JI Packer​

J.I. Packer

James Innell Packer (22 July 1926 – 17 July 2020) was an English-born Canadian evangelical theologian, cleric and writer in the low-church Anglican and Calvinist traditions. He was considered one of the most influential evangelicals in North America, known for his best-selling book, Knowing God, written in 1973, as well as his work as an editor for the English Standard Version of the Bible. He was one of the high-profile signers on the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a member on the advisory board of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and also was involved in the ecumenical book Evangelicals and Catholics Together in 1994. His last teaching position was as the board of governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, in which he served from 1996 until his retirement in 2016 due to failing eyesight.

JI Packer

“All roads in the Bible lead to Romans, and all views afforded by the Bible are seen most clearly from Romans, and when the message of Romans gets into a person’s heart there is no telling what may happen.”
--JI Packer

JI Packer

“How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing so is demanding, but simple. It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into a matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise of God.”
--JI Packer

JI Packer

Our argument has shown the real nature of the choice with which this debate confronts us. It is not a choice between obscurantism and scholarship, no between crudeness and sensitivity in biblical exposition. It concerns quite a different issue, and a far deeper one, although critics of Evangelicalism rarely seem to see it, or if they do, are shy of discussing it. The fact is that there we are faced in principle with a choice between two versions of Christianity. It is a choice between historic Evangelicalism and modern Subjectivism; between a Christianity that is consistent with itself and one that is not; in effect, between one that is wholly God-given and one that is partly man-made. We have to choose whether to bow to the authority claimed by the Son of God, or whether on our own authority to discount and contravene a part of His teaching; whether to rest content with Christianity according to Christ, or whether to go hankering after a Christianity according to the spirit of the age; whether to behave as Christ’s disciples, or as His tutors. We have to choose whether we will accept the biblical doctrine of Scripture as it stands, or permit ourselves to re-fashion it according to our fancy. We have to choose whether to embrace the delusion that human creatures are competent to judge and find fault with the words of their Creator, or whether to recognize this idea for the blasphemy that it is and drop it. We have to decide whether we are going to carry through our repentance on the intellectual level, or whether we shall still cherish our sinful craving for a thought-life free from the rule of God. We have to decide whether it is right to make such an idol of nineteenth-century biblical criticism that not even God is allowed to touch it. We have to decide whether to say that we believe the Bible and mean it, or to look for ways whereby we can say it without having to accept all the consequences. We have to choose whether to allow the sovereign Spirit to teach us faith in Scripture as such, or whether to appeal to historians to delimit the area of scriptural assertion within which faith is permissible. We have to choose whether, in presenting Christianity to others, we are going to rely on the demonstration of the Spirit to commend it, or on our own ability to make it masquerade as the fulfilment of secular thought. Evangelicals have made their choice on all these issues. What their critics are really asking them to do is to reverse it: to enter into a marriage of convenience with Subjectivism. But Evangelicals cannot in conscience consent to being thus mis-mated. … Liberalism, as we saw, sets the task of sorting out the divine utterances from the total mass of Scripture by the exercise of our own wits, guided in part by extra-biblical principles of judgment. … discounts the perfection and truth of Scripture in order to make room for man to contribute his own ideas to his knowledge of God. … God’s revealed truth does not need to be edited, cut, corrected, and improved by the cleverness of man.
--J.I. Packer, “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God

JI Packer

Indeed, analysis shows that the modern ‘broad church,’ liberal, and existentialist positions, however superficially different, are all really members of the same theological family. They are all versions of what we may call Renaissance theology, the Erasmian type of thought within Protestantism. Renaissance theology is characteristically rationalistic, anti-dogmatic, and agnostic in temper . . . Of all these varieties of Renaissance theology, and with them the cross-bred ‘dialectical theology’, which as one foot in the Reformation camp and the other in the Renaissance camp, and shifts its weight from foot to foot according to who expounds it, three things have to be said, Frist these positions are all subjectivist in character–that is, they all depend on denying at some point the correlation between Scripture and faith, biblical revelation and inward illumination, the Spirit in the Scriptures and the Spirit in the heart, and on appealing to the latter to justify forsaking the former. In other words, one only reaches them by backing at some point one’s private view of what the Bible is, or should be, driving against what it actually says, and jettisoning in practice part of what it teaches in order to maintain this private opinion. … Second, these positions are all unstable, for they recognize no objective criterion for truth, nor method for establishing it, save the more or less speculative reasoning of individual theologians, whose conclusions never command full agreement within their own camp, let alone outside it. The pendulum keeps swinging all the time; systems rise and fall; theological fashions, like fashions in the styling of cars or ladies’ hats, rapidly come and go. The first quarter of this century was the age of liberalism, dominated by Troeltsch and Harnack; the second quarter was the age of dialecticism, dominated by Brunner and Barth; the third quarter was the age of existentialism, dominated by Bultmann and Tillich; the fourth quarter has been the age of liberation theologies, chiefly Latin American, black, and feminist; the twenty-first century will no doubt see other fashionable ‘isms’, and other dominant thinkers rising and falling. The truth is that the world of Renaissance theology is a desert of continually shifting sand, where stability is impossible. . . so far as they fail to uphold the authority of the Spirit in the Scriptures over the Spirit in the theologian, and deviate from the task of expounding and applying what the Bible actually says, these positions are really sub-Christian. --J.I. Packer, God has Spoken: Revelation and the Bible. (Baker, 1965, 1979, 1993)

