An Evening Conversation with J. I. Packer - An Interview by Mark Dever

our format tonight as i say will be a bit different from that of most of our previous forums tonight we intend to have a conversation with a time to include you at the end with some questions and answers well tonight our conversation is with one of the better known writers in christian circles from his time in oxford to london to bristol to birmingham to vancouver not in that order our guest has been someone with a gift of clarifying issues if it is true as former archbishop michael ramsey said that the best defense of any doctrine is the creative exposition of it then we have with us this evening one of the more faithful defenders of the faith in the last half century trained at oxford having served as a pastor in birmingham england and having taught theology in england canada and around the world our guests books are on topics ranging from scripture to evangelism to god himself and in them he has carefully and clearly and faithfully given us some of the finest guides that many of us here tonight have known to god's truth he is currently professor of systematic and historical theology at regent college in vancouver british columbia canada it is with profound thanks to god for the ministry that he has given our choice servant tonight that we have here we welcome our guest tonight ji packer jim it's good to have you good evening and am i coming through at the back apparently so let me put it irish if you can't hear me at the back raise your hand all right clearly we can manage jim the way that many of us know you uh obviously is from your writings as we do and there are some of the more well-known things we'll come to a bit later but i think some of the writings that uh writing that you did that's had the most profound effect on pastor after pastor and a serious christian after a serious christian that i meet was really not a book you wrote your own but it's one of your many introductions and prefaces and so one of your early ones the one that you did to john owens book this puritan classic on the atonement called the death of death and the death of christ and in it you begin with some trenchant comments on the gospel in the evangelical world today and so about 40 years ago would you mind just reading that section that you and i talked about earlier sure one of the most urgent tasks facing evangelical christendom today is the recovery of the gospel this remark may cause some raising of eyebrows but it seems to be warranted by the facts there's no doubt that evangelicalism today is in a state of perplexity and unsettlement in such matters as the practice of evangelism the teaching of holiness the building up of local church life the pastors dealing with souls and the exercise of discipline there's evidence of widespread dissatisfaction with things as they are and of equally widespread uncertainty as to the road ahead this is a complex phenomenon to which many factors have contributed but if we go to the root of the matter we shall find that these perplexities are all ultimately due to our having lost our grip on the biblical gospel without realizing it we have during the past century bartered that gospel for a substitute product which though it looks similar enough in points of detail is as a whole a decidedly different thing hence our troubles for the substitute product doesn't answer the ends for which the authentic gospel has in past days proved itself so mighty the new gospel conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence deep repentance deep humility a spirit of worship a concern for the church why we would suggest that the reason lies in its own character and content it fails to make people god centered in their thoughts and god fearing in their hearts because this is not primarily what it's trying to do one way of stating the difference between it and the old gospel is to say that it's too exclusively concerned to be helpful to man that is to bring peace and comfort happiness and satisfaction and it's too little concerned to glorify god the old gospel was helpful too more so indeed than is the new but so to speak incidentally for its first concern was always to give glory to god it was always and essentially a proclamation of divine sovereignty in mercy and judgment a summons to bow down and worship the mighty lord on whom man depends for all good both in nature and in grace its center of reference was unambiguously god but in the new gospel the center of reference is man this is just to say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is not where is the chief aim of the old was to teach people to worship god the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better the subject of the old gospel was god and his ways with men the subject of the new is man and the help god gives him and there's a world of difference the whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed from this change of interest has sprung a change of content for the new gospel has in effect reformulated the biblical message in the supposed interests of helpfulness accordingly the themes of man's natural inability to believe of god's free election being the ultimate cause of salvation and of christ dying specifically for his sheep are not preached these doctrines it would be said are not helpful they would drive sinners to despair by suggesting to them that it's not in their own power to be saved through christ the possibility that such despair would be salutary is not considered it's taken for granted that it cannot be because it's so shattering to our self-esteem the result of these omissions is that part of the biblical gospel is now preached as if it were the whole of that gospel and a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth right right thus we appeal to people as if they all had the ability to receive christ at any time we speak of christ's redeeming work as if he'd done no more by dying then make it possible for us to save ourselves by believing we speak of god's love as if it were no more than a general willingness to receive any who will turn and trust and we depict