It's Time to Re-read Knowing God by J.I. Packer

It seems like the generation before us is dying. This week, John Lewis of the Civil Rights Movement, and J.I. Packer, went to eternity.

I'll write about Lewis elsewhere. But I'd like to quote this article, a book review of Alistair McGrath's biography of Packer from the late '90s. (I've read McGrath's biography of Calvin, so I'm sure this one is excellent). In explaining Packer's frustration with the pietism of the holiness teaching in the Keswick movement in England (a movement that deeply affects our own evangelical teaching on the Christian life):

*That's when, by "a happy accident," he found the Puritans. Gaining a reputation for bookishness in CU circles, Packer had been asked to oversee the library of the OICCU shortly after his conversion. "Just out of nosiness" ("I'm a nosy person"), he started sniffing through the books. He found an edition of John Owen's On the Mortification of Sin in Believers—pages still uncut—and started reading: "By faith fill thy soul with a due consideration of that provision which is laid up in Jesus Christ; for this end and purpose that all thy lusts, this very lust wherewith thou art entangled, may be mortified by faith. Ponder on this, that though thou art no way able, in or by thyself, to get the conquest of the distemper; though thou art even weary of contending and art utterly ready to faint; yet that there is enough in Jesus Christ to yield thee relief." (underlining mine)

This quotation of a quotation--of John Owens, touched me this morning when I read it.  Faith, not works, is the way to deal with personal struggles. 

Packer apparently met lots of opposition from elements in the Church of England and the evangelical circles in England, but when he came to Regent College in Vancouver, things improved. In discussing Packer's contentious friendship with Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who asked him to visit toward the end of Lloyd-Jones' life:

*"I never saw him," Packer says. "He died before I could get there. It didn't make a great deal of difference," he says. "There's always heaven." 

Yes, heaven. His thoughts are that high and wide, though his feet are firmly planted here so long as he can continue to have a part in expanding the soul of Christ's bride. "I want to see a focused vision of spiritual maturity—the expansion of the soul is the best phrase I can use for it. That is, a renewed sense of the momentousness of being alive, the sheer bigness and awesomeness of being a human being alive in God's world with light, with grace, with wisdom, with responsibility, with biblical truth."

We should all dust off our copies of Knowing God, or find a copy, and remind ourselves what good theology is.