It is only fitting that I structure my introduction in the same way: why readers should get to know Packer, what Packer’s books are like, and the benefits of reading Packer. Packer divides it into three sections: why we should know God, what God is like, and the benefits of knowing God. Packer’s Knowing God is not about hermeneutics, but actually knowing God. I got the distinct impression that he was passing the baton. It also had a formative influence on the eventual shape of my dissertation, my calling, and much of my subsequent work. That handoff symbolized how the church always relays the faith-from one person to the next. “My windows are open,” he commented.Īnd then he said something to the effect of “That’s for you and your generation to handle.” I got the distinct impression that he was passing the baton. He confessed that he did not know a lot about it, but said that he was interested. After his lecture, I asked him about deconstruction, the latest challenge to biblical interpretation at the time. He then went on to set out an evangelical hermeneutic, laying special weight on the importance of the Holy Spirit’s work as illuminator and interpreter. Packer engaged the big names in 20th-century hermeneutics-Bultmann, Heidegger, Fuchs, and Gadamer-and assessed their significance for coming to know God via biblical interpretation. Packer clearly understood the problem and faced up to it. This quickened my heartbeat, for I had come to Cambridge to answer the question, “What does it mean to be biblical when we speak about God?” I had learned that there was no easy way around the challenge of the plurality of interpretations, in which everyone, or at least every denomination, finds in the Bible what they think is right in their own eyes.
The topic of Packer’s Tyndale House address was biblical authority and hermeneutics. He later moved from Oxford to Trinity College, Bristol, and eventually to Regent College, Vancouver, where he taught theology from 1979 to 2016, long after his official retirement. He obtained all his degrees, including his doctorate, from Oxford University and later served as warden of Latimer House, the Oxford counterpart of Tyndale House. That in itself was impressive, as Jim was decidedly an Oxford man. Packer had come to Cambridge to give a lecture at Tyndale House, a study center for evangelical biblical scholars. It proved to be an apt choice: Packer is one of the handful of authors I’ve met who lived up to, and in his case surpassed, the mental image I had constructed through reading his works. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia was the second). It was also the first book I gave to the woman who would later become my wife (C. Knowing God had been published in 1973 and was by then an established bestseller. Packer, the elder statesman of evangelical theology-and had been for some time. Packer in Cambridge in the mid-1980s when I was a doctoral student at Cambridge University.
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