the father and the son not as sovereignly active in drawing sinners to themselves but as waiting in quiet impotence at the door of our hearts as we say for us to let them in it's undeniable that this is how we preach perhaps this is what we really believe but it needs to be said with emphasis that this set of twisted half truths is something other than the biblical gospel the bible is against us when we preach in this way and the fact that such preaching has become almost standard practice among us only shows how urgent it is that we should review this matter to recover the old authentic biblical gospel and to bring our preaching and practice back into line with it is perhaps our most pressing present need thank you very much jim you read those lines of 40 years ago do you still affirm all of that yes no hesitation no asterisks no qualifications no i think it's still true that's why i said yes some things change this hasn't changed yet that's my observation so i think those words are still as apropos as they were when i first wrote them have you seen in these last 40 years those concerns that you had then being addressed in evangelicalism generally there has emerged a minority within the evangelical world that has addressed them yes this minority calls itself reformed the people around and about usually refer to the members of this group as calvinists i for one who belong to this group as god enables me i don't like being called a calvinist because calvin himself was very anxious not to make a party bearing his name or anything like it and i re venerate the men the memory of calvin too much to do something which if he knew about it as i suppose in glory he might well um he would want to rebuke me for so i use his word reformed the reformed people have set themselves to review the questions that i raise in that uh that that state the statement i read and they have found models for their own preaching of the gospel in the 17th century puritans and in people like george whitefield the pioneer at every point of the 18th 18th century awakening and jonathan edwards who was very much helped by whitfield into evangelistic ministry and in charles spurgeon who perhaps you know was the greatest pastor evangelist bar none in 19th century england and in recent years you may know the name of martin lloyd jones a great individual preacher of the gospel in britain who in his own day was thought of as the finest evangelistic preacher in the country well all these men in fact modeled the kind of change that i was calling for in that extract and taking their cue from these men the reformed constituency has begun to change i mean to change into this older wiser pattern and for that i thank god but the reformed people are still very much a minority and the situation overall still needs the treatment that i was trying to spell out jim you didn't grow up yourself in a christian family did you no i didn't um god knew what he was doing with me i grew up in a church going home but there was a church-going family i should say but in the home i'm afraid there was no real christian influence at all so the gospel in god's good time came to me as something new and something exciting just because i'd reached my late teens and never met it before and how is it you came to meet it i won't tell you the whole story it would take too long it begins with a unitarian trying to persuade me that though of course he said of course jesus christ wasn't divine his moral teaching was the most wonderful thing since i scream there seemed to be something strange about that view and it set me wondering what the truth of christianity might be c.s lewis comes into the story there i read the material in mere christianity which in those days was published as three small books i read his screwtape letters and that helped me on the way i became orthodox in the sense that i was prepared to stand up and argue for the christian creed but there came a time in my first term at oxford university when i was listening to a preach a preaching of the gospel at an evangelistic service and over a period of about 20 minutes the following things happened i became aware quite suddenly and even dramatically that my position was that of someone standing outside a house where a party was going on and looking in through the window yes i could see they were they were enjoying themselves yes i could understand the games they were playing yes i could see the food they were eating but i was outside not inside why was i outside well because i had kept jesus christ at bay kept him out of my life i mean as a living lord and that was what had to change uh the sermon ended the congregation saying just as i am it was very ordinary conversion you see lots of people these days get converted while people are singing just as i am all around them and and by the time the service ended i was a believer and i knew i was a believer and christ was my savior and my lord he'd broken into my life and i was going out to live a new life in him with him i remember writing home to my parents to tell them that that was now the agenda it was a clear-cut conversion and that was about 55 years ago was it 19 yes it was 1944 and now that i think of it it was in the month of october and this might even be the anniversary i can't tell you which day it was but 55 years yes that's right i was never good at math you understand and 55 years on following christ you've you've found uh along the way some heroes some people to help you who've been particularly useful in your following christ oh yes uh i was always a bookish person and i wasn't two years into my christian life probably not one year in actually before i had found bishop jc rile i wonder if you know his name he was the first bishop of liverpool england he died in 1900 so it'll be his centenary next year he was a man who had drunk deep at the wells of the puritans and he taught christian faith christian truth christian wisdom christian life in puritan terms and made no secret that that was where he that was the source from which he drew his understanding of the scriptures on these matters the extract that i read