James Innell Packer

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James Innell Packer , known as JI Packer (born July 22, 1926 in Gloucester , England , † July 17, 2020 in Vancouver ), was a naturalized Canadian theologian in the evangelical Anglican tradition. He wrote over 40 books and is considered one of the most influential evangelicals of the 20th century. He was a professor at Regent College in Vancouver. He became known in 1973 for his book Know God ( Knowing God ), which has sold in North America alone over a million copies.

Life

James Innell Packer was the older child of Dorothy and James Packer, an office worker on the Great Western Railway . He had a sister named Margaret three years younger than him. At the age of seven he was hit by a car and suffered a serious head injury that made him physically impaired. At the age of 15, for example, instead of the bicycle he wanted, he was given a typewriter that would continue to shape his life. As the only student of his year, he learned classical philology at the Crypt School. When he graduated from school, he won a scholarship to Oxford University where he made a Bachelor of Arts in 1948. During this course of studies he met CS Lewis for the first time , whose teaching would have an important influence in his life. He turned to a personal Christian faith through a sermon on October 22, 1944 at St. Aldate's Church in Oxford. He briefly taught Ancient Greek at Oak Hill Theological College , London, and began studying theology at Wycliffe Hall , Oxford in 1949 . In London he regularly attended the services of the Westminster Chapel , led by the famous preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones . In 1952 he was ordained a deacon , in 1953 a priest of the Anglican Church and was involved in the evangelical wing of the Church of England.

From 1952 to 1954 Packer was curate of a parish in Birmingham . During this time he was also able to publish a first, twelve-page article entitled The Puritan Treatment of Justification by Faith (German: The Puritan Contemplation of Justification by Faith ) in Evangelical Quarterly 24, No. 3. In 1955 he received his doctorate in philosophy and wrote about the salvation teachings of the Puritan Richard Baxter . Packer initially lectured at Tyndale Hall for six years and then at the Latimer Trust evangelical research institute. 1955-61 he lectured at Tyndale Hall , an evangelical college in Bristol . In 1961 and 1962 he was the librarian of the Latimer Trust founded by John Stott in Oxford in 1960 , an Anglican evangelical research institution, whose direction he then took over until 1969, and where he was honorary president until his death. In 1970 he became rector of Tyndale Hall, and from 1971 vice rector of Trinity College , which was formed from the merger of the three evangelical colleges in Bristol.

In 1977 the then British citizen was the only founding member of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy who was not a citizen of the United States . On this body he was in charge of the preparation of the Chicago Declaration on Biblical Inheritance of 1978 and the Chicago Declaration on Biblical Hermeneutics 1982, as he assumed an intermediary role.

In 1979 Packer moved to Canada to take a chair at Regent College in Vancouver , which he held until his retirement. This college has established the JI Packer Chair in his honor.

He was the executive editor of Christianity Today and has contributed frequently to the magazine.

Packer was the editor-in-chief for the English Standard Version , an evangelical revision of the Revised Standard Version , an English-language translation of the Bible .

In Vancouver, Packer was a volunteer curate in the conservative St. John's Shaughnessy Congregation, considered the largest Anglican congregation in Canada, until it decided in February 2008 to leave the Anglican Church of Canada . Since then, the parish has considered itself part of the Iglesia Anglicana del Cono Sur de América , since since the decision of the diocese to allow same-sex couples to be blessed , they no longer felt themselves in communion with the bishop and the synod . However, this status is controversial because it undermines the principle of territoriality of the local churches, which has been an essential principle of Anglicanism since the Reformation, and undermines the recommendations of the Windsor Report . Packer justified this decision with the fact that the decision of the diocese in this context was a falsification of the Gospel , contested the authority of the Scriptures and endangered the redemption of fellow men.

Packer went blind in 2015 so that he could no longer read and write himself. His last work , The Heritage of Anglican Theology (German: Legacy of the Anglican theology ), which he put together with the help of his wife, will appear in the 2021st

theology

Packer saw himself theologically as a Calvinist in the tradition of the Puritans . Especially the writings of John Owen had a lasting impact on him.

He was one of the most important advocates of biblical inerrancy, but rejected all fundamentalist biblicism:

" I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, and maintain it in print, but exegetically I cannot see that anything Scripture says, in the first chapters of Genesis or elsewhere, bears on the biological theory of evolution one way or the other. On that theory itself, as a non-scientist, watching from a distance the disputes of the experts, I suspend judgment, but I recall that BB Warfield was a theistic evolutionist. If on this count I am not an evangelical, then neither was he. "

" The fact that certain cultural and dispensational changes have changed the application of certain biblical passages to our time, as compared with the time when they were first written, must not be confused with the trustworthiness — that is, the inerrancy — of the passages themselves , as expressions of the truth and will of God for those to whom they were first addressed, and as applications of those unchanging truths about God and man which we also must apply, as God's wisdom leads us, to our own different situation. "

In 1978 he was one of the signatories of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy , which affirmed the inerrancy of the Bible.

He later supported the ecumenical movement but believed that Christian unity should not come at the expense of Orthodox Protestant doctrine. Yet he has received criticism from some conservatives for his ecumenical advocacy, particularly after the publication of the book Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission (Eds. Charles Colson , Richard J. Neuhaus ), in which Packer contributed.

Private

On July 17, 1954, he married Kit Mullett, a Welsh nurse with whom he later adopted three children. He also had two grandchildren.

Fonts

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James Packer died , ideaschweiz.ch, obituary of July 20, 2020.
  2. ^ Obituary from The Gospel Coalition accessed on July 18, 2020
  3. ↑ Time Magazine: The 25 most influential evangelicals in America
  4. ↑ Hauke ​​Burgarth: From cynic to theologian - JI Packer died at the age of 93 , July 22, 2020, Livenet
  5. ^ A b c Books & Culture: A Peacemaker in the Battle for the Bible
  6. ↑ The Vancouver Sun: Anglican congregation votes to split over same-sex blessing ( Memento from February 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ^ Christianity Today: Why I walked
  8. ↑ Johannes Blöcher-Weil: James Innell Packer has died , per media magazine, July 21, 2020
  9. ↑ Sue Careless: Vale: James Innell Packer (1926-2020) , website anglican.ink, July 21, 2020
  10. ↑ Hanniel Strebel: JI Packer: Doctrine and life go together 20 July 2020 Evangelium21.net
personal data
SURNAME Packer, James Innell
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Packer, James I.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-Canadian Evangelical-Anglican theologian and author
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Gloucester , England
DATE OF DEATH 17th July 2020
Place of death Vancouver , Canada