On December 18, 1990, J. I. Packer wrote me a postcard, which included this phrase in his fine print: “Come after your wife, whisper in your ear: Ellis Peters, Elizabeth Peters, Andrew Greely, Ralph McInny and see how she reacts.
They’re all mysterious contemporary novelists. There’s a story behind that.
- In the late 1980s.
- I felt a middle-aged malaise: not to leave my wife.
- To sail the world or to buy a motorcycle.
- But to find communion with other pastors of various denominations who really appreciate God’s sovereignty in salvation.
- A little one? And a great joy?”Unspeakable Joy”.
- As Peter calls it (1Pe 1.
- 8).
I knew pastors like that were there somewhere, because crowds were gathering at Southern Baptist Founders conferences and Banner of Truth conferences. But there was a certain tone I wanted to give: very serious?Honestly serious, really happy? Charismatic joy. Really rooted in history – in the lineage of Luther, Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones and Packer. Ricly contemporary?With the best songs of worship of the Great God, Really passionate about global missions and unreserved peoples. love with the local church. Do you really brave?Willing to say aloud: killing babies in the womb is abhorrent and that racial respect, justice and harmony really matter?
That’s the flag I wanted to live up. I wanted to see who would come to sing with me under this kind of saturated preaching of the Bible and reformed theology.
How can I do that? How can I help pastors take this seriously? Nobody knew me. Why would they come? He needed a speaker whom the pastors knew and respected and who believed in the vision. I wrote to J. I. Emballeur. My big surprise, he was ready to come. And in the spring of 1988, we held the first Bethlehem Shepherds Conference; Since then, she has met every year. He did this kind of thing over and over again for nameless churches and conferences. He was a servant.
Back to the mysterious novelists
While I was here for the conference, Christmas and I invited him and the other speakers to dinner at our house. During the conversation, it was discovered that Christmas likes to read mystery books. Packcker was excited, who are your favorites?Can I see your collection?Did they both disappear in it? Christmas Library He never forgot those happy moments and always remembered them in conversations or correspondence for decades.
Hence the advice of your postcard: I could arouse more affection if I approached my wife and whispered the name William Kienzle instead of John Calvin.
So for me, the name J. I. Packer means Reformed theology in the hands of a servant. He didn’t try to stand out, but he tried to fall behind what others dreamed of. He had the power to design and lead a movement. But he was spiritually ready to serve.
Clearly, there is a difference between leadership and influence. There were many popular leaders whose influence lasted little, but the silent and regular production of Packer’s books, and his behind-the-scenes work in movements led by others, have probably solidified. and deepened the evangelical and reformed resurgence with more effect than many more visible leaders.
I knew the work of a theologian isn’t really very glamorous. He wrote in 1991:
“Theologians are called to be the water and sewer engineers of the church; it is your job to see that God’s pure truth flows in abundance where it is needed and filter out any invasive contamination that could harm your health. (Search for mercy, 15).
In other words, theology reformed in the hands of a servant
Another example of Packer’s server heart was his willingness to promote other people’s editorial projects. His name appears in the mentions on the back cover of many books, one wonders how he had time to write his own. When I say “promote other people’s editorial projects,” I think not only of their writing summaries, but also of their contribution prefaces and introductory sketches.
In my experience, one of Packer’s productions had an impact on a bomb. In 1958, Banner of Truth reprinted John Owen’s book, Death in the Death of Christ, a three hundred-page ex display of the final (or limited) atonement (the L of TULIP). Packer was invited to write an introduction. I consider these efforts to be the work of a true servant, as introductory sketches are often buried and forgotten, and only serve to guide readers to broader work.
But this time, the silent influencer, unpretentious and without prominence, dropped a bomb. This, introduction, took his life. It has been reprinted in several forms and is now available for free online. I mean, bomb, because when it was printed as an independent essay, it blew up the walls of John Owen’s difficult diction and spread much more on its own than in Owen’s book.
I consider this essay (to change the metaphor of the brick pump) as one of the most important elements of the reformed resurgence of the last fifty years. His essay was not primarily about the final atonement, but about the gospel. And Packer argued that the five points of Calvinism, with all its limitations (which he details), do the great service of clarifying how God’s saving work, heralded in the gospel, is diluted by the rejection of the five points of historical Calvinism. . He wrote,
“It doesn’t matter if we call ourselves Calvinists; what matters is that we must understand the Gospel biblically. But this, we think, actually means understanding it as historical Calvinism. The alternative is to understand it and distort it . . . Modern evangelism. ” In general, he has stopped preaching the gospel in the old fashioned way and let us frankly admit that the new gospel, moving away from the old, seems to us a distortion of the biblical message (Pursuit of Godliness, 137).
Explains the distortion
“Our minds have been conditioned to think of the cross as a redemption that does less than redeem, and of Christ as a Savior who does less than save, and the love of God as a weak affection that cannot drive anyone out of it. . . Hell without the help of human faith as the help that God needs for this purpose. As a result, we are no longer free to believe or preach the biblical gospel. We cannot believe it because our thoughts are caught up in the task of synergism. We are tormented by the Arminian idea that if faith and unbelief are responsible acts, they must be independent acts; therefore, we are not free to believe that we are completely saved by divine grace through faith, which is the very gift of God and flows from Calvary. Instead, we engage in a mind-boggling kind of double-thinking about salvation, telling ourselves, one instant, that everything depends on God, and the next that everything depends on us. The resulting mental confusion takes away from God much of the glory we must give him as the author and finisher of salvation, and from ourselves with much of the comfort that we can derive from knowing what God is to us. (Search for mercy, 137).
This booklet (written as a support sketch) sounded so clear, blunt and beautiful that, for many of us, we knew that it was (to change metaphor again) the music of our homeland. It’s true. It’s completely biblical. It was the liberation, of our “confused” minds, of the strange shirt of philosophical strength that prevented dozens of texts from being understood about what they really meant. Brick construction. Music and more. Packer played a gospel recovery trumpet.
It is no coincidence that the last quarter of a century among evangelicals has seen a reformed resurgence and a proliferation of movements, books and conferences under the slogan “Focused on the Gospel”. For those who see the world and the Word as JIPacker saw it, they are not separate movements.
All because the humble servant was ready to write an “introduction” that should obviously have been overshadowed by a great book. But the Lord Jesus told us how it works: “Whosoever wants to make great among you is what you serve?(Mt 20. 26).
J. I. Packer was a great man. Did you pay full attention to my wife’s mystery novels, help get a conference of unknown pastors off the ground, reject theological sewers, write hundreds of recommendations for other people’s books, or support the reissue of John Owen? Here we have reformed theology in the hands of a servant. Or, as you would like to be told, here is the biblical gospel in the hands of a servant.