was from my preface to a book by a 17th century puritan john owen and ryle put me onto puritans actually i found owen on my own and found him extremely enriching clarifying and edifying it is his treatment of questions about the christian life other puritans came in on the act if i may put it that way i found richard baxter i found john bunyan i gained a great deal from them i found john calvin and his institutes have meant a great deal to me over the years i mentioned lewis i've read i think all lewis's christian writings and re-read a lot of them and gained much from lewis with his um [Music] simple childlike rationality he insists on seeing straight and not allowing his lines of thought to be distorted or diverted by any irrelevant considerations he talks real rational plain simple bible christianity and he's given me a great deal by so doing these are just some of the people there are others so i haven't mentioned george whitefield as a hero but he is i went to george whitfield's old school and george whitfield was as i said the pioneer of all the good things that happened in the 18th century awakening he was the first man to preach the gospel he was the first man to publish journals testifying to the way that god was leading and using him he was the first man to organize what we would call small groups in those days they were called societies small groups for folk who come to faith so for small groups in which they would fellowship with each other and be led by older and wiser folk who would help them to move on together in the lord and maintain the spiritual glow by being together you've got to have fellowship as a young christian if you're going to grow and in the small groups of the 18th century that's what happened um whitfield went to america whitfield spread the same the same gospel and the same revival fire as one may properly call it in new england as he'd been spreading in old england and he was doing all this years before wesley got in on the act three years four years before he was the leader wesley never liked to acknowledge that it has to be said because wesley after all was 10 years older and wesley had been a fellow of at oxford college whereas whitfield was only the son of a man who kept a tavern but um just his as a matter of history whitfield came first and whitefield was one of these calvinists clear-headed strong loving expansive beautiful christian spirit he had but those were his convictions and when i found whitfield and i found him actually of course when i think of it i found him before i found any of these other people i was converted in october in december the christmas vacation had begun and i was at home and i found the two-volume life of whitfield in our local public library i knew that i've been that the school i'd been to had produced whitefield and people have been telling well but didn't you know whitfield was an evangelist whitfield was a preacher of the gospel i got bronchitis and i could remember lying in bed with bronchitis reading the biography of george whitefield and getting an enormous amount of joy and encouragement from it yeah but those are just some other people right what about uh during this century people that you've met along the way i mean i guess you met lewis and you heard him lecture but that was not particularly about christian matters others who along the way may have influenced you personally i suppose that martin lloyd jones is number one in terms of living influences he and i disagreed about some things towards the end of his ministry but i would name him as the greatest man i ever knew he was i think i said earlier tagged as the premier preacher of the gospel in britain i heard him preach the gospel often enough to feel that that judgment must be true i never heard anyone who brought so much of god god's presence and god's power into the pulpit with him as martin lloyd jones he was at his greatest i think when he was preaching the gospel from the gospels and bringing the lord jesus into it directly as himself the teacher who said the things that pierce the heart and that shut the hearers up to self-despair and the necessity of faith and this is matthew this is the sayings of jesus as recorded in matthew mark and luke as well as in john i've never heard anyone open up the gospels in an evangelistic way as lloyd jones did it was wonderful you won't know the name of alan stibbs he was an ex-china missionary anglican clergyman teacher in a theological college became a very close personal friend he was a man of god if ever there was one and he was in terms of his own temperament as possessed by the gospel when he preached an idiot when he talked it one-on-one as lloyd jones was temperament entirely different lloyd jones was welsh and there was fire and thunder and lightning a dramatic element in the way that he preached the gospel uh alan stibbs was a west country englishman like myself with a more phlegmatic temperament but he had us he had a strong mind and a warm heart and there was a tremendous compelling force about the way that he set out the truths of the gospel [Music] even though his his voice was rarely raised but it quivered because of the intensity of his own feeling and you got that since the getting the benefit of those two men half a century ago uh i have always maintained that the preaching is 50 of the message because the preacher needs to appear as a person operating under the power of the message that he's declaring to others and i suppose one of the reasons why i'm so clear and strong on that is that i saw it as reality in martin lloyd jones and alan stibbs there have been others but less influential and they'd be people you don't know so here's the story martin lloyd jones and i he as chairman and i as secretary used to run a conference full title the puritan and reformed studies conference and it was for ministers and christian workers who wanted to explore the wealth of puritan wisdom for use in their own ministry lloyd jones was old-fashioned in some ways whether he was right or wrong in these matters i'm not going to decide i just tell you he was old-fashioned and one of the