[JI] Packer and [Thomas] Howard touched on a still deeply-relevant historical truth: it is because Christian communities failed to nurture and transmit from generation to generation the full depth and breadth of the gospel in its intellectual rigor, illuminating every aspect of human life, that faith and reason came to be seen as opposites. Packer knew that especially among North-American evangelicals, anti-cultural and anti-intellectual sentiments disillusioned many younger Christians who hungered for a holistic, integrative view of faith and life. Packer sought to recover a broader Christian vision grounded in the Christ who became human so that we could become fully human by union with him. “To be fully Christian,” Packer wrote, “in other words, is to live; it is to be fully human.” And this is the message taught to us by the Scriptures and the Christian tradition. We hear this message from “some of the most luminous and titanic minds ever to appear on the human scene, as well as from peasants, shopkeepers, kings, hermits, Easterners, Westerners, Africans, Americans, and people of all other sorts and conditions.” And they all share this vision of what it means to be fully human because they know “that to have followed Christ the Savior is to have been brought to wholeness, freedom, and joy,” albeit often through great struggle and pain. These Christians all believed that in Jesus the Christ, God became “the second Adam,” not so that “they could escape from their humanness” but, on the contrary, so that they could “become human” since Christ was “the perfect example of all that humanity was meant to be.”
Needless to say, Packer (and Howard) were not promoting nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, which offered Christ as universal example of humanity attainable through rational reflection. Rather, they restated classic Christianity in emphasizing that only through union with Christ will we enter into the fullness of our humanity whose inherent dignity and worth everyone possesses by virtue of being made in God’s image. It is only through participating by grace in the humanity Christ accomplished in his passion, resurrection, and ascension, that human beings are freed from the power of sin and death, so as truly to enter into a life without fear, becoming free to serve others in love.
In all of his writings, including Knowing God, Packer promotes Christianity as a culture-generating force that humanizes all of life. He was critical, however, of contemporary Christian trends that merely mirrored culture, and warned that the humanizing power of the gospel required a Christianity nourished in the fullness of an authentic biblical faith, which places the living, cosmic Christ at the center of all human experience. With this vision, Packer joins giants in the faith like the second century church father Irenaeus, who believed that Christ “recapitulated” every dimension of humanity in himself, making “one new humanity” (Ephesians 2:15), beyond ethnic, racial or other divisions of any kind. Packer believed that schooling in classic Christianity of the kind I have outlined was vital for returning the church to the kind of life-giving, humanizing witness required for today. For the sake of this witness, the church should be unified across confessional boundaries, which is arguably the main reason for Packer’s signing of the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT) initiative in 1994.
The humanizing power of the gospel required a Christianity nourished in the fullness of an authentic biblical faith.Packer signed the document because he believed it to be “vital for the health of society in the United States and Canada that adherents to the key truths of classical Christianity—a self-defining triune God who is both Creator and Redeemer; this God’s regenerating and sanctifying grace; the sanctity of life here; the certainty of personal judgment hereafter; and the return of Jesus Christ to end history—should link up for the vast and pressing task of re-educating our secularized communities on these matters.”
It is this Christ-centered, and therefore humanistic, unifying theology that I also recall from my encounter with Packer. I first met him in 1994, when I was a UBC graduate student in comparative literature. By this time, I had become intensely interested in Reformation history and literature, particularly the connections between the English Calvinist non-Conformists and the German Lutheran tradition. To supplement my UBC offerings, Packer had agreed to a guided study on Puritan literature, with an emphasis—no surprise!—on John Bunyan, Richard Baxter, and John Owen. During this course, I was inspired by what I would call Christian humanism at its best: deep learning founded on a classics degree (Packer could cite Latin passages from Luther, Erasmus, Calvin, or Augustine at will, and he also commanded classical rhetoric and poetics) combined with Christ-centered theology and a strong concern for humanizing culture. This is the Christian humanist Jim Packer I recall and whose Christian humanist outlook I intend to honor as I take up the Packer Chair this fall.
Read it all.
