J. I. Packer: An Evangelical Life

by Leland Ryken, J. I. Packer (Afterword)

Overview

For the last 60 years, J. I. Packer has exerted a steady and remarkable influence on evangelical theology and practice. His many books, articles, and lectures have shaped entire generations of Christians, helping elevate their view of God and enliven their love for God. In this new biography, well-known scholar Leland Ryken provides readers with a compelling overview of Packer's interesting life and influential legacy. Exploring his childhood, college days, theological education, and professional life in both England and America, this volume combines detailed facts with personal anecdotes so as to paint a holistic portrait of the man himself. Finally, Ryken identifies lifelong themes evident in Packer's life, ministry, and writings that shed light on his enduring significance for Christians today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433542558
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	10/14/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Leland Ryken (PhD, University of Oregon) served as professor of English at Wheaton College for nearly fifty years. He served as literary stylist for the English Standard Version Bible and has authored or edited over sixty books, including The Word of God in English and A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible.

Leland Ryken (PhD, University of Oregon) served as professor of English at Wheaton College for nearly fifty years. He served as literary stylist for the English Standard Version Bible and has authored or edited over sixty books, including The Word of God in English and A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible.

J. I. Packer (1926–2020) served as the Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology at Regent College. He authored numerous books, including the classic bestseller Knowing God. Packer also served as general editor for the English Standard Version Bible and as theological editor for the ESV Study Bible.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Childhood and Teen Years

(1926–1944)

When we consider great and famous people, it is natural to think of them as having always been great and famous. After all, that is how we know them.

The J. I. Packer that we know certainly ranks as a great and famous man. In 2005, Time magazine included Packer in a list of "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America," and entering the name James I. Packer on an Internet search engine yields over four million results. When we consider data like that, it is natural to believe that Packer has always been great and famous.

But, of course, this is untrue. Great and famous people are not born so, but as ordinary specimens of humanity. James Innell Packer was no exception.

Early Years

Packer was born on July 22, 1926, in the village of Twyning, near the city of Gloucester. His childhood home was in the heart of Gloucester, which is located in a region of England known as the South West, not far from the border of Wales. Packer calls Gloucester a market town. It is also a cathedral city, which means that the church has a more-than-usual institutional visibility on the local scene. Cathedral cities in England perpetuate the external rituals of the Anglican faith, creating plenty of scope for nominal Christianity.

At the time of Packer's upbringing, Gloucester was also a rail center of some importance in England, and his father, James Percy Packer, oversaw the general office of the Great Western Railway at Gloucester. By Packer's account, his father was unsuited for major responsibility and was comfortable with the fact that his duties mainly involved dealing with such matters as lost luggage claims. The office staff consisted of only two people beyond Percy — a junior clerk and a typist. The Second World War increased the workload enormously, and at the age of fifty-two, Packer's father suffered a temporary mental collapse leading to early retirement.

The Packers were thus a lower-middle-class family, and we can say that J. I. Packer came from humble roots. In fact, a generation or two earlier, his ancestors had farmed in Oxfordshire. Throughout his life, Packer has retained what Britons call "a West Country burr," which one dictionary defines as a way of speaking English in which the "r" sound is more noticeable than in ordinary pronunciation.

People who know Packer can attest that he has never lost the common touch. One friend recounts that Packer commended a local restaurant to her with the statement: "This place has a homespun feel. That's why I like it." I recall that when the translation committee that produced the English Standard Version met in Cambridge, England, the committee members occasionally ate the noon meal in a restaurant, and Packer was faithful in making the waitress feel appreciated. Similarly, when Packer ate the evening meal in my home on the occasion of my first meeting him in Wheaton, he inquired of my wife what the main dish was called and commended her for its deliciousness.

Throughout his childhood years, Packer lived in a modest rented home. On the ground level were what former generations called a "front room" (a living room for receiving guests), a dining room, a kitchen, a pantry, and what in England is called a "scullery" (an all-purpose kitchen and laundry room). There was a piano in the front room. The upstairs consisted of three bedrooms and a bathroom. Gas lighting was replaced by electricity when Packer was six.

Packer was the firstborn child in his family, with his sister, Margaret, being born three years later. His middle name, Innell, sounds nearly aristocratic, and the initials J. I., by which Packer became known, are immediately impressive (perhaps especially to American ears). Innell is a Packer family name, and its choice as a middle name is an endearing piece of family history. An unmarried second cousin of Packer's father bore the surname of Innell, but she was the last in a family line. Packer's father acquiesced in her request to give his newborn a middle name that would perpetuate her family name.

