<i></i> Who is J.I. Packer? Put simply
in the last half of the 20th century and early part of our
own century J.I. Packer has been one of the foremost influences
among evangelical Christians. His lengthy career has spanned
six decades; first in England alongside the likes of Martin
Lloyd Johns and John Stott, then in Canada at Regent College, and
finally in the United States through his voluminous writings.
There is a mystery about how a mere professor could achieve the
kind of influence that Packer has achieved. He never filled a
high visibility pulpit as a regular position and he always
taught at small evangelical colleges and seminaries. He
became famous on the strength of his books, his books cover the
basics of Christian belief and are filled with practical wisdom
about how to live the Christian life to the glory of God. So who is J.I Packer? To answer
this question we might ask what he has made the focus of his
ministry. The title of a book written in his honor sounds the
right note; Doing Theology for the People of God. G.K. Chesterton began his
autobiography by saying that he was assured by competent folk
that he was born in a certain place at a certain time. Like
G.K. Chesterton I believe that I was born, I have often been told
I was. I was brought up in a lower middle class home in
Gloucester City, England. I had an ordinary upbringing and
thought of myself as a very ordinary person right through my
youth. My home was solid, the atmosphere was friendly and
affectionate with no kind of insecurity. We were a
churchgoing family, that's true, but church attendance was part
of the family routine so we did it without thinking or talking
about it. I can't honestly say that the home had very much that
was positively Christian in it except parental affection,
parental stability, and parental concern that I and my sister,
the two children, should have a fair crack at the wip
educationally and then in terms of whatever profession we chose. I went to ordinary schools;
infant school, junior school, and then a grammar school. I was
a fairly sharp student and I did well at school and eventually
got myself a scholarship to Oxford but I found it pleasant
to work, I've always enjoyed reading and learning things. For
a number of reasons I was not a sportsman, my inclinations never
would have taken me that way and I had an accident early in life.
When I was seven years old I was chased out into the street by a
fellow classmate at the junior school that I was attending and
came into violent collision with a truck. The effect was to knock in part
of my skull in the way that the top of an eggshell is knocked in
when you hit it with an egg spoon. The bits of broken bone
had to be removed and in the providence of God there was a
very skilled brain surgeon at our local hospital. He had done
training at Vienna which was the number one world centre of brain
surgery at that time and he did a very skillful job. When I went
back to school I was obliged to wear aluminium plate over the
hole where the bone had been taken out and the effect was to
make me feel like a speckled bird. At the age of 15 I think I
went on strike and refused to wear it anymore. My school days otherwise were
fairly straight forward, I was a bookish boy, I loved reading. I
began to write an imitation of the stuff I was reading. On my
11th birthday I had dropped broad hints that what I hoped
for was a full sized bicycle and on the birthday morning however
what I found waiting for me was an old typewriter. The gift of
the typewriter was almost prophetic. My parents foresaw,
and I think that this was brilliant parenting on their
part, they foresaw that I would have enormous fulfillment out of
doing things with a typewriter; writing this, writing that,
whatever. It was in fact the best present that I ever had as
a boy and it continued with me for seven or eight years before
it finally lost it's power to function. I've always had a
typewriter and day by day been using it ever since so the
effect of that was to confirm that in some sense or other I
was going to be a writer. All my writing and all my ministry has
been focused on feeding, any writing or ministry that remains
in the future will have the same focus. Packer is above all else a
communicator, as an author he has made it a priority to write
for the common person. His signature book, entitled Knowing
God which has sold nearly 2 million copies, was not drafted
as a best seller and grew out of a series of articles for a small
religious magazine. Packer can do specialized scholarly writing
of the highest order but he deliberately writes in a
simplified style that the ordinary Christian can
understand. That does not mean that the thinking in Packer's
books and articles is simple, what he writes is based on
various sophisticated thinking. But he writes books and essays
as a hymn writer writes poetry, under vows of renunciation, that
is deliberately controlling the amount of visible scholarship
and technical language. But foundational to Packer's
prolific literary career has been his persistent love of
books and reading. In this Packer's life is truly
countercultural today, in an age of disposable communication
Packer's emphasis on the written word reminds us that
Christianity is, at its heart, a religion of the book. Right from the start my
Christian life, that is from the time of my conversion at age 18,
the Bible has been central in my devotion, in my understanding of
the faith, and as I've grown older in the writing that I've
done. I've produced I suppose half a dozen different books
seeking, one way or another, to vindicate the truth, the trust,
worthiness, and the life giving quality of Holy Scripture.
