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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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November 2006 Photo: Sue Careless
David Thurlow and Ian Wetmore
Eminent theologian Dr. J.I. Packer of Vancouver is well known to readers of TAP and to Canadian Anglicans as a defender of the Christian faith. Whether through some of the many books he has authored, his columns in Christianity Today, or his involvement in Anglican Essentials Canada, we know him as a man of prayer who speaks boldly yet humbly for the truth of the Gospel.
To celebrate his 80th birthday, and to give thanks to God for his profound influence on, and great contribution to the wider Church, Packer was recently honoured when Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama sponsored a conference titled “J.I. Packer and the Evangelical Future.”
Included in the impressive list of speakers were well-known theologians, seminary deans, preachers and authors, such as David Neff and Richard John Neuhaus, editors of Christianity Today and First Things respectively, and popular Christian author and apologist Charles Colson. But the two bright lights of the conference–and we’re not just saying this because we’re Canadian–were the Canadians, Edith Humphrey and Bruce Hindmarsh. Dr Humphrey spoke loving words of encouragement, especially to Anglicans in these troubled times. She urged us to heed Dr Packer’s insistence on “Trinitarian Theocentricity”– to focus on the God Who Is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–and to place worship above evangelism, for effective evangelism can only be rooted in “right worship” which is the literal meaning of “orthodoxy.” Packer, she says, warns us against worship of diversity, both in forms of worship and in variety of beliefs, and counsels a return to the classic Anglican approach to unity in essentials, and tolerance of diversity only in the nonessentials. Years before the present “individualism fetish,” Humphrey said, Packer was “speaking and writing lovingly of the personal God, the One who is three Persons, who loves each of us and never allows any of us to escape his mind.”
Dr Hindmarsh spoke on “Retrieval and Renewal,” by which he means looking back to the Great Tradition of teaching, worship and spirituality as it has been embraced through the centuries, and drawing from it in order to renew the Church today. He shares with Packer a love of the Puritans and has a particular research interest in evangelical spirituality and the evangelical movement in the 18th and 19th centuries. He presented Dr Packer as a humourous, fun-loving individual who, at the age of 80 has all the vitality of A.A. Milne’s Tigger. He spoke of Dr. Packer as a modern day Robin Hood able to dig deep in the treasures of Christian theology presenting them to the spiritually impoverished in our day. “To be evangelical,” says Hindmarsh, “is to be of the Gospel, seeking to be informed and shaped by it in every aspect of life.” Early evangelicals were able to emphasize a very important balance: the uniqueness of the individual while stressing the necessity of belonging to a larger community--membership in the Body of Christ, to use St Paul’s terminology. This is in stark contrast with the current overemphasis in so many circles on the uniqueness of the individual and his “personal” relationship with the Saviour apart from and above the rest of the Church. Of great importance to classic evangelicals is frequent recourse to the “ordained means of grace,” including preaching, Holy Communion, common prayer, public meetings and fellowship in homes. All these were occasions in which God was expected to act. And who would not agree that these are occasions which all Christians should seek out, confident that God will indeed visit his people and pour out his grace?
Dr Packer himself spoke at the close of the conference. He thanked each of the speakers for their offerings, but his most striking moment was in response to a question put to him regarding what he thought was perhaps the greatest threat to the Church. ‘Liberalism’ was the answer he gave. He claimed that it breeds agnosticism, and therefore must be eradicated from the Church. He argued that liberalism is an ideology which has little or no confidence in the truth claims of the Gospel and thus presents an ineffective witness to the world.
Would that we had many more teachers of the faith with the courage and insight of J.I. Packer.
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Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2006 |