JI Packer

First, why does inerrancy matter? Why should it be thought important to fight for the total truth of the Bible? . . . I, however, am one of those who think this battle very important and this is why. Biblical inerrancy and biblical authority are bound up together. Only truth can have final authority to determine belief and behavior, and Scripture cannot have such authority further than it is true. A factually and theologically untrustworthy Bible could still impress us as a presentation of religious experience and expertise, but clearly we cannot claim that it is all God’s testimony and teaching, given to control our convictions and conduct, if we are not prepared to affirm its total trustworthiness. Here is a major issue for decision. . . So the decision facing Christians today is simply: will we take our lead at this point from Jesus and the apostles or not? Will we let ourselves be guided by a Bible received as inspired and therefore wholly true (for God is not the author of untruths), or will we strike out, against our Lord and his most authoritative representatives, on a line of our own? If we do, we have already resolved in principle to be led not by the Bible as given, but by the Bible as we edit and reduce it, and we are likely to be found before long scaling down its mysteries (e.g., incarnation and atonement) and relativizing its absolutes (e.g., in sexual ethics) in the light of our divergent ideas. . . . once we entertain the needless and unproved, indeed unprovable notion that Scripture cannot be fully trusted, that path is partly closed to us. Therefore it is important to maintain inerrancy, and counter denials of it; for only so can we keep open the path of consistent submission to biblical authority, and consistently concentrate on the true problem, that of gaining understanding, without being entangled in the false question, how much of what Scripture asserts as true should we disbelieve. . .
--JI Packer, Beyond the Battle for the Bible

JI Packer

Is inerrancy really a touchstone, watershed and rallying point for evangelicals . . . what is centrally and basically at stake in this debate, and has been ever since it began two centuries ago, is the functioning of Scripture as our authority, the medium of God’s authority, inasmuch as what is not true cannot claim authority in any respectable sense.
--JI Packer, Beyond the Battle for the Bible

JI Packer

To the Puritans, Scripture, as a whole and in all its parts was the utterance of God: God’s word set down in writing, his mind opened and his thoughts declared for man’s instruction. … That which was delivered by such a multiplicity of human authors, of such different background and characters, in such a variety of styles and literary forms, should therefore be received and studied as the unified expression of a single divine mind, a complete and coherent, though complex, revelation of the will and purpose of God. … ‘Think in every line you read that God is speaking to you,’ says Thomas Watson—for in truth he is. What Scripture says, God says.
--JI Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life

JI Packer

We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant. However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of his penman’s milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise. So, history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: since, for instance, non-chronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed. --J.I. Packer’s shorter commentary on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, in Explaining Biblical Inerrancy

JI Packer

The truthfulness of Scripture is not negated by the appearance in it of irregularities of grammar or spelling, phenomenal descriptions of nature, reports of false statements (e.g., the lies of Satan), or seeming discrepancies between one passage and another. It is not right to set the so-called “phenomena” of Scripture against the teaching of Scripture about itself. Apparent inconsistencies should not be ignored. Solution of them, where this can be convincingly achieved, will encourage our faith, and where for the present no convincing solution is at hand we shall significantly honor God by trusting His assurance that His Word is true, despite these appearances, and by maintaining our confidence that one day they will be seen to have been illusions. Inasmuch as all Scripture is the product of a single divine mind, interpretation must stay within the bounds of the analogy of Scripture and eschew hypotheses that would correct one Biblical passage by another, whether in the name of progressive revelation or of the imperfect enlightenment of the inspired writer’s mind. Although Holy Scripture is nowhere culture-bound in the sense that its teaching lacks universal validity, it is sometimes culturally conditioned by the customs and conventional views of a particular period, so that the application of its principles today calls for a different sort of action. --JI Packer; Explaining Biblical Inerrancy

Dec 7, 2022: Gospel Coalition: What’s the Future of Evangelicalism? Let J. I. Packer Show the Way.
When J. I. Packer died in 2020, post-war evangelicalism was left with very few remaining representatives of its early days. He lived through three waves of evangelical ecclesiology and scholarship and also helped launch a fourth. Can his life and ministry show us the way forward?

J. I. PACKER (1926-2020) "The Only Hope of the World is the Lord's Return" : James Innell Packer, better known to many as J. I. Packer, was one of the most famous and influential evangelical leaders of our time. He died Friday, July 17, at age 93. We honour his remarkable life and ministry by reliving an interview when he was 80 years of age. Packer, was an English-born Canadian evangelical theologian in the low-church Anglican and Calvinist traditions. His last teaching position was as the Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, in which he served from 1996 until his retirement in 2016, due to failing eyesight. He is considered one of the most influential evangelicals in North America.

JI Packer

"All devices for exerting psychological pressure in order to precipitate 'decisions' must be eschewed, as being in truth presumptuous attempts to intrude into the province of the Holy Ghost. Such pressures may even be harmful for while they may produce the outward form of 'decision,' they cannot bring about regeneration and a change of heart, and when the 'decisions' wear off those who registered them will be found 'gospel-hardened' and antagonistic."
-JI Packer; A Quest for Godliness

JI Packer