Packer describes his early years as uneventful. The family's house had fenced-in front and back lawns, where Packer engaged in normal boy's play. His father's employment by the Great Western Railway made steam trains a fascination to him, and one of his favorite toys was a train set. He also played with a construction kit, drew pictures, and read.

From his early years, Packer was a shy boy who did not mingle easily with his peers. When asked in his eighties what he most remembers about his childhood, he replied, "Solitariness." While Packer was a self-described introvert, his sister was the opposite. Margaret had many friends, but Packer had "very few" (his own testimony). However, Packer claims that he has "always been able to be happy on my own."

People who have written biographically about Packer all describe him as a loner, solitary, and isolated in his childhood. Packer himself has shared that when he first felt the call to ministry during his second year in college, he hesitated because he saw himself as "an odd person, somewhat solitary and, as I thought and felt, very poor at human relationships." However, he has also recorded that God "overpowered me, telling me I must trust him and go ahead."

People who have known Packer in his adult years find it hard to picture him as anything but sociable and gregarious. When the translation committee of the English Standard Version met in Cambridge, it faced a daily choice between eating a catered lunch at Tyndale House or walking to a restaurant on the Cam River. An excursion to the restaurant extended the time to a whopping two hours, but Packer was a consistent advocate of the more sociable amble and sit-down lunch.

When I noted to Packer that people who know him today find him a gregarious person, he offered two explanations for the apparent contradiction. One is that introverts "don't enjoy being introverts" and find ways to compensate and even behave like extroverts in social situations. Second, when Packer became a Christian, the words love and fellowship became, he said, "heavyweight words" for him, and he consciously cultivated "the habit of fellowship."

The Packer family enjoyed an annual summer holiday, and their preferred vacation was vintage British — renting a bed-and-breakfast house on the seacoast. Except for one Welsh holiday, the family regularly went to Cornwall. Packer says the family enjoyed the Cornwall coast and saw no need to vary the routine. The family traveled with "privilege tickets" that were free to employees of the train company.

When Packer's academic ability became increasingly obvious as the years unfolded, his father was proud of his son's accomplishments, but he did not have the background to understand them. His mother, however, grasped what was happening and continuously showed interest in what Packer was learning at school.

Packer's maternal grandmother had been widowed in her forties and had retrained herself as a "district nurse" who visited patients. Her drive and initiative lived on in Packer's mother, whom Packer calls "a remarkable person, clearheaded and strong-willed." She attended a teacher training college and then had a successful teaching career at two or three schools before marrying Packer's father. Unfortunately, she suffered from anemia during Packer's growing-up years, an era when little help for the disease was available. She therefore led what Packer calls "a quiet life," resting on the dining room couch between two and four o'clock every afternoon.

Packer considers his mother to be the dominant parental influence in his life. She attained what Packer believes to have been saving faith at college, but it was of an Anglo-Catholic, "high-church" nature, expressed by what the Puritans called "formalism" (performing the standard rituals of the church).

A Momentous Accident at School

In September 1933, Packer began to attend the local "junior school." It was a difficult adjustment for the seven-year-old, who was subjected to bullying from other students. On the fateful day of September 19, a schoolmate chased Packer out of the school grounds and onto a busy street (London Road). Packer was hit by a bread van and thrown to the ground. The accident resulted in injuries that have affected Packer every subsequent day of his life.

Packer was taken to the Gloucester Royal Infirmary and rushed into surgery. The primary injury was trauma to the head. The external damage was a dent in the skull, which is a feature of Packer's physical appearance to the present day. The formal diagnosis was what Alister McGrath (quoting the surgeon's memorandum) calls "a depressed compound fracture of the frontal bone on the right-hand side of his forehead." Naturally, there was fear of damage to the brain, but it proved to be much less severe than might have been expected.

Packer spent three weeks in the hospital and then six months at home for recuperation, returning to school near the end of the academic year. For three years after the accident, he spoke slowly and with a drawl, and he never regained any memory of what had happened immediately before and after the accident. Two years afterward, the boy who had chased Packer from the playground (named Arthur Oliver Cromwell!) identified himself, which Packer received as new information.

The injury had huge repercussions for Packer, but as bad as the accident was, it was a story of providence and grace as well, beginning with the sparing of Packer's life. But the marvel goes further. The surgical procedure that was immediately performed required the extraction of fragments of bone from inside the skull to relieve pressure on the brain. The resident surgeon in the Gloucester hospital had just returned after an extended time in Vienna, where he had specialized in this very type of surgery.