old-fashioned features of his thinking was that meetings for ministers were meetings for men he believed that women had a ministry but the heart of that ministry was to keep the men preaching and he wasn't pleased at this particular uh puritan studies conference when he saw a couple of young women in the assembly and when he and i were talking towards the end of the conference he he took it on him to complain to me about the fact that they were there and he said they they don't they don't come for the puritans they just come for the men and and i having uh got engaged to one of them the previous evening was able to [Music] was able to say to him uh well doctor as a matter of fact i'm going to marry one of them and he without betting an eyelid came back with you see it then i was right about one of them now what about the other that's what i call repartee lloyd jones out of the pulpit where he didn't crack jokes and that was a matter of uh that was a matter of principle was one of the wittiest men i've ever run across and that that was just a vintage example of lloyd jones in repartee when you've had your laugh now i suppose we're meant to get serious about the theology okay if you are interested to know more about lloyd jones we certainly have some of his books on the bookstall we have a biography of him by ian murray who we had here in may and we also have an audio and a videotape of an interview like this we did with elizabeth catherwood his daughter who has i think some of his same traits of personality anyway uh jim let me read you a quote from a baptist minister here in the district not too long ago he's not present don't worry and i won't name him and tell me what you think of this quote okay yes sir here we go the church will always have its right middle and left wings of thought the pre-post and all millennial groups the armenians and calvinists the hierarchical charismatic and democratic ideas of church government the inerrant authoritarian and inspirational views of the bible etc none of us has all the truth and when you add together what all of us know about god it is still inadequate because he is incomprehensible the gentleman's comments about what we are likely always to have in the church are likely to be true and it's bad news the gentleman's assumption that there's no way of deciding between these different views and that that's why we have to keep them going alongside each other is i think mistaken the gentleman's supposition that we can't adequately know god just because he is so much greater than we are is positively perverse i i you must allow me to use that word perverse because god has spoken used language told us things given us his infallible book through which we may know his mind up to the point that he's revere up to that all the distance he's revealed we may know his mind absolutely calvin i think had the illustration that fits here he said imagine well he didn't say it this way imagine a person with a brain like einstein talking to his two-year-old he talks something like baby talk he brings everything down to the level of simple childish speech that his two-year-old can understand there's a great deal in the mind of the speaker which he doesn't even try to tell his two-year-old because the two-year-old couldn't understand it if he got going on it that's a picture of how it is with us and our god but a good father with a brain like einstein will talk to his two-year-old in a way that makes possible a well it which actually brings about a very solid love relationship trust relationship genuine fellowship between the little lad and his dad or the little girl and her dad and that too is part of the illustration god has spoken he's told us as much as we can grasp as much as we need to as much and as much as we need to grasp for a thoroughly fulfilling love and trust and hope relationship with himself himself there really is plural it's the father the son and the holy spirit the truth about god is that he is they and they are he and you have to use grammar like that to show that you're taking the trinity seriously but yes um the relationship with god is one of love and trust and hope and it's a solid relationship and it's a fulfilling relationship and it's a joyful relationship but it's not a relationship in which we know everything about god to say we can't decide between different theological positions because we don't know everything about god is however perverse because god has decided in scripture between those different positions and it's our business to discern as best we can seeking the help of god's spirit to enable us to understand the word for the purpose to decide as as clear as best we can as clearly as we can between the various options embrace what we find the bible really teaches and let go other views certainly while we're all of us doing that we must be patient and tolerant uh in dealing with people who are on the same task but at the moment anyway coming to different conclusions so i'm not suggesting that we should proceed against people who disagree with us on these matters as if they were heretics but i do think it's vital that we should hold to the fact that there is such a thing as revealed truth and under god it's coherent and clear and if there are problems in grasping it the problems are in us not in scripture and what we need to do is to be more humble more open to listen more carefully to what others are saying and to pray more earnestly for the light of the spirit basically i'm not on that gentleman's wavelength though i appreciate his sincerity and you can see what wavelength i am on and i think i can fairly say that if the gentleman in the chair on my right were john calvin instead of mark dever he would be nodding his head this is pure calvin are you nodding your head mark oh that's good well jim a frequent slogan or a song that's frequently used in world council of churches circled is doctrine divides ministry unites i'm sure you've heard that before indeed i have doctrine divides ministry unites now just to bring up the ect process since we're all here you and i talked about the ect thing a number of times and