Pointing to the Pasturelands E-Book

J. I. Packer

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Best of Christianity Today
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 393

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

All theology is doxology.Anglican theologian J. I. Packer was one of the most widely respected Christian writers of the twentieth century. Author of over forty books and named one of the most influential evangelicals by Time magazine and the readers of Christianity Today, Packer's impact is immense. He was known for profound theological writing that was always lively and worshipful.Pointing to the Pasturelands recovers several decades of Packer's contributions to the pages of Christianity Today. This includes his editorial columns, longer articles, and brief answers to readers' theology questions. The book concludes with a profile of Packer from Mark A. Noll. Enjoy timeless insights from a man whose life was devoted to knowing God and making him known.

Leseprobe

POINTING

to the

PASTURELANDS

Reflections on Evangelicalism, Doctrine, & Culture

J. I. PACKER

Pointing to the Pasturelands: Reflections on Evangelicalism, Doctrine, & Culture

Best of Christianity Today

Copyright 2021 Christianity Today International

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are the author’s translation or are from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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Scripture quotations marked (NIV84) are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked Revised Standard Version (RSV) are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683595434

Digital ISBN 9781683595441

Library of Congress Control Number 2021940532

Lexham Editorial: Elliot Ritzema, Abigail Stocker, Abigail Salinger

Cover Design: George Siler, Brittany Schrock

CONTENTS

Foreword by Russell Moore

Part 1: Columns

1Satan Scores Twice

2’Tecs, Thrillers, and Westerns

3A Bad Trip

4The Unspectacular Packers

5Great George

6All That Jazz

7An Accidental Author

8Decadence à la Mode

9What Lewis Was and Wasn’t

10It’s Wrong to Eat People

11Nothing Fails Like Success

12John’s Holy Sickness

13Hype and Human Humbug

14Mistaking Rome for Heaven

15The Prayboy Club

16Klaus Bockmuehl’s Rich Legacy

17Why I Like My Pie in the Sky

18Humor Is a Funny Thing

19Fan Mail to Calvin

20How Will I Be Remembered?

21Surprised by Graphics

22God’s Plumber and Sewage Man

23Bungee-Jumping, Anyone?

24Packer the Picketed Pariah

25The Whale and the Elephant

26Fear of Looking Forward

27When Prayer Doesn’t “Work”

Part 2: Articles

28Fundamentalism: The British Scene

29Christianity and Non-Christian Religions

30Charismatic Renewal: Pointing to a Person and a Power

31Walking to Emmaus with the Great Physician

32Poor Health May Be the Best Remedy

33How to Recognize a Christian Citizen

34What Do You Mean When You Say “God”?

35The Reality Cure

36Rome’s Persistent Renewal

37Why I Left

38What Is at Stake?

39The Devil’s Dossier

40Pleasure Principles

41Why I Signed It

42Thank God for Our Bibles

43Still Surprised by Lewis

44Wisdom in a Time of War

45Why I Walked

46The Joy of Ecclesiastes

Part 3: Good Questions

47Can the Dead Be Converted?

48Did God Die on the Cross?

49Is Satan Omnipresent?

50Hell’s Final Enigma

51Text Criticism and Inerrancy

52Prayers for Salvation

53Experiencing God’s Presents

54Reflected Glory

55Incarnate Forever

56All Sins Are Not Equal

57Salvation Sans Jesus

Conclusion: Count Your Surprises

Epilogue: The Last Puritan

Sources

Scripture Index

FOREWORD

On the same summer day in 2020, the world lost two historic figures—the civil rights leader John Lewis and the evangelical Anglican theologian J. I. Packer. What immediately came to my mind, for both of them, was the word “trouble.” Lewis, of course, had said, “Never, ever, be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Packer, much less memorably but just as truthfully, had once said, “Like a good pietist I’ve always wanted peace, and like Richard Baxter I’ve been involved with trouble, trouble, trouble, all the way.” In both cases, the notion of “good trouble” was able to sum up a life.

In Lewis’s case, many of us know exactly what is meant by “good trouble.” After all, despite the fact that we came to know him as an refined, elderly leader in the halls of Congress, we had all seen the pictures of him as a young man, beaten and bloodied by segregationist police forces attacking him and his fellow protesters as they marched against the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We thought of Lewis in terms of his courage in taking on an unjust and violent Jim Crow system in the American South. For Packer, though, the concept of “trouble” might not seem as readily evident.

After all, most evangelical Christians came to know Packer through his writings about God, the gospel, and the way of spiritual formation. For some, that came because someone handed them a copy of Knowing God in a church small-group study. For me, it came through my reading, as a teenage Baptist in Mississippi, of Packer’s columns each month in Christianity Today. I once talked to a Roman Catholic businessman who knew very little about evangelical Christianity but said he had read several of the Puritans. “How did you come across the Puritans?” I asked. He explained that Packer’s work on evangelical-Catholic cooperation had led him backward to many of Packer’s interests—including the Puritans he loved. Packer no doubt knew he was trying to introduce John Owen, Richard Sibbes, and others to a new generation of evangelicals, but he probably never imagined that such efforts would cross the Tiber too.

