R.I.P. J. I. Packer

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James Innell Packer died on Friday, July 17, at age 93.

I first met J. I. Packer in the late 1970’s. He had come to speak at a church local to me, and I went to hear what he had say. I was a new Christian and had just read Knowing God so I joined the queue to meet him and have him sign my book.

The person in front of me made the silly mistake of disagreeing with something Packer had said, so I was treated to the pleasure of a five-minute demolishing of the person’s point. When my turn came, I decided not to disagree with anything. But I had questions. Lots of questions.

Happily for me (not necessarily for Packer), I was seated next to him at lunch so I plied him with my questions. The two answers that stayed with me were to: “why should I stick with the Anglican Church since it is gurgling its way down the toilet?” and “what exactly is the Bible?” (I was new to all this, remember).

The first answer was along the lines of, yes, the Anglican Communion may be on its way to ruin but what can you do personally to contribute to your parish to try and make it better. The second was: The Bible is God’s propositional revelation to man. Both answers appealed to me at the time – and still do. Funnily enough, 30 years later when I met him at an ANiC synod and reminded him of the second answer, he looked at me and said: “hmm, I’m not sure I would put it quite like that now”.

A great honour to have met him and a great loss for the church.

There is a very good article about J. I. Packer in Christianity Today. Read it all here:

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.
I. Packer was born in a village outside of Gloucester, England, on July 22, 1926. He came from humble stock, being born into a family that he called lower middle class. 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).

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. He carried a visible dent in the side of his head for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, Packer was uncomplaining and accepting of what providence brought into his life from childhood on.

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. Packer committed his life to Christ on October 22, 1944, while attending an evangelistic service sponsored by the campus InterVarsity chapter.

Although Packer was a serious student pursuing a classics degree, the heartbeat of his life at Oxford was spiritual. It was at Oxford that Packer first heard lectures from C. S. Lewis, and though they were never personally acquainted, Lewis would exert a powerful influence on Packer’s life and work. 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.

9 thoughts on “R.I.P. J. I. Packer”

  1. What a privilege to have been counted as one of Jim’s friends, and to have his endorsation of my spiritual autobiography and his encouragement for my academic work.

    He, like his friend and eventual colleague James Houston here in my city, owed a debt to CSL, who was an Oxford don when he was a student.

    He was a living lesson in how completely high intellectualism and intense love for people can be and must be fused in an individual Christian.

    My spiritual autobiography being lightly fictionalised, for the protection of a number of people living and dead, James becomes “PIJ” throughout. Not I hasten to add that HE needed any protection, his part in the drama being completely positive.

    It was typical of him that when I got home from my Father’s funeral in time for All Saints in 1979 he asked whether I had cried yet. I write this about the whole thing: My father used to pray over me at bedtime, when I was still at home and not very old, “Lord, please bless Diana, and make her strong, and brave, and wise, and good.” Evidently he is at it again. As You are. He was so warm, so chaste, so much better a man than I knew. After he was gone, all over England in his old parishes they remembered him before You, saying how kind he always was. He functioned so often blinded by migraine, emptied by vomiting till he was dry. He was not always sweet-tempered at home. The praying over me in bed ceased as I matured physically: he was completely comme il faut towards me always. Extraordinary emotional health in a posthumous child. The last and most complete bear-hug came after my honeymoon, when, embracing me, soft and warm against and about, he said, “Darling, I do so hope you are happy.” He knew things that nobody told him. He used to introduce me, tears of pride in his eyes, as “my horrible daughter, Diana”. It was left to my mother, so many years after he was gone, to say, “He adored you, you know.”

    After the funeral I broke down, back home in Vancouver, singing For all the Saints. To PIJ I said that my father represented “the fine flower of Chris‍tian civilisation”. [OLHD p. 481]

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  2. And another passage:

    November 1997:
    I have to write and publish something about Bishy’s Bad Little Book. So fluent, so lightweight! He can’t even make up his mind what his subject is! But let’s see what PIJ says to my draft. Darling Simmy will drop it in at Regent for me.

    Vancouver, 17.xi.97.
    Dear Pete,
    Arius Redivivus
    Some are beginning to say, “Wot Does Didie Think?” About The Bishop’s Book, of course. Perhaps it would be better to say “What do Sim and Didie think?” Until the other day we knew nothing about it except what we had heard or read in the Press. We shouldn’t like to assume that everything there is accurate. And unfortunately we have inhibitions so that we can’t say, “I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices the mind so.” But now at last we have it. My learned spouse has been reading our borrowed copy before me, and now it’s my turn. I have been writing. Before I put anything onto the Net, or let it go out in the name of our PBSC branch, I should like to get your opinion of this draft, and what may be missing or wrong with it. Yes, I realise that, if you are here at all, I am by no means the only pebble on your beach. Still, it’s the first time that I shall have asked you for any tutorial/supervisory work, and I may as well while there is time!

    I can’t seem to make this thing short, without risking that someone might say I have failed to be fair, or haven’t shaken absolutely all the apples, good and bad, out of the tree. You will note that in dealing with a liberal catholic I have used a certain amount of low cunning. I am also quite nasty in an urbane way: let me know if you think I have gone too far.

    There is no need to return this copy to me. If you have any comments perhaps you could ’phone or e-mail them to me. The mail is not to be relied upon. I shall be in Seattle for Thursday and Friday, but our tape has plenty of space for you if you catch us out.

    This has all been very exhausting, spiritually and mentally, for me. I have a sense of futility now that I have written something, knowing that it’s not only more important to pray for our bish than to argue with him, it is infinitely more so. Sim says that we should hope for a new Raphael rather than a new bishop out of this. I no longer enjoy controversy, if I ever did, and my poor old CNS is still easily worn out by reading and writing. It is beginning to emerge that I may have been for years in a state which would have amounted to full breakdown in a person less determined to carry on. I sometimes wish that my brain and temperament were housed in a more substantial body.
    Ever,
    Didie

    18 November 1997:
    Dear old PIJ, so prompt, so efficient, so clear-headed! So my Open Letter is ready to go, after one quick little chat on the ’phone. [OLHD pp.375-6]

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  6. “The term is over:
    the holidays have begun.
    The dream is ended:
    this is the morning.” + Aslan

    ‘The Last Battle’ – ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’
    C.S. Lewis Friday, November 22 + 1963

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    • He had been nearly blind for several years, so this is especially true. Our loss is his gain. Remember Kit and the three children and grandchildren in your prayers, all.

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