J. I. Packer
J. I. Packer
JamesInnell Packeris a British-born Canadian Christian theologian in the low church Anglican and Reformed traditions. He currently serves as the Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is considered one of the most influential evangelicals in North America. He has been the theologian emeritus of the Anglican Church in North America, since its inception in 2009...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth22 July 1926
biblical men order
The biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, andy more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages.
two church needs
The Church, therefore, has two constant needs; instruction in the truths by which it must live, and correction of the shortcomings by which its life is marred.
christian running errors
The gospel does in truth proclaim the redemption of reason. Obscurantism is always evil, and wilful error is always sin., All truth is God's truth; facts, as such, are sacred, and nothing is more un-Christian than to run away from them.
loneliness self life-and-death
What, after all, are the world's deepest problems? They are what they always have been, the individual's problems—the meaning of life and death, the mastery of self, the quest for value and worth-whileness and freedom within, the transcending of loneliness, the longing for love and a sense of significance, and for peace. Society's problems are deep, but the individual's problems go deeper; Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, or Shakespeare will show us that, if we hesitate to take it from the Bible.
people saint holiness
Holy people glory, not in their holiness, but in Christ's cross; for the holiest saint is never more than a justified sinner and never sees himself in any other way.
knowing-god stills knows
You can know a lot about God and godliness and still not know God.
lying teaching mean
Infallible denotes the quality of never deceiving or misleading and so means wholly trustworthy and reliable; inerrant means wholly true. Scripture is termed infallible and inerrant to express the conviction that all its teaching is the utterance of God who cannot lie, whose word, once spoken, abides for ever, and that therefore it may be trusted implicitly.
teacher eye men
But man's eyes are blind through sin, and he can discern no part of God's truth till the Spirit opens them. Inner illumination, leading directly as it does to a deep, inescapable conviction, is thus fundamental to the Spirit's work as a teacher.
two sick sin
There are two sorts of sick consciences, those that are not aware enough of sin and those that are not aware enough of pardon.
father men self
The whole story of the Father's Christ-exalting plan of redeeming love, from eternity to eternity, must be told, or the radical reorientation of life for which the gospel calls will not be understood, and the required total shift from man-centeredness to God-centeredness, and more specifically from self-centeredness to Christ-centeredness, will not take place.
mind doubt devil
If I were the devil I should broadcast doubts about the truths and relevance and good sense and straightforwardness of the Bible ... At all costs I should want to keep them from using their minds in a disciplined way to get the measure of its message.
emotional thinking feelings
Think against your feelings; unmask the unbelief they have nourished; let evangelical thinking correct emotional thinking.
knowing relief his-love
There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me.
christian spiritual biblical
But that is not because these principles are traditional; it is because they are biblical. There is certainly an arrogant, hide-bound type of traditionalism, unthinking and uncritical, which is carnal and devilish. But there is also a respectful willingness to take help from the Church's past in order to understand the Bible in the present; and such traditionalism is spiritual and Christian.