However we were first introduced to Packer, most of us were drawn to him not because he was in “trouble,” but because he seemed to us to be the antidote to much of what we saw had gone awry in evangelical Christianity.

When many were angry culture warriors, Packer was winsome and calm. When many were emotionally manipulative, Packer was reasonable. When many were anti-intellectual, Packer took the mind seriously. When many seemed to reduce Christian theology to syllogisms, Packer modeled piety and warmth of heart. When many wanted to downplay the supernatural or the morally rigorous aspects of the Christian faith to gain a hearing with modern culture, Packer pointed us back to the old paths of biblical authority. When many others wanted to keep narrowing evangelicalism down to an ever-smaller remnant of the convinced, Packer sought to remind us that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism—and that we have no right to seek a kingdom smaller than the one for which Christ died. In each of these, Packer took his readers seriously—and he spoke to us with both authority and tranquility, with both reason and compassion. I suspect most of us believed what seemed to be true to me as a young man reading those Christianity Today columns: that if we were ever to meet J. I. Packer, we would find not an evangelical “celebrity” but a Christian who would seem to us almost like a grandfather in the faith, ready to pray with us and to encourage us to keep trusting Jesus.

This doesn’t seem like trouble. But looking back over Packer’s life, we do indeed see trouble. Liberal Christians dismissed Packer as a “fundamentalist” because of his commitment to biblical inerrancy and the supernatural realities of Christian orthodoxy, while conservative evangelical separatists denounced him for staying within the Anglican Communion. Even within that communion, higher-church Anglicans sometimes saw him as too much of a “Billy Graham” type of evangelical, while lower-church evangelicals sometimes ignored his commitment to the sacraments. Progressives opposed him for his refusal to “evolve” on matters of sexual ethics, while the more narrowly Reformed of his fellow evangelicals acted betrayed when he coauthored and signed the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” statement. This was all trouble. And, at every point, when Packer believed the integrity of faith or witness was at stake—whether in biblical inerrancy or in avoiding unnecessary schism in his church or any other matter—he was willing to stand and to speak and to write.

The reason we don’t think first of his “trouble,” though, is precisely for the reason he mentioned. He was a pietist. He loved Jesus, and he loved Jesus’s church. He was not, as are so many, a quarrelsome fighter seeking to find a “brand” by the intensity with which he fought his opponents. Instead, Packer truly believed that those who disagreed with him could be persuaded. And his primary audience was not those seeking the entertainment of controversy, but the One he knew would greet him at the judgment seat—One for whom the kingdom of God consists not in theatrics but in power, One who sees such power won not in an argument but in an empty tomb.

In all of this, Packer showed us what it was like to age and to die—without vindictiveness, revenge, bitterness, or moral collapse. His convictions were clear, but he was not spending his life seeking to police boundaries or to hunt heretics. Perhaps that is why books by authors who never would have spoken to each other would bear endorsement blurbs by J. I. Packer.

His life was one long column of what it means to know God and to grow into Christ, in suffering but always with joy. As you read this collection of essays, you can perceive what it means to be a thoughtful, reasonable, joyful model of evangelical Christianity. Behind all of these words, from various eras of his life, Packer shows us what it means to be in good trouble because he shows us what it means to carry good news.

—Russell Moore

Public Theologian,

Christianity Today

Part 1

COLUMNS

Chapter 1

SATAN SCORES TWICE

It is distressing to see an old friend in trouble. It is doubly so when the trouble is of his own making. And since last year, my life has had in it one such source of distress—namely, the doings of a man whom I had regarded as a spiritual ally ever since we were student counselors together at an evangelistic boys’ camp.

His name is David Jenkins, and he is the bishop of Durham, in the Church of England. He won his spurs professionally as a brilliant upholder of orthodox faith. He has written books on God, on man, and on Christ, which, despite their hectic and tortuous style, seemed to me to be top-class pieces of Christian exposition.

His recent pronouncements, however, reveal that he now thinks—and wants us all to know that he thinks—that when commending faith in the incarnate and risen Christ, it is best not to get hung up on the actuality of Christ’s virgin birth or his bodily resurrection. One should, he thinks, leave open the question of how, physically, Christ entered and left this world. Thus David finds it appropriate to sanction skepticism about what the opening and closing chapters of Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels tell us on these points. He himself, he says, is uncertain here.

Naturally, he has been lumped in English Christian minds with the great army of liberals, radicals, and modernists who, denying supernatural explanations, have surrendered belief in the eternal deity of the Lord Jesus and thus reduced him to a historical memory with role-model force, like Socrates or Winston Churchill.

