He published books on the reliability of the Bible. He championed the out-of-vogue doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture. Packer had an extraordinarily strong commitment to the view that the words of the Bible are the very words of God. Packer’s first book was a defense of the authority of the Bible, and this became both a lifelong passion and one of Packer’s most significant contributions to the evangelical church. That is his indisputable legacy, and I will highlight what I believe to be the most important ways in which Packer affected the direction of Christianity during his life.
Packer’s primary legacy is the influence he held over events in Christendom and over people’s lives during his lifetime. When we speak of the legacy left by a deceased person, we think misleadingly in terms of a speculative posthumous legacy that is impossible to predict. Despite this range, Packer consistently self-identified as a theologian, which we can therefore regard as his primary vocation. Packer had a career as a controversialist (by necessity rather than choice, he confided to me). For a quarter of a century, Packer’s involvement with Christianity Today gave him a platform as an essayist who frequently turned to topics of cultural critique. In both his publishing and speaking, Packer was famous as a Puritan scholar, but he was also a dedicated churchman who said that his teaching was primarily aimed at the education of future ministers, and he spent countless hours serving on church committees. Perhaps no one in history has written more endorsements and prefaces to the books of others than Packer did. His first book, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, began as a talk to a group of students (the publisher requested a pamphlet but Packer wrote a book).
#JI PACKER KNOWING GOD PDF FREE SERIES#
His signature book, Knowing God (which has sold a million and a half copies), began as a series of bimonthly articles requested by the editor of a small evangelical magazine. His publishing career was a case study in accepting virtually every request that was made of him. No audience or venue was too small to elicit Packer’s best effort. In both spheres, his generosity was unsurpassed. Packer’s fame as a speaker rivaled his stature as an author. But the world at large knows Packer as an author and speaker. He earned his livelihood by teaching and was known to those who were his students as a professor. Packer filled so many roles that we can accurately think of him as having had multiple careers. Packer’s move to Regent College in Vancouver in 1979 shocked the evangelical world but enlarged Packer’s influence for the rest of his life. In that role, Packer was one of the three most influential evangelical leaders in England (along with John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones).
In England, Packer held various teaching posts at theological colleges in Bristol, during which he had a decade-long interlude as warden (director) of Latimer House in Oxford, a clearinghouse for evangelical interests in the Church of England. He spent the first half of his career in England before moving to Canada for the second half. When Packer left Oxford with his doctorate on Richard Baxter in 1952, he did not immediately begin his academic career but spent a three-year term as a parish minister in suburban Birmingham. Lewis, and though they were never personally acquainted, Lewis would exert a powerful influence on Packer’s life and work. It was at Oxford that Packer first heard lectures from C. Packer committed his life to Christ on October 22, 1944, while attending an evangelistic service sponsored by the campus InterVarsity chapter.Īlthough Packer was a serious student pursuing a classics degree, the heartbeat of his life at Oxford was spiritual. Much more important than Packer’s accident was his conversion to Christ, which happened within two weeks of his matriculation as an undergraduate at Oxford University. Nevertheless, Packer was uncomplaining and accepting of what providence brought into his life from childhood on. He carried a visible dent in the side of his head for the rest of his life.
Packer’s life-changing childhood experience came at the age of seven when he was chased out of the schoolyard by a bully onto the busy London Road in Gloucester, where he was struck by a bread van and sustained a serious head injury. The religious climate at home and church was that of nominal Anglicanism rather than evangelical belief in Christ as Savior (something that Packer was not taught in his home church). He came from humble stock, being born into a family that he called lower middle class.
Packer was born in a village outside of Gloucester, England, on July 22, 1926. Packer, was one of the most famous and influential evangelical leaders of our time. James Innell Packer, better known to many as J.
0 kommentar(er)