just to be clear with the audience gathered here we we i think we agree about justification we disagree over the ect process uh i understand what you've said that you're attempting to do you're not speaking for others who are involved in it but you're what you're attempting to do in being involved with the evangelicals and catholics together document is trying to prepare or trying to get as far as you can in being able if i can use this phrase to be in ministry together even though you do disagree doctrinally now is that unfair it's not unfair provided you explain the formula correctly the ministry which i would like to see catholics and evangelicals engaging in jointly is evangelistic ministry in which the church questions that divide us are not directly raised and the focus is entirely on the need of us sinners and christ as the savior who meets the needs of all humanity and i would like to see us further able to guide converts whatever their background along a path of receiving ministry of the word food for their souls and enjoying fellowship with the saints for their encouragement and growth and again not have the church questions that divide us coming into the picture while that primary nurture is being given the church questions of course can't be kept out of the picture forever but i wish that um we could go further together in primary evangelism and i think that the cause of christ all around the world would be strengthened if we could that point i know that i know from having read things you've written on this before and talking to you about it before it's a thing that for evangelicals like myself who don't uh don't think this is going to be a fruitful process uh it takes a bit of our listening to understand let alone agree but even to understand what it is you're trying to do so let me encourage you uh during the question time let's not turn this into an ect referendum because for many people here they don't know what that is but jim could you just tell us a few things that you've written because i know you're asking about this all the time and you've written about this could you suggest some things we could read to better understand what it is you're trying to do in that process so i know you've written two or three things but people might not know about this in the book evangelicals and catholics together published by word in 1994 or five i suppose there's a long essay by me responding to the criticisms of the ect process that have come from various evangelical protestant sources and saying why i still believe that the project is worth working with that i think is what folks should read if you finally decide that as far as you are concerned uh in your ministry and your life this isn't something that is going to help this isn't something that is going to further evangelism and nurture but perhaps in your situation make it more difficult well you won't lose my respect if you withdraw from the situation if you express non-support if you say well i think that the problems are greater than the benefits could ever be or something like that and there are people who take that line i happen to disagree so i continue i just ask for the understanding as to why i'm doing this for as much good will as you can muster and for prayer that god's will may be done in this whole process if indeed it would create more problems than it solved should the venture succeed should it be possible to build a platform on which catholics and evangelicals can preach the gospel together and do primary nurture together well then i would want it to fail if on the other hand as i think at the moment it would further the gospel for this project to succeed well i should go on working with it and i for one shall go on praying for god's blessing on it all i ask for i say it again is sympathetic understanding of why some of us are laboring in this department and prayer that god's will may be done i want to turn now to probably the reason most of the people here tonight are here and it's some of the books that you've written over the years i mean these are just some of the books that jim has written there are others we could have brought but just to pick out a few that i've seen again and again i have a large effect in people's lives here we go um oh i can't get this one because i'm the guy oh well um jim you want to comment on any of these these early ones fundamentalism in the word of god evangelism and the sovereignty of god and then of course the one that made you the evangelical superstar you are knowing god i don't know what sort of comment you expect after a remark like that there they are it was jack horner who said what a good boy am i i'm not proposing to echo his words but i i will say to the praise of god that though i started writing these books fairly early in life at a well just before i was 30 was when i was drafting fundamentalism of the word of god i having in god's mercy i say it again being enabled like calvin to focus right from the start beliefs which i haven't had to change as the years have gone by i hope that i've learned something over the years i hope that the basis on which these beliefs are set has broadened i hope my understanding of what's gone on and is going on at the moment in the world of christian thought has been extended but fundamentally i am still where i was and i'm prepared to go bail for anything said in any of these three books or any of the in any of those 30 books um even in knowing god you must get comments all the time about that comment do you know what i'm going to ask about i expect so the images yes you must get questions all the time about that are you really saying that if we have a church bulletin we shouldn't have a rembrandt of the crucifixion on the front of it no i'm not quite saying that what i'm saying as i make clear in uh a footnote added for the uh 20 the 20-year addition it's okay new edition of knowing god what i'm saying is that we've got to remember if we're going to use images pictures sketches paintings sculptures which in any way purport to represent christ we've got to remember that there's a difference between representational