But Bishop Jenkins does not belong in this camp. His books show him to be a trinitarian according to Nicea (one God, three coequal persons), and an incarnationalist according to Chalcedon (one person, two undiminished natures). Yet he still thinks it sensible to promote agnosticism on the virginal conception and the empty tomb. Why?

Assuming that nomination as a bishop did not alter his views, it looks as if he has simply not rethought a widespread assumption of our student days: namely, that by teaching some Christian facts (such as the Virgin Birth) as uncertain and smudging the outlines of your doctrines of God, Creation, sin, Christ, and salvation, you could speed the evangelistic task, for then the gospel would be easier to accept.

What such simplification does, however, is destroy credibility. It turns one’s faith more or less into a private oddity shaped by fashion and fancy and salesmen’s instincts rather than by facts. No one who thus debones Christianity for public consumption can escape the pincer effect of these two questions: Since you believe so much of the biblical message, why do you not believe more? And since you believe so little of that message, why do you not believe less? The effect of straining at the gnats of virgin birth and empty tomb after swallowing the camels of divine triunity, incarnation, and resurrection is to call in question whether God the Creator is really Lord of all, sovereign in and over the physical world that he made. I am sure David did not mean to do this, but he has done it.

So there is bitter irony in what has happened. Jenkins feels doubts that are a hangover from the bad old days. He thinks, as so many once did, that this skepticism enhances Christianity’s intellectual credentials. He fails to see that his own understanding of a pre-existent, all-powerful God makes these doubts unnecessary and unreasonable.

The Church of England, which during the past generation has experienced a significant conservative swing, is outraged, perceiving, as Jenkins does not, that his agnosticism challenges the truth of theism, the status of the catholic creeds, and the authority of the Bible and, in the end, makes the task of evangelism not easier but harder. Bishop Jenkins’s credibility is now suspect across the board, and good things he says are unlikely to be taken seriously. Thus Satan scores again, twice over.

Do you wonder that I am distressed?

Chapter 2

’TECS, THRILLERS, AND WESTERNS

The cat came out of the bag at a recent CT senior editors’ meeting. To avoid scandal, I give no names; but it emerged that for relaxation one of us reads westerns (Louis L’Amour), another goes for espionage thrillers (Frederick Forsyth), and I devour mysteries. (’Tecs I call them.)

I started young, ingesting my first Agatha Christies when I was seven. Since then I have read, among others, all the Sherlock Holmeses, Father Browns, and Peter Wimseys; all the Ellery Queens, Agatha Christies, and Carter Dicksons; all the John Dickson Carrs and Dick Francises except one; all the full-length stories of Hammett, Chandler, James, and Crispin; and all the work of new arrivals Amanda Cross, Antonia Fraser, Simon Brett, and Robert Barnard; not to mention most of Margery Allingham, Austin Freeman, Freeman Wills Crofts, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, Ruth Rendell, and Julian Symons.

What have I gained? Fun, to start with. Where else could I have made the acquaintance of characters like Stout’s Nero Wolfe (world’s heaviest genius and largest ego), Dickson’s Sir Henry Merrivale (the Old Man, but no gentleman), Gardner’s Perry Mason (incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial), Christie’s Miss Marple (mesmeric village knit-wit), and the prewar Poirot, who bounced and burbled like Maurice Chevalier?

I have also gained some elementary instruction, learning chemistry from Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke, railway operation from Crofts’s Inspector French, basic Christianity from Chesterton’s Father Brown, Reformed Judaism from Kemelman’s Rabbi Small, post-Vatican II Catholicism from Kienzle’s Father Koesler, and up-to-date liberal Methodism from Merrill Smith’s Reverend Randollph.

But it is not for general education that I read ’tecs, nor for examples of life and instruction of manners, for which the Thirty-nine Articles say that Anglicans read the Apocrypha. What I enjoy is the poignant perplexity of the puzzle, the sleuth’s superior brainwork, and the doing of justice by clearing the innocent and exposing the guilty.

Ought my fellow senior editors and I repent of time wasted in our light reading? Not necessarily. If overloaded academic and literary people never read for relaxation, their brains will break. And ’tecs, thrillers, and westerns, while not great literature, are among the most moral fiction of our time. Goodies and baddies are distinguished, and killers finally get it in the end. Writing that upholds fundamental morality is neither degenerate nor corrupting.

Also, these are stories of a kind that would never have existed without the Christian gospel. Culturally, they are Christian fairy tales, with savior heroes and plots that end in what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe—whereby things come right after seeming to go irrevocably wrong. Villains are foiled, people in jeopardy are freed, justice is done, and the ending is happy. The protagonists—detectives, Secret Service agents, noble cowboys and sheriffs, or whatever—are classic Robin Hood figures, champions of the needy, bringers of merited judgment and merciful salvation. The gospel of Christ is the archetype of all such stories. Paganism unleavened by Christianity, on the other hand, was and always will be pessimistic at heart.

