Tomorrow would have been J. I. Packer’s 94th birthday. Tributes have flooded social media. His influence on my life began almost 30 years before I met him—through one special book.
I followed God’s call to preach in 1973 at the age of 16. During the months of seeking the will of God about the matter, one of the books I purchased and read was hot off the press: a first edition copy of J. I. Packer’s Knowing God.
Knowing God is considered a classic by just about everybody. In 2006, Christianity Today ranked it as one of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals in the 20th century. The book was updated in 1993 with a new preface by Packer.
Essentially the book addresses two primary points: knowledge about God and knowledge of God through Christ. Packer is deft at explaining who God is and how we can know him personally.
I remember sitting in my backyard swing and carefully reading and marking the book. I found it to be right in line with what my pastor had been preaching: a high view of God, His attributes, His sovereignty, majesty, and love for all through Christ.
Packer took God seriously. He took Scripture seriously. He took preaching seriously. He took holy living seriously.
God spoke to me through Packer’s Knowing God at a crucial time in my life.
This venerable, and in some respects modern day Puritan, cast a long shadow over the Evangelical world . . . and part of that shadow fell on a 16 year old boy in Rome, GA.
Which brings me to a funny story. At our annual SWBTS Preaching Conference in March, 2019, one of our speakers was Alistair Begg. During our late-night panel discussion after Begg had preached, I was seated next to him. A question was asked about books that had influenced our ministry. I mentioned Packer’s Knowing God and told the story of my reading it when I was a teenager. I mentioned my copy being a first edition. Begg’s wit immediately came into play as he offered to purchase it from me! I declined. When I remarked that I subscribed to Packer’s book but not to Packer’s Calvinism, Begg was incredulous, flashing a stunned look my way as the crowd chuckled. I assume until that point he assumed I was a Calvinist.
I had never met J. I. Packer until 2002 when the Board of Trustees of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, of which I was Vice-Chairman, invited him to come and speak during our fall semi-annual meeting. He was kind enough to allow a picture to be taken with me standing beside him; a picture displayed in my office at SWBTS for many years.
It was certainly a portrait of “the odd couple” if ever there were one. Packer was a tall, lanky, drink of water and could easily pass for a Texan (except for his accent). I am short, (and at the time slightly pot-bellied). He had a beautiful British accent and I have a Southern accent. He was Anglican and I am Baptist. He was a Calvinist and I am not.
I’ll never forget the wisdom Packer brought to the Board during that strategic time of change. With his soft voice and a tone with as much edginess of a polite golf commentator, he said a seminary faculty should be four things:
1. Scholars. Scholars enjoy analysis, discussion, academia, extending knowledge. They are life-long students who pursue their field. As scholars, we continue as students. “Value the mainstream, and seek to correct the eccentricities.” But remember, knowledge brings responsibility.
2. Colleagues. A faculty is a team and must work together as a team for the good of the institution and her students. No one man can carry an institution.
3. Theologians. We must build and maintain for others a theological construct as a foundation for systematic theology. This foundation is exegesis first, then Biblical Theology, Historical Theology, and finally Systematic Theology. First you collect the truth and then you apply the truth. Studying theology is intellectual sanctification—the mind controlled by God’s truth enables one to instruct students well.
4. Pastors. Faculty should be pastors because students are committed to our care. You cannot be a teacher without being something of a shepherd.
Wise words. He, being dead, still speaks.
Perhaps my greatest appreciation for Packer, and there is so much to appreciate him for, was his commitment to genuine expository preaching. “Scripture is God preaching” is one of my favorite quotes from Packer. He believed the job of every preacher is to let the text have its say.
Every preacher should read all of Packer’s books, including everything he said about preaching, but especially his chapter “Why Preach?” in The Preacher and Preaching: Reviving the Art in the Twentieth Century, ed. S. T. Logan (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1986). These words from pages 17–18 and page 4 respectively are pure gold:
The Bible text is the real preacher, and the role of the man in the pulpit or the counseling conversation is simply to let the passages say their piece through him. . . .For the preacher to reach the point where he no longer hinders and obstructs his text from speaking is harder work than is sometimes realized. However, there can be no disputing that this is the task. And by preaching the Bible one makes it possible for the thrust and force of “God’s Word written” (Anglican Article 20) to be adequately appreciated, in a way that is never possible through any type of detached study, or any kind of instruction in which a person speaks for or about the Bible as distinct from letting the Bible speak for itself.
Second, topical preaching has become a general rule, at least in North America. Sermons explore announced themes rather than biblical passages. Why is this? Partly, I suppose, to make preaching appear interesting and important in an age that has largely lost interest in the pulpit; partly, no doubt, to make the sermon sound different from what goes on in the Bible class before public worship starts; partly, too, because many topical preachers (not all) do not trust their Bible enough to let it speak its own message through their lips. Whatever the reason, however, the results are unhealthy. In a topical sermon the text is reduced to a peg on which the speaker hangs his line of thought; the shape and thrust of the message reflect his own best notions of what is good for people rather than being determined by the text itself. But the only authority that his sermon can then have is the human authority of a knowledgeable person speaking with emphasis and perhaps raising his voice. In my view topical discourses of this kind, no matter how biblical their component parts, cannot but fall short of being preaching in the full sense of that word, just because their biblical content is made to appear as part of the speaker’s own wisdom. The authority of God revealed is thus resolved into that of religious expertise. That destroys the very idea of Christian preaching, which excludes the thought of speaking for the Bible and insists that the Bible must be allowed to speak for itself in and through the speaker’s words. Granted, topical discourses may become real preaching if the speaker settles down to letting this happen, but many topical preachers never discipline themselves to become mouthpieces for messages from biblical texts at all. And many in the churches have only ever been exposed to topical preaching of the sort that I have described.
Who influenced Packer the most when it comes to preaching? Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
With the passing of J. I. Packer, we have lost not only one of the greatest theological minds in Evangelicalism, but also one who fostered faithful biblical preaching.
Tomorrow, on Packer’s birthday, I’ll post Part Two.