People wonder in these days whether reading is important in
anybody's life and particularly whether Christian reading is
important in the Christian life. I think that that uncertainty is
one of the struggles of our time and I hope we shall very soon
outgrow it. Any reading that makes you think about the
subject matter, the truth of what's being affirmed or denied,
and that leaves you clearer in your own mind about it is
beneficial reading. I hope myself that the age of the book
is not coming to an end as a number of modern prophets have
said they think it is. I write books in the hope that
people will read them and benefit by them and I continue
to read books with the same go. Among the theologians that I've
read and profited from have been John Calvin and his Institutes
and John Owen, the Puritan who wrote on a number of fundamental
Christian themes masterfully in every case and I learned a great
deal from him. Richard Baxter, another Puritan from whom I
learned most of what I feel I know about the commitment of a
pastor to his people. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is a book
that I reread every year and I hope that nobody will tell me
that it's not a theological book because it is, it has a very
deep and insightful level. There was an Anglican bishop named
Ryle, first Bishop of Liverpool England in the last 20 years of
the 19th century, who wrote a great book with a one word
title; Holiness. That book is one that I very much appreciated
over the years and have gone back to on many different
occasions. All these books are in the
historic reformational tradition and that's where most of the
influences that my reading has brought to bear on me have come
from and I don't apologize for that. Truth is truth and to the
chronology of it whether it's truth that was put into print
fifty years ago or 500 is a secondary matter. I want reading
to remain part of our culture and I think that we shall lose
far more than we gain if we abandon the reading of books for
the picking up of information by any other means whatsoever. In the history of Christendom
very few academicians have devoted as much time to church
matters as Packer has. He has modeled devotion to the Bible as
the surer and infallible word of God, the need for Christians to
live holy lives, and the importance of steadfastly
refusing to accommodate the plain teaching of the Bible to
current cultural trends. But the biggest lesson that we can learn
from Packer's life is the lesson of being a faithful steward in
the tasks that God places before us. Packer never set out to make
a splash, he never tried to gather a following, he simply
cultivated his garden and left the results to God. It is a
model that we can all strive to imitate. When I look back on the
productions that I have had a part in during the course of my
life the English Standard Version of the Bible, the ESV,
stands out as perhaps the most valuable thing that I've ever
been involved in. We didn't have a translation that was literal
in the sense that it laboured all the time to be transparent
to the word, sequence, and sentence structure of the
original Hebrew and Greek so that it would get the reader as
close to the original wording as any translation could. We needed a translation that was
viable for all ages and all levels of study, we needed a
translation that could be memorized relatively easily as
the Bible has been memorized from other translations in the
past. We needed a Bible that would read well in the pulpit,
we needed a Bible it would be clear for the exposition from
the pulpit that faithful pastors would give. We needed a Bible
that would be free from cultural bias of any sort, we needed a
translation that as far as possible didn't tip its hand or
its hat in the direction of any of the contemporary areas of
debate, as far as possible. Then it would be trans-cultural in
the sense that it simply registered in translation what
was there in the original and stopped at that point. It seems
to me that we who worked on the English Standard Version had
considerable success by God's mercy at all these points. I
shall continue to see this as the most important bit of
service to the church that I've been involved in in the whole of
my working life. As I look back on the life that
I lived I would like to be remembered as a voice, a voice
that focused on the authority of the Bible, the glory of our
Lord, Jesus Christ, and the wonder of his substitutionary
sacrifice in atonement for our sins. I would like to be
remembered as a voice calling Christian people to holiness and
challenging lapses in Christian moral standards. I should like
to be remembered as someone who was always courteous in
controversy but without compromise. I ask you to thank
God with me for the way that he's led me and I wish, hope,
and pray that you will enjoy the same clear leading from him and
the same help in doing the tasks that he sets to you that I have
enjoyed. If your joy matches my joy as we continue over in our
Christian lives you will be blessed indeed.