Do I urge everyone to read detective and cowboy and spy stories? No. If they do not relax your mind when overheated, you have no reason to touch them. Light reading is not for killing time (that’s ungodly), but for refitting the mind to tackle life’s heavy tasks (that’s the Protestant work ethic, and it’s true).

You must find what refreshes you, as your senior editors have found what refreshes them. And if you will not accuse us of being wicked worldlings for our light reading, I will not accuse you for watching all those TV sitcoms and sports programs that so bore me. Fair? Surely—and Christian too.

Chapter 3

A BAD TRIP

All who work for the firm identified on an envelope I once received as “God & Son Inc., Doing Business for 2,000 years with Sinners Like You” receive regular in-service training. A few months ago, God gave me a refresher course on patience. I flunked it.

Patience means living out the belief that God orders everything for the spiritual good of his children. Patience does not just grin and bear things, stoic-like, but accepts them cheerfully as therapeutic workouts planned by a heavenly trainer who is resolved to get you up to full fitness.

Patience, therefore, treats each situation as a new opportunity to honor God in a way that would otherwise not be possible, and acts accordingly. Patience breasts each wave of pressure as it rolls in, rejoicing to prove that God can keep one from losing his or her footing. And patience belongs to the ninefold fruit of the Spirit, which is the sanctifying profile Jesus set for his disciples.

As a Calvinist, I have a strong doctrine of providence; and as a devotional instructor, I often deal with sanctification. So I had taken it for granted that patience was something I was good at. (You always fancy yourself good at that of which you know the theory.) But look at what happened.

I was committed to being in England after Christmas, but a memorial service for a long-time friend required my presence there just before the holiday. Thus, for the first time ever, I had to be away from home at Christmas. Self-pity and grumbling. At Chicago I learned that an unscheduled stop would delay the London flight two-and-a-half hours, so I had to call ahead and change arrangements. Resentment. The plane had no ground heating, so at both Chicago and Detroit we boarded into 8 degrees of frost—the same temperature as outside. Cold contempt—emotionally cold, I mean—and prideful pleasure that it wasn’t Britain’s or Canada’s national airline that was doing this to me.

Organization in Britain seemed sloppy, and British Rail did badly. Cynical gloom. A phone call from Vancouver contained a hurtful personal criticism. Seething anger, which kept me awake all night. I flew out of Heathrow full of hard thoughts about my travel agent for not booking me on another airline, where the mileage would have been credited to me under one of the half-dozen bonus schemes to which I belong. Petty greed.

Poor performance? Very poor indeed. (Didn’t I tell you I flunked the course?)

Two things made my lapses of temper especially disgraceful. First, the trip was marked by all sorts of blessings—a new friendship, old friendships renewed, an evangelistic opening that I had prayed and waited ten years for, and more. Finding that God is with me should have banished all bitterness of the kind that I was indulging. Where should I ever want to be, save in the place of God’s appointment?

Second, I know the theory of patience so well. The Murphy’s Law aspect of life is set out in detail by my favorite biblical author in Ecclesiastes; and Romans 8:28 has been a key text in my teaching for years. My moods were a series of sins against knowledge, outwardly dissembled, inwardly cherished. Hypocrisy. However, the Father and the Son still do business with sinners like me, and as I left Britain, “I mercy sought, and mercy found.” “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD’; then thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin” (Ps 32:5).1

On the way back from England, the film provided by the airline was a movie I had long wanted to see, but the sound channel was not working. Another of the entertainment channels offered Verdi’s La Traviata complete, but after the first hour it clicked back to the beginning, so that I only heard the first act—three times. Now, at baggage claim in Miami, I find one of my bags kicked in. Suspicion rises to certainty: I am being made to repeat the course I flunked.

Maybe I can do better this time round. Pride? Self-confidence? We’ll see.

Chapter 4

THE UNSPECTACULAR PACKERS

In England, where I lived until 1979, there are people with names like Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley), Featherstonehaugh (pronounced Fanshaw), Fiennes (pronounced Finch), and Sidebottom (pronounced, in at least one case known to me, Siddybuttoom).

No such exotic label graces me, however.

Packer is, I guess, a trade name like Carter or Carpenter, telling the world my ancestors filled bags or peddled door to door. It is an uncommon name: Among the half-million personal entries in the Vancouver phone book, there are only 16 Packers. (Packers thus have rarity value, whatever else they may lack.)

My notion of Packers always was that, in addition to being few and far between, we were a quiet, unobtrusive lot, rural in our style and passive in our stances. This, I am sure, was an extrapolation from my immediate forebears. My great-grandfather was a wealthy man who fell on hard times. My grandfather was successively a farmer, miller, and innkeeper—doing poorly at each. And my father was a railroad clerk in charge of another clerk and two typists.

Were Packers always unspectacular? One of us (a money man who built railroads and endowed Lehigh University; no direct relation) got into the Encyclopedia Britannica. But since when did one swallow make a summer? On the other hand, no major criminal was ever called Packer. Maybe harmless mediocrity really is the authentic Packer way.

