{"id":94912,"date":"2020-07-24T08:47:09","date_gmt":"2020-07-24T12:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=94912"},"modified":"2020-08-01T08:50:38","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T12:50:38","slug":"ct-bruce-hindmarsh-j-i-packer-was-the-robin-hood-of-evangelicalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=94912","title":{"rendered":"(CT) Bruce Hindmarsh–J.I. Packer Was the Robin Hood of Evangelicalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

J<\/span>. I. Packer was my teacher at Regent College when I was a young graduate student. Some years later, he became my colleague and next-door neighbor in the hallways at the college and a fellow church member at St. John\u2019s Anglican Church in Vancouver. I will forever be grateful to have known him. He shaped my life and thought in many ways, and I am not alone in this experience.<\/p>\n

In light of his recent passing<\/a>, I have been thinking more about his wider legacy and especially his significant contribution to evangelicalism as a whole. In the present political culture, however, the word \u201cevangelical\u201d or \u201cevangelicalism\u201d is freighted with a good deal of baggage that\u2019s worth shedding immediately.<\/p>\n

We can do so by going back in time. The Old English word \u201cgospel\u201d never got a proper Old English adjective and had to steal a Greek one: \u201cevangelical.\u201d But the noun and the adjective belong together. And as the great Bible translator William Tyndale put it, \u201cevangelical\u201d is a word that \u201csignifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man\u2019s heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance, and leap for joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

This vibrant relationship between word and life, message and experience, doctrine and devotion was absolutely central to the evangelical movements in Germany and English-speaking lands that emerged at the beginning of the modern period.<\/p>\n

Evangelicals today claim some sort of genealogical or theological continuity with these movements. But wherever we see the preaching of Jesus Christ generate new life and set people in joyful motion, that is where we properly use the adjective \u201cevangelical\u201d in its most important and basic sense. It is why we cannot, I think, abandon the term. Again, the words \u201cgospel\u201d and \u201cevangelical\u201d ought always to be kept together. Indeed, Jim Packer played a significant role in evangelicalism over the past six decades precisely because he helped those who identify as social<\/em> evangelicals to be theological and spiritual evangelicals as well.<\/p>\n

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Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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A wonderful description and appreciation of JI Packer by historian Bruce Hindmarsh. Oh, that more in our day who claim the Puritan tradition might also be as catholic as Packer was. (And you’ve got to see these illustrations by Phil Long!) https:\/\/t.co\/9tfyGvmDam<\/a> via @CTMagazine<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Travis L. Myers (@travismyers71) July 24, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n