and symbolic art if you think that the paintings drawings sculptures rembrandts or whatever are actually intended to tell you what jesus looked like and you're better off without them on the other hand there's a long tradition in christendom of symbolic not representational but symbolic art art exhibiting jesus in a way which is intended to project truth about him and convey to you a reminder of his dignity as lord of all enthroned by the father i'm thinking there as maybe you've already picked up from my language of the ike the icon painting tradition in the eastern orthodox world and in modern times iconic art representing jesus in terms of the male ideal of particular societies has become quite a thing in world christendom in japan for instance jesus is depicted by artists as an ideal japanese and in black africa jesus is depicted by black artists as a perfect black man well what's being projected is the thought of perfection human perfection uh and its own it's it's not representational it's only symbolic i can see that for people who can handle that sort of thing there's no harm in it and indeed there's good in it i still think that there are so many people around who can't handle that sort of thing and will if they see a rembrandt suppose that jesus looked like the figure that rembrandt paints or if they see an eastern orthodox icon which of course you can do in any any orthodox church they will think that jesus is that the icon is saying jesus looks like that there's so many people who i say will take all um artistic images in represent in a representational way that on balance the way of wisdom is to get on without any of the pictures but where the pictures are i'm not going to quarrel when once i have verified that they're being understood representationally sorry they're not being understood representationally do you see what i mean uh that that's now that's an extension of the line of thought that uh that that i set out in the first edition of knowing god uh or it's a qualification of it if you like because in the original edition i didn't distinguish between representational and symbolic art and i should have done but that i see is me broadening the basis of my own understanding of things and i'm grateful to god for a way many ways in which he's broadened the basis without changing the substance why did you write a book about god oh it was originally put together or rather the chapters were originally composed not put together but composed separately for a little journal called the evangelical magazine that no longer exists it came out every second month and i wrote five articles a year for the magazine and the editress lady editor is to be credited i suppose with um producing the book really because she asked me would you write articles on god for an intelligent reader who has no technical knowledge of theology but who has a sharp mind doesn't appreciate uh vague verbiage wants to be told quite precisely what there is for him to face in christian teaching and he's prepared to be honest if you talk to him in an if you're right for for him or her in an honest way one of the keys to successful writing is to know your ideal reader this lady editor had given me the profile of my ideal reader and i wrote article by article addressing that ideal reader the first question i asked myself was well where do i start with this person and i started with what's the first chapter of the book studying god is worthwhile there's gain in knowing him and that involves knowing about him and then i went on from one thing to another and after five years of doing this i began to think well maybe this material could be published as a book and i thought in at that time that it was a book that would have one edition because the way that i'd written was a good deal more thoughtful and therefore demanding of thought on in my readers then was the case with most of the the devotional reading at that time i mean the devotional reading that was being put in print at that time so i imagined it would go through one edition and there'd be some people who were really serious in their study who would buy the book and then it would go out of print and on we'd go to next business and i'm still flabbergasted really at the way in which god has taken the book sent it all around the world put it into two dozen different languages and established it as a nurture book for the whole evangelical constituency everywhere that that is what has happened to god's praise be it said i am just very thankful that he's chosen to use something that i produced in that way and the book does good still 20 what 26 years after it was first published and i still get letters from people telling me what good it's done them and i can only say thank you lord thank you lord thank you lord amen that's the story jim one of the you you've had more books have continued to come out but one of them you and i talked about particularly is this a grief sanctified passing through grief to peace and joy could you tell us about that one for just a moment yeah first thing to tell you is that it's published by servant books an interesting public pub interesting publishing house that produces um books for evangelicals and books for roman catholics both the heart of this book a grief sanctified is the memoir which richard baxter my puritan mentor here he is right here we ask him to come this evening okay well those of you with very sharp sight can see him there and the rest of you can imagine what he's what he looks like he lost his wife and within a month of losing her he had written out a memoir of her it was his way really of coping with his own grief um those who have to cancel the bereaved nowadays know that sometimes you help a person by saying well write out your memories of the person you've lost and then read what you've written and thank god for the good that there was the good that there was for you in their lives it's a way of appreciation coupled with the act which is so basic when you lose someone you loved the deliberate letting of that person go well baxter didn't know all the um ins and outs of modern grief