But behold! The mail brought a promotional circular that said: “After months of work, The Amazing Book of the Packers in Canada is ready for printing, and you are listed in it!… [W]e have spent a great deal of effort and thousands of dollars.… I believe this is the only book of its kind in the entire world … you must order right away … the book is printed for you alone.” In it is a Packer coat of arms 600 years old, with instructions for tracing my family tree. “You will want to have your own copy—use the order form enclosed.”

Wow! Amazed thoughts ran off everywhere. I wondered, for instance, if my CT colleagues had ever received such honor.

I wondered, too, if my entry in the Amazing Book would be correct, and I found lying behind that query the paranoid egoism of original sin—the quality that prompts you, when your new phone book comes, to look up your own entry to see if it is misprinted.

Then I wondered what Packerish proclivities the circular was meant to appeal to. What, in essence, was its selling line? Was it to some notion of family pride—pride of race, or of place, or even of grace (the worst of the lot)? Or to some feeling like Alex Haley’s, that you do not know your identity unless you know your roots? Or simply to the desire to possess a book that is “hand bound with a beautiful burgundy grained finish and … richly gold embossed” with one’s name printed in it? Whatever the point of appeal, ego-boost was clearly the name of the game.

When I saw this, sanity supervened. I remembered John the Baptist, who settled for being a voice in the wilderness, and George Whitefield, greatest post-apostolic evangelist ever, who said, “Let the name of Whitefield perish, if only Christ is glorified!” I brooded on the words “I have called you by name; you are mine,” and on Jesus’ directive, “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” I reflected that while exploring one’s lineage need not be sin, to draw one’s sense of worth and dignity from his or her place in a human family rather than in God’s family of saved sinners could never be right. I reminded myself that pride smolders in me all the time, and that the risk of fanning it into flame is best not taken.

So I shall pass up The Amazing Book of the Packers and continue concentrating on the amazing grace of God. The wedding garment will do more for me than the Packer coat of arms. What use, after all, will a coat of arms be to me or anyone else on judgment day? “Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:13, RSV).

Chapter 5

GREAT GEORGE

This year Christians in Gloucester, England, celebrated one of the city’s noblest sons, George Whitefield. Oxford Methodist, Puritan Calvinist, and roving evangelist, Whitefield was for over 30 years the acknowledged spearhead of revival on both sides of the Atlantic. Wesley extolled him after his death for having preached the gospel more widely and fruitfully than anyone since the apostles.

Nineteen eighty-six was the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Whitefield’s ordination. Gloucester made much of it, with a commemorative service, lectures, exhibitions, and a specially written play. I was involved. (Why? Because I am a Gloucester boy who went to Whitefield’s old school, that’s why.)

I reconstructed Whitefield’s gospel, an exercise that proved a tonic to my soul. To Vaughan Williams, John Barbirolli was Glorious John; to me, George Whitefield is Great George.

Not everyone understood Whitefield in his own day; not everyone understands him now. Said the program note on the 1986 play: “Whitefield underwent a sudden conversion at Oxford, the exact nature of which it is now impossible to determine.” Impossible? Horse feathers! Whitefield’s own narrative explains everything.

In 1944, by God’s grace I too underwent a sudden conversion in Oxford, not 50 yards from the site of his; and when soon after I read Tyerman’s life of Whitefield I resonated with his conversion story and evangelistic zeal. As Jesus said, those born of the Spirit are a mystery to those who are not; they are, however, no mystery to each other!

With his huge, sweet voice and overwhelming expression of concern for his hearers (honest tears usually marked his pulpit references to hell), Whitefield was and remains in a class by himself among British evangelists. Only the Baptist Charles Spurgeon, who took Whitefield as a role model, ever came close to him.

Both were pastoral Calvinists of genius, marked by tremendous inner intensity, vividness of imagination, freshness of vision, and sublimity of rhetoric. But Spurgeon’s tincture of country-boy truculence and his obtrusive melancholy streak put him behind Whitefield. Mesmeric speaker, superior writer, and generally better brain that he was, Spurgeon neither roared nor soared in the pulpit as Whitefield did. As a preacher, Whitefield was supreme.

You could call him a sanctified barnstormer. God gave him actor’s gifts as his resource for communicating Christ. Garrick, England’s leading player, once said, “I’d give a hundred guineas to be able to say ‘Oh!’ like Whitefield,” and added that Whitefield could move a crowd to tears of joy just by his way of pronouncing “Mesopotamia.”

Communication was his life. For many years he spoke in public an average of 50 hours a week. He recorded himself as having preached over 18,000 sermons of one to two hours each. “I love those that thunder out the Word!” he said; and in evangelistic application he thundered it out in a way that not only great churchfuls but open-air crowds of up to 30,000 (Ben Franklin vouched for the number) found convincing and electrifying to the last degree. Yet for more than half his ministry he was asthmatic, and vomited after preaching!