Of course, the accident was traumatic for Packer's parents, who took every possible precaution to prevent further injury to their son's head. They curbed his physical activities in the years that followed and discouraged bicycle riding. Even more confining was a black aluminum plate, held in place by an elastic band, that Packer wore on his head from the time of the accident until the age of fifteen, when, he says, he "went on strike" and refused to wear it any longer. Packer refers to his appearance while wearing the plate as that of "a speckled bird."

A Reader Is Born

Packer's solitary nature intensified in the days following the accident. He felt marginalized; though he found a niche as a good learner who would help others (even those who bullied him) with their homework, he never fully participated in schoolyard games. Reading had always been more natural to Packer than sports. He recalls that he was a prodigious reader already at the age of four and always remained such, characterizing himself as "something of a bookworm." In the wake of his accident, this appetite for reading only accelerated.

A year or so after the accident, Packer's grandmother took him for a weeklong vacation to the coastal resort town of Torquay to help him recover from a bout of bronchitis (to which he was prone). The weather was rainy and unsuitable for walking on the beach. The boardinghouse where the pair stayed provided books for just such occasions. Deprived of his construction set and toy train, Packer began to read the books that were in his room.

He began with a collection of short stories by Agatha Christie entitled The Hound of Death. His grandmother then lent him some of her own Christie books. In his adult years, Packer became such a zealous reader of older spiritual classics that it is natural for us to think of those books as his primary reading material. But when Christianity Today conducted a poll of its contributors on the ten best religious books of the twentieth century, a nomination by J. I. Packer stood out. He chose the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien, with a supporting comment: "A classic for children from 9 to 90. Bears constant re-reading."

A Writer Is Born

While reading might be an expected result of an enforced convalescence, the path by which Packer became a schoolboy writer is less expected. That avenue was an ordinary typewriter.

Packer's fascination with typewriters began when he accompanied his father to the railway office on Saturday afternoon "catch-up" trips. There were two typewriters in the office, and Packer was allowed access to one of them. At the age of eight, he taught himself to type using four fingers. The subject matter of his typing was highly unusual — copying poems such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Hiawatha" and Robert Southey's "The Inchcape Rock," although it was not the poetry but the act of typing that he found rewarding.

Packer's passion for typing did not escape the notice of his parents, partly because it solved a problem in the making. A bicycle was the toy of choice among boys in Packer's milieu, where receiving a bike around the age of eleven was a virtual rite of passage. But Packer's parents were fearful of any physical activity that might further injure their son's head.

On the morning of his eleventh birthday, Packer hastened to the living room, where the family made a practice of placing birthday presents. He had given hints that he wanted a bicycle and expected to receive one. What he found was a used typewriter that seemed to him to weigh half a ton. Yet, old as it was, it had been well serviced.

If the birthday boy was disappointed, he did not let it show. He at once put paper into the typewriter and began to type. According to McGrath, the typewriter became "the most treasured possession of his boyhood." Its legacy was long lasting: to this day, Packer types his books and correspondence on a typewriter instead of a computer.

The acquisition of a typewriter gave impetus to Packer's early writing. He began to compose stories about school and space travel, two genres that youngsters of the time read in weekly publications. Packer contributed his stories to "magazines" produced by friends at school. It can be hard to pinpoint when an eventual author first contracts the "infection" of writing and publishing, but my theory is that the seeds are planted early. I have no intention of being overly dramatic when I ask what Packer's life and career would have been like if he had received a bicycle instead of a typewriter for his eleventh birthday.

Some sixty-five years later, Packer was able to see the hand of providence in his parents' decision not to give him a bicycle (he did receive a bicycle on his thirteenth birthday, when he was physically able to handle it). In this, Packer "came to discern that what he had experienced was outstandingly good parenting, though it had not felt like that at first." Packer added that he "cannot forget that the head injury became a happy providence eleven years later," excluding him from conscripted military service at the age of eighteen and enabling him to go to Oxford University, where he became a Christian, which Packer thinks "would hardly have happened to him in the army."

In September 1937, not long after that memorable eleventh birthday, Packer made the transition from the local "junior school" to the Crypt School in Gloucester. The school was prestigious, having been founded in 1539, the approximate time when King Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome and established the Church of England. Ironically, in view of Packer's nominal Christianity at the time, but prophetically in view of what he became, the Crypt School counted among its former students the English preacher and evangelist George Whitefield.

At the Crypt School, Packer chose to specialize in "classics." This involved the study of the language, literature, and history of ancient Greece and Rome. A double significance might be seen in this decision. First, when Packer went on to Oxford University, he again chose the track known as classics. Second, Packer was the only student in his class at the Crypt School to choose classics. It was an early indication of his willingness to travel less-trodden roads, a tendency that has led many to judge him to be "in a class by himself."

