Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Why a Post-Christian World Needs Pastor-Theologians

Written by Kevin J. Vanhoozer |
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
This is no time for despair. We don’t need to reinvent the church but to rediscover it, for the church is God’s creation. This is no time to abandon theology but to drill down deeper to take every thought, and every social imaginary, captive to Christ. The local church is the place to cultivate biblical literacy, to learn what every Christian needs to know to represent Christ and his kingdom.

Karl Marx once complained that philosophy has “only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” What about theology? Does it have a better track record with effecting change?
Some today blithely dismiss theology as having long passed its use-by date. That view is short-sighted. The truth is that pastor-theologians are the ascended Christ’s gifts to the church (Eph. 4:8). Informed by the Word and empowered by the Spirit, Christ uses pastor-theologians both to interpret the world and to transform it. Like first responders, they enter the crisis of our post-Christian world and train disciples to address its most dire needs.
Disaster in the Making
We’re not in a Christian Kansas anymore. Tell-tale signs of our post-Christian world include Christianity’s declining influence, declining church attendance numbers, a decline in respect for the church, and the diminishing Christian influence on the main ingredients of our culture—its beliefs, values, and practices. In our post-Christian world, there’s also been a shift in how people understand and react to “Christian” as an identifier.
Sometime in the 20th century, the Western world awoke, like the minister in John Updike’s novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, to find it had lost its faith. The speed at which the “post” has staked its qualifying claim on Christianity is mind-boggling. What just happened?
No single argument or scientific discovery is responsible for the end of the Christian era. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age suggests the revolution was interior, in the way society images the world and humanity’s place in it. The reasons are complex, but the result is palpable: we inhabit a world where God’s existence isn’t felt to be obvious, intuitively correct, or plausible. The world feels this-worldly.
One of the many consequences of our post-Christian culture stands out: post-literacy. From the beginning, and even more so after the Reformation and the printing press, Christianity has been word-centered. In a post-literate culture, however, people communicate through a variety of multimedia platforms; the written word no longer holds pride of place. In a culture saturated by TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, attention spans need to be only a few minutes long (sorry, long-winded preachers).
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Why You Should Read J.I. Packer

Written by Kevin J. Vanhoozer |
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
This is the primary benefit of knowing Packer: not to become more like him, but to be inspired to become more like Christ. Every pilgrim needs words to sustain us in the journey. The benefit of knowing Packer is having a wise, godly, and winsome companion along the way.

I first met J. I. Packer in Cambridge in the mid-1980s when I was a doctoral student at Cambridge University. He was already J. I. Packer, the elder statesman of evangelical theology—and had been for some time. Knowing God had been published in 1973 and was by then an established bestseller. It was also the first book I gave to the woman who would later become my wife (C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia was the second). 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.
Packer had come to Cambridge to give a lecture at Tyndale House, a study center for evangelical biblical scholars. That in itself was impressive, as Jim was decidedly an Oxford man. 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. 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.
The topic of Packer’s Tyndale House address was biblical authority and hermeneutics. 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. Packer clearly understood the problem and faced up to it. That alone was significant. But there was more to come.
For half a century, J. I. Packer’s classic has helped Christians around the world discover the wonder, the glory, and the joy of knowing God.
Stemming from Packer’s profound theological knowledge, Knowing God brings together two key facets of the Christian faith—knowing about God and knowing God through a close relationship with Jesus Christ. Written in an engaging and practical tone, this thought-provoking work seeks to renew and enrich our understanding of God.
Named by Christianity Today as one of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals, Knowing God is now among the iconic books featured in the IVP Signature Collection. A new companion Bible study is also available to help readers explore these biblical themes for themselves.
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. 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. After his lecture, I asked him about deconstruction, the latest challenge to biblical interpretation at the time. He confessed that he did not know a lot about it, but said that he was interested. “My windows are open,” he commented.
And 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. I have been running ever since. That handoff symbolized how the church always relays the faith—from one person to the next. It also had a formative influence on the eventual shape of my dissertation, my calling, and much of my subsequent work.
Packer’s Knowing God is not about hermeneutics, but actually knowing God. Packer divides it into three sections: why we should know God, what God is like, and the benefits of knowing God. 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.
Why Knowing Packer Matters
Packer liked to describe himself as, above all else, a catechist: someone who instructs others in the Christian faith and life. A catechist need not be an academic. By definition, however, a catechist must be an ecclesial theologian, someone whose teaching builds up the church, one disciple at a time. Packer’s catechetical fingerprints are all over To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism (2020), an Anglican Church in North America project for which he served as theological editor, and which he wryly referred to as “Packer’s Last Crusade.”
As Packer elsewhere points out, Christianity is not instinctive to anyone. It is learned not on the street but in the pew. The content of the Christian faith—what the apostle Paul calls the “good deposit” (2 Tim. 1:14), what accords with sound doctrine, or what Packer calls the “Great Tradition”—is handed from one generation to the next. A Christian catechism teaches people everything they need to know in order to be a Christ-follower. Doctrine and discipleship fit hand in glove: action without doctrine is blind; doctrine without action is dead.
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