What kept him going? “Christ’s laborers must live by miracle,” he wrote, and maybe that is the answer.

I look at Whitefield, and love him. He restores my faith in biblical preaching and my hope of church revival. And his dictum, “Let the name of Whitefield perish, if so be that Christ is glorified,” does me no end of good. One of life’s richest blessings, so I find, is to be kept in sight of Great George.

Tailpiece: Whitefield, who signed his letters “less than least of all,” would certainly dislike this article.

Chapter 6

ALL THAT JAZZ

Hans Rookmaaker, the late pipepuffing pundit of Amsterdam, colleague of Francis Schaeffer, and “Rooky” to his young Anglo-Saxon admirers, had a lifelong passion for early jazz. I, too, was grabbed in my teens by the glory of this simple, subtle, cheerful, poignant, bright-colored music, and I venerated Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, Tommy Ladnier, Bix Beiderbecke, Bubber Miley, Tricky Sam Nanton, and Muggsy Spanier as its top dispensers.

At 18 I was playing jazz, after a fashion (sloppy gas-pipe clarinet modeled on Pee-Wee Russell). To listen to what was going on in the band around me and help make it happen was as exhilarating an experience as I have ever had.

But when I was converted I could not see, nor could anyone tell me, how this or any other form of secular music or art could be pursued with a Christian motivation. So I gave up jazz, sold my clarinet and records, and let folk around me think I shared their view that what I called New Orleans and they called Dixieland had a devilish influence on its devotees. It came to me as a test of loyalty to my Savior to renounce what I enjoyed so much, and from that standpoint, giving up jazz no doubt did me good.

Yet when Rookmaaker came to faith, he did no such thing. And now my heart says of him, wise man!

In my twenties the pietistic Manicheism (not called that, of course) in which I had been nurtured began to dissolve into an authentic biblical humanism, such as Calvinistic Holland had been able to give Rookmaaker. By my thirties, I had begun to mutter what Rookmaaker was ready to shout from the housetops—namely, that by Christian standards of judgment, early jazz was among the twentieth century’s most valuable cultural products.

Academically, Rookmaaker was an authority on this music (he wrote record sleeves, and a book on the subject, locked up, alas, in Dutch). It was a delightful experience to hear a tape of his and to realize that he and I, the amateur in aesthetics once “sent” by Jelly Roll Morton, were at one in this field.

Please remember now, that the jazz I speak of is the march-dance-lament music that was born in New Orleans among blacks and creoles at the turn of this century, became the rage in the twenties, went underground in the thirties, and was finally negated in the forties when new ways of playing and a new harmonic language, expressing a changed mentality, altered jazz radically. Modern jazz—cool, cerebral, and often protesting, trading in unresolved dissonances over an enigmatic tonal base and so mirroring life’s endless tensions—does not speak to me, and I am not discussing it.

Once, I think I made Rookmaaker’s day by introducing him to a student audience as one of the few people who knew the significance of the occasion when Louis Armstrong carried a trumpet into the recording studio instead of his familiar cornet. To the uninitiated, let me say that what this marked was the superseding of early jazz’s preference for collective polyphony (into which the mellower cornet blends well) by solo display on more brilliant instruments. Armstrong crossed that watershed, and almost everyone followed. But early jazz was essentially fellowship music, group music rather than individualistic display music; that was one Christian value built into it.

There were other “built-in” values, too. Classic jazz, as this amalgam of dance music, rag music, military music, and folk music is deservedly called, bubbles with joy in living. Though sometimes sad, it is never savage or bitter. It is happy music. Tuneful and rhythmical, free but controlled, sprinkling “blue” notes in the melody line over solid major-key harmonies and deploying three-line polyphony that recalls Bach—it energizes you by relaxing you, and its simple climaxes leave you content and refreshed.

So those old records minister to me. (I do not play the clarinet nowadays.) And I hope I do not outrage anyone by letting this be known. After all, there might be refreshment here for you as well.

Chapter 7

AN ACCIDENTAL AUTHOR

This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed home … and this little pig went to India, where he was greeted with a request from a student magazine for an article that would encourage India’s budding Christian writers.

Why, I wonder, did they pick on me? I suppose they must see me as a senior writer who has made the grade, and so can serve as a role model for the young. Are they wrong? Not entirely. My books have gone into ten languages and sold over a million-and-a-half copies. And they have helped all sorts of readers, old and young, male and female, academic and unlettered, Calvinist and Arminian, Christian and pagan. (I know this from the flow of testimonies that the mailman has brought me over the years.) It amazes me that God should use my material so constantly in this way, but in his mercy he does, so that my writing has become the central item in my ministry. I ought, therefore, not to refuse to strut my stuff as a model for tomorrow’s wordsmiths, however much my (British? elitist? modest? spiritual? lazy? hypocritical?) instincts urge me to do just that.

