 1990s about his theological development and followed through the exposition and exploration of those ideas in his many writings, I came to realize how theology is about reflective inhabitation of the Christian faith. I see that understanding of theology in Packer himself and in the Puritan writers Packer rightly loves and admires so much. So the first point I want to make is simply this: Packer demonstrates how theology, when it is well done and when it is properly done, changes lives. It is not simply about the mere adjustment of our ideas; it is about the renewal of our minds and, subsequently, the redirection and reinvigoration of our lives.
Let me explore a few themes that illuminate Packer’s importance for theology in general. One of Packer’s most characteristic emphases is our need for theology to keep a check on the kind of loose thinking that arises from an uncritical personal piety. Now I think that such piety is on the whole a good thing. I adore Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and don’t feel in the least embarrassed to speak in such explicitly relational terms about Christ. But there is a danger here—a danger to which Packer is acutely alert. Personal piety can easily degenerate into uncritical thinking about faith, leading us into all kinds of inadequate judgments. Packer brought this out clearly in one of his earliest published writings—a 1955 review, published in the Evangelical Quarterly, of a leading work promoting the Keswick holiness teaching of that period. Listen to this theological one-liner from that review: “Pelagianism is the natural heresy of zealous Christians who are not interested in theology.”
You can’t help but admire the theological concision and insight of that sentence. As his colleagues at Regent College Vancouver often quip, “Packer by name, Packer by nature!” One of Packer’s great strengths is his capacity to condense—to offer succinct summaries of often complex and highly nuanced topics. He locates the fundamental problem as lying in a misdirected enthusiasm for personal devotion, which is inattentive to the evangelical realities of human nature on the one hand and to the transformative power of God’s grace on the other.
That’s why it’s important to think theologically. When I was writing my biography of Packer back in the 1990s, I got in touch with many of his students from the late 1950s at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, which was then a theological college of the Church of England. They remembered Packer well. And one of the things they treasured about him was his willingness to talk about theology over the college breakfast table. They would ask him about the great theological questions of the day—the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom, to give one obvious example. What they valued was the style of Packer’s replies. He did not give them prepackaged answers; he showed his theological working. As one of them told me, Packer taught them how to theologize—to develop their own theological frameworks, not simply to parrot other people’s answers. They found him to be an invaluable theological resource. I want to echo their judgment. In his lecture courses at Bristol in the 1970s and at Regent College over the last few decades, Packer showed his students how to do theology for themselves rather than simply presenting them with the outcomes of that process.
One aspect of Packer’s approach to theology that has always impressed me is his rigorous grounding of theological reflection in an engagement with the Bible. If you search the archive of recordings of presentations given at Regent College Vancouver, you will find a rich treasure trove of Packer’s lectures on the Bible. For example, he offered two courses of lectures at the 2016 Regent College summer school: one on the Anglican Heritage; the other on the Letter to the Colossians. There is always a risk that systematic theology becomes independent of the Bible. Evangelicals, of course, would say that we never do this. In reality, however, I think sometimes we do, even if unintentionally—for example, by adopting template approaches to theology, which means that we read Scripture in the light of preconceived theological schemes and do not allow these to be challenged or informed by the biblical text. Packer’s principled attentiveness toward the biblical text is, to my mind, a clear theological virtue.
So how do we read the Bible? One of the many criticisms often directed against evangelicalism is that it represents a highly individualist reading of the Bible—what Packer himself styled a “Lone Ranger” approach, adopted by people who have “proudly or impatiently” turned their backs on the church and their heritage. I do not for one moment dispute the importance of grounding biblical truth in the lives of individuals, but as we all know, there is a danger that individual perspectives and judgments become theologically determinative: this is how I see things—so this is how things really are.
What can we do about this? Packer offers us the beginnings of an answer, which I personally continue to find generative and helpful. We must learn to read the Bible in company. Here is how he described his own approach to theology back in 1996 in his masterly essay “On from Orr: The Cultural Crisis, Rational Realism, and Incarnational Ontology”: “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. And Packer has remained faithful to his own principles. Think of his detailed studies of the relevance of the Puritans for today’s church. Packer’s love for the Puritans was not born out of antiquarian curiosity but out of a burning conviction that there was gold in the Puritan hills. He had discovered this personally and wanted to share this wisdom with others.
Packer found in Puritanism a movement that was theologically rigorous yet pastorally and spiritually engaged. In many of his writings of the 1990s, we find Packer turning to the treasure chest of Christian heritage and opening up its riches for contemporary Christianity. There was no artificial detachment imposed here between Christian theology and the Christian life. Like the Puritans, Packer is an ecclesially engaged theologian, who sees the natural place of the theologian as lying within the community of faith—not standing above the people of God, still less standing outside them, but, rather, speaking to them as one who shared their journey of faith and hoped to encourage them to reflect on it more rigorously and profoundly.
There is an important point here that we need to grasp and appreciate. We find it also in the writings of C. S. Lewis. Both Packer and Lewis deplore “chronological snobbery”—the idea that somehow the most recent is the best; that the past is somehow discredited or rendered useless by the passage of time. Both invite us to reach into the past and retrieve its riches—not uncritically, for they made mistakes in the past, just as we do today. Yet the passage of time has helped us to see how some theologies retain their power and perceptiveness, inviting us to retrieve them and put them to fresh use today.
This has important implications for how we study 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 many more could be added.
