J. I. Packer

He was born on 22 July 1926 in Twyning, Gloucestershire, to a railway clerk father and a family that was, by his own account, only nominally Anglican. At seven, a collision with a bread van left him with a head injury that kept him off sports fields and pushed him toward books instead. By eleven he owned an Oliver typewriter, and he never really stopped writing. He won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, graduating in 1948, and it was there, through the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, that he first encountered Puritan theology and attended lectures by C. S. Lewis. Neither encounter left him unchanged. He returned to Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall to study theology, and by 1954 he held both a master’s and a doctorate, his dissertation written under Geoffrey Nuttall on the Puritan theologian Richard Baxter.

Packer was ordained a deacon in 1952 and a priest in 1953 in the Church of England. His final academic post was as Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, where he taught from 1996 until failing eyesight forced his retirement in 2016. Along the way he served as general editor of the English Standard Version Bible, signed the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, and contributed to the ecumenical document Evangelicals and Catholics Together in 1994. His later books include Weakness Is the Way (2013), a short argument that Christian strength is inseparable from acknowledged frailty.

There’s something worth sitting with in a theologian who spent seventy years insisting that doctrine and devotion can’t be separated, that knowing about God is hollow unless it becomes knowing God. Different traditions reach that same conviction by very different roads. Packer’s road was Calvinist and Anglican, shaped by the Puritans, but the destination, a life oriented entirely toward the real, isn’t anyone’s exclusive property.

He died on 17 July 2020, five days before his ninety-fourth birthday, in Vancouver.