But am I a good role model as a Christian writer? I doubt it. Certainly, I have been putting things in print for 30 years, and my bibliography has 200 entries. Certainly, I try to give the world a book a year, and shall continue trying as long as my brains hold out. And certainly, I feel myself under constraint in this: Woe is me if I do not write the gospel! But even allowing for the way my mind highlights all that seems odd, I cannot but think myself a very odd writer indeed.

To start with, I can’t do fiction, or poetry, or travelogues, or honest autobiography. (I could do dishonest autobiography, but who wants that?) I can write only about ideas and issues of mind and heart before the Lord. My range is absurdly narrow.

Moreover, I am untutored; I never read a book or took a course on writing in my life. One of Iris Murdoch’s novels is called An Accidental Man; well, I am an accidental writer. I got into it by being obliging, writing what I was asked to write for no better reason than that I was asked to write it. One day I was asked to write up a talk I had given, and like Topsy, the script “just growed” into a full-length book that sold 20,000 copies in its first year. Behold! I had become an established author. By now, I suppose, I should count myself a professional, having published so much. But to myself I remain an amateur who scribbles till he likes his flow and wording, then mails the result to the publisher (usually late), and moves on to the next thing so hastily that within 24 hours he forgets what he has written. What sort of a role model is a man like that?

Wait a minute, though; that is not a complete statement. (Give yourself a kick in the pants, Packer.) I have to remember that God made me a communicator. No one ever had to teach me how to make myself clear, nor tell me that good communication is half rational analysis and half pictorial and dramatic imagination, as in Isaiah and Ecclesiastes and Jesus and Paul and Luther and C. S. Lewis. No one ever had to admonish me to start by deciding who my ideal reader was, and to write for him throughout. Thus I began with certain natural advantages, which some would-be authors clearly lack.

What I find that I know about writing boils down to this: There are four rules. First, have something clear to say. Second, keep it simple. Third, make it flow. Fourth, be willing to redraft as often as is necessary to meet these requirements.

Writing is both an art and a craft, and you learn it by doing it. To see things you want to say, and to have ideas about how to say them, is how it starts: then you have to find the sound of your own voice talking on paper, and you can only do that by reading your initial drafts and making improvements. It is as simple—and as difficult—as that. “The Teacher searched to find just the right words,” says Ecclesiastes (12:10 [NIV84]), and in this he was the model for all writers anywhere in any age.

Okay, CT, that’s enough for you. I must get on with my article for India.

Chapter 8

DECADENCE À LA MODE

“Chocolate chocolate cake,” said the dessert menu; “layers of fudge and decadence. A must for chocolate lovers!”

Decadence? Surely that word belongs in the world of sociology, morality, philosophy, theology, and history, rather than of cake and fudge. Yes, it does—but I can see why the menu writer brought it in. He wants us to know that the taste of this chocolate chocolate cake will set us ecstatically indulging with no thought of long-term consequences (the thickening shadow, the bulging belly, clothes that no longer fit, shortness of breath, etc.). Irresponsibility about consequences is certainly a mark of decadence.

Also, he is encouraging those whom we may call choc-nuts to see their self-indulgence as right and proper, on the ground that sweetness, however sinful, should never be passed up. Putting pleasure first, and identifying happily with Oscar Wilde’s “I can resist anything but temptation” is another mark of decadence. Yes, the word fits.

What we have here is in fact the Playboy philosophy applied to the taste buds. Gluttony, like lust, was once recognized as a deadly sin—that is, one that kills the soul. Here, however, it is made to seem chic, and the hint is dropped that truly spunky souls will always settle for pleasure seeking because they will see it as the only wise way. Smart guys regard self-indulgence as a must; hail, hedonism! Any energy left over from worshiping the two great gods power and profit (status and success, if you prefer) should go into the service of pleasure, a third god hardly less great. I used to point to the Jacuzzi as the supreme symbol of our hedonistic mindset, but this come-on for chocolate chocolate cake would have done just as well.

Decadence means going morally and spiritually downhill. The modern West is very decadent, as we all know, and its decadence threatens the church, as worldly ways always do. “The place for the ship is in the sea,” said D. L. Moody, speaking of church and world, “but God help the ship if the sea gets into it.”

Here in Vancouver, B.C., where everybody who is anybody sails a boat, some friends recently proved the literal truth of Moody’s dictum; their boat sank in rough water, and they scarcely escaped with their lives. Today, great segments of North American Christianity seem to be desperately waterlogged by worldliness, particularly over pleasure seeking. Am I wrong?

Comparing today’s evangelicals with those of yesterday and of the New Testament (a habit without which we are unlikely to see what we are looking at when we gaze around us), I note a widespread passion for biblical orthodoxy that comes close to that of the best Fathers and Reformers and Puritans, and of Spurgeon and Warfield among my heroes; but with it, alas, goes a widespread lack of moral strength that reminds me of the later Middle Ages and of Anglicanism before Wesley—which is bad news. George Gallup’s comment, that though American evangelical numbers grow, evangelical community impact remains minuscule and does not increase, confirms my perception: Decadence—weakening worldliness, spiritual AIDS—has infected us, and is pulling us disastrously down.

