Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Friday, September 27, 2024
I hope God’s Crime Scene can help you answer this question by employing a number of very simple investigative tools detectives use every day. Criminal investigators recognize one important evidential truth: the identity of a suspect must account for all the evidence “in the room”. Whatever caused the origin of our universe must also account for all the other evidence we see “in the room” including the fine-tuning of the cosmos, the origin of life, the appearance of design in biology, our experience of consciousness and free agency, the existence of transcendent objective moral truths, and the enduring presence of evil and injustice.

In my book, God’s Crime Scene, I examine the universe as a “crime scene” and investigate eight different pieces of evidence through the filter of a simple investigative question: “Can the evidence ‘in the room’ be explained by staying ‘in the room’? This question is key to determining whether a death scene is a crime scene, and I typically play a game I call “inside or outside the room” whenever I am trying to determine if a death is, in fact, a murder. If, for example, there is a victim in the room with a gunshot injury lying next to a handgun, but the doors are locked from the inside, all the DNA and fingerprints in the room come back to the victim, the gun is registered to the victim and there are no signs of an outside intruder, this is simply the scene of a suicide or accidental death. If, however, there exist fingerprints or DNA of an unknown suspect, the gun does not belong to the victim, and there are even bloody footprints leading outside the room, I’ve got to reconsider the cause of this death. When the evidence in the room cannot be explained by staying inside the room and is better explained by a cause outside the room, there’s a good chance I’ve got a murder. When this is the case, my investigation must shift direction. I must now begin to search for an external intruder. I think you’ll find this investigative approach applicable as you examine the case for God’s existence. If all the evidence “inside the room” of the universe can be explained by staying “inside the room”, there’s no need to invoke an ‘external’ cause. If, on the other hand, the best explanation for the evidence “inside the room” is a cause “outside the room”, we’ll need to shift our attention as we search for an “external” intruder.
There are eight distinct pieces of evidence (in four separate categories) that must be explained when examining the attributes of our universe. These divergent categories of evidence all point to the same reasonable inference. The first category involves cosmological evidence. One important attribute of the universe is simply its origin. This first piece of evidence is critical to understanding the very nature of the cosmos and has been examined deeply by atheists and theists alike. As it turns out, nearly everyone agrees on two evidential inferences related to the origin of our universe:
The Universe Came In To Existence From Nothing
The evidence for the beginning of our universe is cumulative, diverse and substantial. The “stuff” of the universe (all space, time, and matter) came into existence from nothing, and all the evidence scientists have examined so far points to this reasonable conclusion.
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The regulative principle of worship suggests and bolsters a regulative principle of everything for the church. Doctrine, order, and doxology are a three-legged stool. When present and sturdy, these legs will bear great weight; when any are missing or compromised, collapse is imminent. Calvin would seem to agree with this thesis according to his famous statement about worship and soteriology in “The Necessity of Reforming the Church” (admittedly written before the presbyterian government was fully developed).

Thesis: No confessional presbyterian church will long remain confessional or presbyterian if it loses Reformed worship.
First, some definitions:

Confessional: orthodox soteriology and doctrine (doctrine of God, Christology, covenant) according to the Reformed confessions
Presbyterian: government by ordained male (per scripture) elders organized in accountable, graded courts
Reformed worship: scripturally regulated (RPW), simple, ordinary means of grace worship—a Reformed bucket to carry Reformed water.

Why will unscriptural, man-centered, culturally conditioned, over-contextualized worship undermine confessional orthodoxy? Because worship by its very form (which ought to be according to spirit—uppercase and lowercase— and truth) communicates certain things about the nature of God and man, thus theology proper and anthropology can’t help but be warped by unbiblical worship. Theology proper and biblical anthropology are the foundations of soteriology, which will also be warped by unbiblical (e.g.: revivalist or sacerdotal) worship.
Why will unscriptural, man-centered, culturally conditioned, over-contextualized worship undermine biblical, presbyterian church government? Because free-form, optional, variable worship forms suggest free-form, optional, variable ecclesial forms…or little form at all. And when worship is no longer led by ordained elders, government by ordained elders seems less plausible. Presbyterian order is not hierarchical, but neither is it excessively horizontal. Rolling it out too thin leads to its disintegration.
The regulative principle of worship suggests and bolsters a regulative principle of everything for the church. Doctrine, order, and doxology are a three-legged stool. When present and sturdy, these legs will bear great weight; when any are missing or compromised, collapse is imminent.
Calvin would seem to agree with this thesis according to his famous statement about worship and soteriology in “The Necessity of Reforming the Church” (admittedly written before the presbyterian government was fully developed).
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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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