Packer gives evangelical Christians a conceptual framework that allows them to see writers like Luther, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards (and many others) as helpful in informing and nourishing our faith, yet without displacing or undermining the Bible itself. To use Packer’s own terminology, writers like Edwards play a ministerial, not a magisterial, role in our theologizing. For Packer, Edwards’s reading of the Bible, and the way in which he 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, of course, but also positively. We can even learn from past mistakes—which are sometimes made for the best of reasons.
The rich theological heritage of the past can help us enrich our vision of the Christian truth by allowing us to see the gospel with new eyes, refreshing our vision and challenging our limitations. I’m sure Packer would agree with C. S. Lewis, who, recognizing that his own eyes were not sufficient, declared that he would “see through those of others.” Both Packer and Lewis develop their styles in dialogue with the classics of the past. Literature, for Lewis, enables us “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.” And that’s what happens to me when I read Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards—and Packer.
Now there’s another point to emphasize here—Packer’s insistence that theology and spirituality are inseparable. Yes, we all know that they are treated as different subjects in many seminaries. Yet I want to suggest that the distinction between them these days really reflects the etiquette of professional boundaries and the politics of professional guilds. Packer has long recognized the interconnection of theology and spirituality and saw this intimate connection embodied in Puritanism. He developed his interest in Puritanism shortly after his conversion, when he found some of its writings speaking deeply and persuasively to his own spiritual struggles.
Packer has quarried the Puritan tradition, helping his readers to see how a good grasp of Christian theology leads naturally and seamlessly into an authentic spirituality. The link between theology, prayer, and adoration has to be maintained and affirmed. While I see this emphasis throughout Packer’s writings, I think it is fair to single out one work in particular as an exemplary statement of this general principle—his inaugural lecture of December 1989 as the first Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology at Regent College, with the brilliant title “An Introduction to Systematic Spirituality.” In that lecture, Packer stressed the utter impossibility of separating theology and spirituality. How, he asked, could anyone separate theology from the “relational activity of trusting, loving, worshipping, obeying, serving and glorifying God?” Perhaps we can see a more extended application or exemplification of this approach throughout Packer’s best-known work, Knowing God—but I think we find it in a more concentrated and explicit form in this inaugural lecture.
So, having just mentioned Knowing God, let me speak more fully about this rich and influential work, published in 1973. It has become a classic, and rightly so. There are so many things that can be said about this work, but I shall limit myself to two points. The first is the work’s constant correlation of systematic theology and spirituality, which for Packer are really two sides of the same coin. This interweaving of understanding ideas and being transformed by them is integral to Christian discipleship. If I could put it like this, to grasp the Christian vision of God is also to be grasped by this vision of God—and transformed in terms of how we think and behave.
But there’s a second point. The great theologian Athanasius of Alexandria, in his letters to Serapion in the fourth century, emphasized that words really matter in theology. Athanasius’s concern was to find a terminology that is adequate to the great truths that stand at the core of the Christian faith, while stressing that we occasionally have to use nonbiblical terms to express biblical truths. I see this point echoed in Knowing God—the precise, weighed, and deliberate quest for the best words to express divine truth. Maybe Packer is like Flaubert, always questing for the elusive yet satisfying mot juste.
I would like to highlight one feature of Knowing God that strikes me as uncharacteristic of many theological works these days—namely, its elegant and clear prose. Packer avoids the dull technocratic writing style favored by some theologians and the pompous verbosity unfortunately cultivated by some others. Let me quote a few sentences from Knowing God to try to make my point.
What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him, because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.
Packer here shows us that good theology can be readable. The rhythms and cadences of these sentences are those of a preacher—a theologian who knows that words matter and so they must be chosen with great care and attention. Packer will think that I am flattering him, but I see obvious parallels here with the writings of C. S. Lewis. As I read Knowing God, I see Packer reflecting not simply the theological convictions of his Puritan forebears but also their passion to communicate those to both the hearts and minds of their audiences. As I remarked earlier, theologians are not empty vessels containing theological ideas but are living souls who exhibit and embody those ideas and values in their lives.
Now it would be cheap and easy for me to score theological points by quoting from other theologians whose writings do not perhaps exhibit the same verbal elegance and graciousness. Indeed, I could do this very effectively by quoting a few passages from my own works, but I will resist this temptation! Those of us who see ourselves as theologians need to reflect long and hard about how we express those truths verbally in our books, lectures, and sermons. And, yes, I did say sermons. I do not see how anyone could study Christian theology without longing to preach about the unsearchable riches of Christ!
I have only just begun to scrape the surface of Packer’s rich engagement with the traditions and tasks of Christian theology. I hope, however, that even this very limited and inadequate account of his approach to theology will help you to realize how much we have to learn from Packer and those to whom Packer would point in the past as theological exemplars. The greatest tribute I can pay to Packer is simply to say that he has influenced and helped me. And as I know from many conversations and an extensive correspondence, there are many others who would say the same.
Let me end with a few words from Packer himself. In May 2016, Packer was asked what he hoped to achieve through his teaching for that year’s summer school at Regent College. Here is his answer to that question: “What I shall be saying to my class, in substance, is: Look! This is the biggest thing that ever was! And we Christians, most of us, still haven’t appreciated its size. We’ve been Christians for years and years, and yet we haven’t fully grasped it.” For Packer, theology is about unpacking this “biggest thing that ever was”—faithfully and reliably. That is the evangelical core of preaching, prayer, proclamation, and adoration. It also stands at the heart of the joyful and prayerful discipleship of the mind that we call “theologizing.”
A lecture given at the Evangelical Theological Society meeting in San Antonio, Texas, on November 17, 2016.