counseling theory but his instinct was to do exactly that and he did it and his memoir of the lady a highly strung temperamental lady she couldn't ever have been an easy lady to live with but a lady who loved him and whom he loved uh so that they had a very rich marriage together even though they had to work at it this this memoir is just a lovely tribute and when i first read it oh 40 years more than 40 years ago um i wanted to share it with other people and i wanted from that wanted to do that from that day to this and i'm very glad that i had the opportunity i edited it for the modern reader i made it a little easier by cutting out some of the 17th century english which would have stumbled some people and i preceded the memoir with an essay on puritan ideals in marriage which i think that the modern world griev urgently needs and i followed the memoir with um another chapter on grief grief counseling and actually coping with the pain and the distress of bereavement i started with baxter i compared him with c.s lewis at certain points i said baxter handled bereavement on paper at any rate better than c.s lewis did and i believe that's true and um there you have two essays from pecker which i think say things illustrating them you see from the memoir that are very urgently needed in pastoral ministry and christian life today so this book is something of a favorite of mine it's been out for a couple of years now um i don't expect it will last long but uh i mean it isn't becoming a seller in the way that um knowing god did but i still think that uh there's precious stuff here and so since you give me the opportunity to do a commercial on it i shamelessly do the commercial and you've heard it now and tell you this is a favorite book of mine which has in its things that i've re-read already several times during the last two years and expect to read again baxter does wonderfully well and i think that what i say in my studies subsidiary to baxter uh is um well it's saying things that the world need the church needs to hear jim we've just seen recently two volumes collected shorter works have come out is there to be a third yes and a fourth and a fourth and do we know when those are coming well the english publisher who's produced the first two wanted to get three and four out before the end of this year he's got all the material and perhaps he will there's going to be an american edition of all four but uh that hasn't materialized yet for the first two that's good it's it's not turn back now yes oh thanks thanks it's an accurate book at least on the cover of it um okay is it wrong of me to ask you in public what you think of the biography of yourself well of course it's a comic question people are not supposed to have their biographies written until they're dead that's to start with and in my own belief i'm not dead yet and there are things that i know about myself that alistair mcgrath never picked up so that with half of my um rather odd mind when i find my when i read that when i read the the biography um there comes to mind a little poem that i learned in england many years ago when i was about that high i suppose the other day upon the stair i met a man who wasn't there he wasn't there again today oh how i wish he'd go away um there is a sense in which mcgrath packer isn't the man who's here though everything that he says about pecker is i think factually accurate but you remember what i read in the in those that opening extract from john owen a half-truth treated as the whole truth quickly becomes a whole falsehood i'm not quite sure that you'll get the full flavor the proper flavor of pecker from the mcgrath biography although as i say all the facts are correct i can remember the bus ride from oxford to cambridge where i was traveling with aleister mcgrath i hardly knew him actually when we started but we were sitting together and talking about many things and after we'd been together for about two hours he looked at me with a very s fixed stern purposeful expression on his face and said out of the blue just like this i must write your life i said well if that's what you want to do get on with it and i said i would check his facts and answer any questions he wanted to ask me and so i did and as i say it's an accurate book and i am grateful to him for putting before the public a lot of facts about pecker which people don't know and which i'm glad that now they can know i've been involved in various uh controversies and situations of what people have seen as ambiguity though they've all been situations in which i knew what i was doing people haven't always understood what i've been up to and alistair explains me from that standpoint very well i think it's fair to say that he wrote the biography selecting his material in terms of his own interests so he projects me as a pioneer something like a pioneer in the reawakening of evangelical theology if that really is the truth i'm thankful i can think of nothing that i would have people remember about pecker that's more important than that fact and he himself you see is a man who is very concerned to reinvigorate evangelical theology but i think really he's he's uh he was quite deliberate in projecting me as a sort of um what do you call it a sort of patriarch or grandfather of that project which he comes along now to take further than pecker was able to do as i say it's well written it's all accurate but that's how i feel about it it's very much a public biography and um i who know a little bit about myself from the inside notice that some of the things that are there inside don't get mentioned but don't think i'm rubbishing the book i as i say i i think the facts are accurate i'm glad that it exists he of course gets the royalties and not myself that's what what i'm saying is entirely altruistic there for you i'm just trying to answer your question i appreciate that

Channel: 9Marks

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Keywords: j i packer, theology, church, conversation

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Length: 58min 53sec (3533 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020