Though we negate secular humanist doctrine, we live by its value system and suffer its symptoms: Man-centeredness as a way of life, with God there to care for me; preoccupation with wealth, luxury, success, and lots of happy sex as means to my fulfillment; unconcern about self-denial, self-control, truthfulness, and modesty; high tolerance of moral lapses, with readiness to make excuses for ourselves and others in the name of charity; indifference to demands for personal and church discipline; prizing ability above character, and ducking out of personal responsibilities—is any of that Christian? The truth is that we have met the secular humanist enemy, and ethically, it is us. Shame on us? Yes, every time.

By now, no doubt, you are wondering whether I had any of the chocolate chocolate cake. No, I am not a chocoholic; if I have dessert I look for apple pie with ice cream or cinnamon sauce or both.

Why did you want to know?

Chapter 9

WHAT LEWIS WAS AND WASN’T

Americans, hearing that I am an Oxford man, often ask me if I knew C. S. Lewis, and their faces fall when I say no. American interest in Lewis, who died 25 years ago never having visited America, staggers me. Writing about him is a growth industry (and some of Lewis’s own books still sell by the thousands); he is the star of the Wade Collection at Wheaton College (Ill.); Christian institutions mount courses on him; and Washington, DC, has an academic unit called the C. S. Lewis Institute. Yet do North Americans see clearly the Lewis on whom they gaze? I wonder.

When I say I did not know him, I mean I had no personal link with him. (Nor did most of his pupils; they found him an awesome academic who hid his sensitive heart behind a debater’s façade of urbane, loud-voiced pugnacity. “I’m a butcher, a rough and brutal man,” he told one of them.) I heard him speak once, on the medievalism of the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker. He was supposed to be the best lecturer in Oxford, and on that showing it could have been true, though in the Oxford of my day the compliment meant less than you might think.

I have been a Lewis reader for 45 years. As an unbeliever, I enjoyed Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity more for their manner than for their matter, for Lewis’s writing style made him seem both a fellow schoolboy and a wise old uncle simultaneously, and that was fascinating. His subsequent Christian essays, which I read after conversion, seemed less schoolboyish and more grandfatherly; but maybe the change was more in me than in him. His supreme achievement, for my money, is the stark and stunning Pilgrim’s Regress, his first apologetic book, which I reread for pleasure as often, I guess, as I do Bunyan’s allegory that inspired it.

Lewis’s fiction thrills me less, due to its lapses from the admirably adult to the archly adolescent, and from the childlike to the childish. His no-nonsense, midtwentieth-century way with words served a late-Victorian imagination streaked with sentimentality, and the results were uneven. Perelandra (Eden replayed, with a different outcome) and Aslan in the Narnia books are surely Lewis’s best fictional achievements. Till We Have Faces is more perfect as art but less powerful as vision, while That Hideous Strength, despite its fine title, is (to my mind, anyway) hideously bad.

His brand of Christianity was conservative Anglicanism with “catholic” (non-Roman!) leanings; hence his nonpenal view of the Atonement, his nonmention of justification, his belief in purgatory, his praying for the dead, and his regular confession to his priest. His conversion was a return to a boyhood faith lost two decades before.

Like other Oxbridge dons, he was something of a high-minded eccentric. The quixotic chivalry with which he housed the mother of a dead friend for 30 years and then married a Jewish Christian divorcée on what appeared to be her deathbed, plus (going from the near sublime to the near ridiculous) his resolute refusal to read newspapers, equally show this.

Like other Ulstermen, he loved verbal battles in which he could challenge the conventional and upset apple carts. This is as clear in his professional writing as literary critic and historian of ideas as in his joyous reassertion of old original Christianity against its detractors.

He loved beer, too, though he was never drunk.

A standard-issue evangelical? Hardly. But he was a Christian thinker and communicator without peer on three themes: the reasonableness and humanity of Christian faith; the moral demands of discipleship; and heaven as home, the place of all value and all contentment. The vivid way in which Lewis, who was something of a homeless child all his life, projects this vision in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Last Battle (last page), and The Great Divorce verifies utterly the fundamental formula of communication: that reason plus imagination, tuned together, equals power. The wisdom and greatness of Lewis may—indeed, must—be measured by moments like these.

Thank you, Mr. Lewis, for being you. I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.

Chapter 10

IT’S WRONG TO EAT PEOPLE

Once upon a time I announced in this column that the Packer clan, though unspectacular, had at least proved harmless. “No major criminal,” I wrote, “was ever called Packer.” Maybe I was getting a bit above myself when I said that, for I have had to eat my words. A letter from Vienna, Austria, cut me down to size.

“One of the most famous criminals of Colorado—nay, American—history bears your name,” I read.