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "J. I. Packer"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Leland Ryken.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Cover Page,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
List of Photographs,
Introduction,
PART 1: THE LIFE,
Early Life and College (1926–1948),
1 Childhood and Teen Years (1926–1944),
2 The College Years (1944–1948),
Theological Education and Ministry (1948–1954),
3 The Post-College Year (1948–1949),
4 Graduate Student in Oxford (1949–1952),
5 Ministry (1952–1954),
6 Courtship and Marriage (1952–1954),
Professional Life in England (1955–1979),
7 Tyndale Hall, Bristol (1955–1961),
8 Latimer House, Oxford (1961–1970),
9 Return to the Academic Life (1970–1972),
10 Trinity College, Bristol (1972–1979),
Professional Life in North America (1979 to the Present),
11 From England to Canada (1978–1979),
12 Regent College (1979 to the Present),
13 Christianity Today (1958 to the Present),
PART 2: THE MAN,
14 A Portrait of the Man,
15 The Little-Known Packer,
16 What Packer's Style and Rhetoric Tell Us about Him,
PART 3: LIFELONG THEMES,
17 The Bible,
18 The Puritans,
19 Writing,
20 Anglicanism,
21 Theology,
22 Preaching and the Minister's Calling,
23 Controversy,
Afterword: J. I. Packer Reflects on His Life,
Sources,
Index,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This book offers a full and balanced portrait of a diligent and faithful theologian. But because J. I. Packer’s theology has always been pastoral, practical, catechetical, and eminently readable—instead of recondite, esoteric, or merely academic—it is appropriate that this welcome volume is itself down-to-earth, accessible, and reader friendly. Leland Ryken, as a veteran student of the Puritans, is the ideal author to write about the most influential Puritan of our time.”
—Mark Noll, Research Professor of History, Regent College; author, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911

“This book is a fascinating, insightful, and, to my mind, precisely accurate portrait of the same Jim Packer whom I have known for more than thirty-five years. What a joy to read this book and be challenged by Packer’s remarkable life!”
—Wayne Grudem, General Editor, ESV Study Bible; author 

“Without a doubt, this is now the definitive, most up-to-date biography of J. I. Packer, and it deserves high praise. With the sensitivity, wisdom, and sheer humanity that a fine biographer needs, Leland Ryken allows us to see the life, mind, and heart of this quiet but highly influential man. Traversing the notoriously complex and hazardous terrain of UK and US evangelicalism with impressive sure-footedness, Ryken not only helps us understand the man and his context, but ourselves as evangelicals.”
—Michael Reeves, President and Professor of Theology, Union School of Theology, United Kingdom

“A friendly portrait of a great evangelical, the man behind the headlines, full of insight into Packer’s genius as a brilliant communicator of the Reformed faith.”
—Andrew Atherstone, Latimer Research Fellow, Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford

“It is such a pleasure to read Leland Ryken’s biography of Dr. Jim Packer. Personally, I have been deeply blessed by Dr. Packer’s writing and teaching ministry for over fifty years since, as a student, I picked up “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God. I can also testify that his Knowing God was most often nominated by my seminary students as a work that profoundly influenced them. To be able to read about the man himself and to understand how God gifted and shaped him has been a moving and edifying experience. This is a good book about a great man.”
—Peter Jensen, former Archbishop of Sydney

“J. I. Packer is chief among the cadre of impressive British thinkers who have had a shaping influence on evangelical Christianity in North America over the past half-century. Indeed, his influence girdles the globe, and it shows no sign of abating as this great theologian approaches his tenth decade. This new biography builds on earlier Packer studies, but it offers distinctive insights into the humanity and ministry of a life lived well, with grace abounding and wisdom from above.”
—Timothy George, Distinguished Professor of Divinity, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University

“For evangelicals, J. I. Packer stands as one of the foremost theological leaders of this generation. His writings have illuminated the minds of countless Christians with the clarity of the Bible’s teaching. He has answered our questions, provoked our thinking, expanded our understanding, and always pointed us to Christ. I’m so glad that Crossway has produced this biography of the man behind the words.”
—Phillip D. Jensen, Bible Teacher and Evangelist, Two Ways Ministries

“Not every life warrants a book-length biography. But then, J. I. Packer’s is no ordinary life. Widely and justifiably regarded as one of the most influential evangelical theologians and Christian statesmen of the last one-hundred years, this meticulously written and remarkably insightful biography of one of my personal heroes deserves a wide reading. Packer’s impact on the Church will be felt and seen for years to come and I happily applaud Leland Ryken’s perceptive portrait of this truly great Christian man. I cannot recommend this too highly.”
—Sam Storms, Founder and President, Enjoying God Ministries