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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God is shaping the perfect figure of you into what will be your resurrected body and glorified soul.  You’ve been sanctified positionally so the sanctification of your person is sure to continue until it’s completion. 

Think of a cup being filled to the brim—or inflating a children’s play castle or a basketball to its entire design.  The thing being pervaded is what it is, but it is in the process of functioning fully and living up to its potential and peak performance until completely full.
Such gets at the sense of the Hebrew for “perfect” in Psalm 138:a[1], which reads, The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me.  David takes consolation in the idea that God will completely fulfill him and accomplish His purposes in him toward his chief end.  The text teaches that our perfect God will perfectly perfect His people.  So Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:24, Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.
God never discards His people as unfinished projects.  First Corinthians 1:8 reads, Who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
What is the basis of this profound assurance that Christians will undoubtedly have fought the good fight and finished their race?  The second part of Psalm 138:8 tells us: … thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever.  God’s mercy, ḥesed in the Hebrew, is a word pregnant with promise expressing His covenant loyalty to His people.  It is used in Psalm 136 at the end of each of twenty-six verses as a corporate, antiphonal exclamation.[2]  God’s faithful covenantal mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23).  So Christian, you can never lose your salvation and you will grow in your sanctification into the perfect you in Christ.  In answer to the last part of Psalm 138:8, Jesus says He will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5)![3]
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If you want a Christian culture, forget American politics. That is as fruitful as drowning yourself under a waterfall. Instead, if you wish for Massachusetts, California, Washington, Nevada, Montana, and all the rest of these fifty states, to bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ, then put down your politics, lay down your mail-in ballots, and grab a shovel. We have work to do! 

Paddling Up the Niagara
The neurotic optimism accompanying the American quadrennial election cycle seems as cockamamie and asinine to me as a man attempting to ride his homemade rowboat up the Niagara Falls. With a horde of eager tourists staring on in pure bewilderment, picture the hapless virtuoso of absurdity, paddling with the finesse of a drunken lifeguard, flapping as frantically against the currents as a penguin in a cheer competition, nearing the aquatic torrent of a three thousand ton wall of falling water, thinking he could scale it with such misplaced bravado, only to be consumed by the avalanche of its fury.
Every four years, we are invited into the same cultural absurdity. Each election, we are presented with a new brand of idealogue who will bring about the “Change We Can Believe In,” who will “Make America Great Again,” and who will help us all “Build Back Better.” Yet, like the magnificent fool, paddling with a boundless reservoir of natural stupidity, change, American greatness, and cultural betterment never come.
The reason for this could not be any more obvious. We were not meant to rowboat against the currents to travel up waterfalls in the same way culture does not change from a top-down point of view. More simply, politics flow downstream of culture; culture is downstream of the family, and the definition of insanity would be for the American people to get trapped in an endless cycle of mindless optimism, thinking: “Well… This candidate will be different.”
But, if there is one thing the American people are good at; they are incomparably resilient. Against all evidence to the contrary, over and against everything we have seen and experienced, every political season, we dutifully don our little row boats once more, falling for the same old lines, expecting this time it will all be different. But it isn’t. Each time we come underneath the mountain of watery lies; however, all we have done is drown ourselves in blind political positivism once again. My hope in this article is for us to stop getting wet and to change our perspective.
Today, I would like to paint a different picture of how to make America great again. I want to posit real change that you and I can believe in. And I want to give us all a robust Christian plan for when America eventually crumbles, enabling us to truly build it back better. If all that sounds good and lovely, then onward, Christian soldiers!
Changing Our Perspective
When the faithful pull back the societal curtains to survey the smorgasbord of today’s cultural malaise, feelings of disgust, confusion, and shock inevitably rise to the fore. If this is not happening, then stop what you are doing and check your pulse. With that out of the way, it is normal for Christians to feel like aliens in this God-forsaken land. For many of us, and by “the many,” I mean those who were not born yesterday, we remember the good old days (just a few years ago) when girls could not have penises, when teenagers at least needed parental consent before they could murder their babies in utero, and where it was biologically impossible for men to have periods and to get pregnant. Apparently, the grown-ups are now in charge, and that “reality” is on full and morbid display.
Clinging to such antiquated “myths” and apparent “fables” these days will land you in the same company as “flat-earthers” and “science deniers,” whatever that means. And yet, the same body politic viewing us as “moral dinosaurs” are the same ilk beckoning us to participate in their futile system. A system that has produced both Democrats and Republicans (ad nasuem) that fill the highest levels of power but without any perceivable change we can believe in.
This is because top-down politics do not work. Politicians are not the makers of culture; they are the products of culture. We have corrupt leaders because we are an evil people and not the other way around.
We must understand that the problems ailing this society run much deeper than a ballot box. If we want to change the world, this nation included, we need a plan that runs much deeper than the superficial two-party system we have been offered. We must also realize that we live in a microwave culture that is no longer patient enough to wait for the brisket on the smoker. We want our change to happen yesterday and can barely stomach a solution that has to be worked out over decades. Yet, this is precisely how we got here, refusing to engage this rotting culture for a hundred years while it willingly marinates slowly in its own skubalon.
We need a bottom-up, Biblical approach with the long view in mind.
A Nine-Step Biblical Approach
Step 1: The Conversion of Sinners
While the cultural Marxists continue to goad us into joining the next half-baked revolution, Christians must plod along faithfully and locally, sharing the Gospel with anyone and everyone who will listen (Acts 1:8). We do not march into the halls of power and demand anything from our pagan overlords… At least not initially. We humbly labor wherever we are so that men and women will know Jesus, which is precisely the model we see in the book of Acts. Whenever the faithful are parachuted into a world where exactly no one else around them has a Biblical worldview, the first step is always to declare the Gospel. Some will reject that message. Others will be converted by that message. But, our job is to preach it boldly, lovingly, truthfully, forcefully, and joyfully.
If we want a Christian culture, we must begin with making Christians.
Step 2: The Discipling of Believers
After someone is converted, we do not notch our Big-Eva Billy Graham-sized belts, plastering our conversion numbers on an 8k gigascreen, so that an overstuffed room full of mega-church consumers can be entertained. Unlike Lady Gaga and many in evangelicalism, we are not in it for the “applause” of men but for the obedience of God. Instead of letting new converts slip through the proverbial cracks, ill-equipped and unprepared for the Christian life, we have been commanded to disciple them. This means baptizing new believers and their children into the local, visible church, and teaching them what it means to obey Jesus in every aspect of their life (Matthew 28:18-20).
If we want a Christian culture, we must teach believers how to live like Christians.
Excursus: The Benefit of One and Two
If the first two steps (mentioned above) were undertaken with any degree of regularity, we would not be in our current predicament.
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