According to Christianity Today, “J.I. Packer was one of the most famous and influential evangelical leaders of our time. He died Friday, July 17, at age 93” [click here for the full CT article]. Dr. Packer had a major influence on many of us at White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation. In this 2008 interview, Shane Rosenthal spoke with Dr. Packer in his office at Regent College about many of the trends and challenges facing contemporary Christianity.
What do you think is the overall health, or lack thereof, of the contemporary evangelical church?
I better begin with saying that by “the evangelical church” I mean the whole fellowship of congregations that believe that the Bible is the Word of God and that Jesus Christ is the savior who everybody needs. I am myself an Anglican, and I fraternize with folk of a number of denominations who are all linked with me and I with them by evangelical faith. Within that frame, on balance, I am hopeful. I think I see evangelicals strengthening their grip on the gospel and also on the fact that they have to be different from the world around them, realizing slowly but surely that they must know their stuff for witness in the world, and so they’re giving themselves to learning their faith with a diligence that is relatively new. I didn’t find it when I came to North America nearly thirty years ago.
Sociologist Christian Smith conducted a five-year study of religious teens throughout America and some in Canada. Whatever their church affiliation, he found they all have the same religious outlook on life: God wants me to be good; he wants us to be happy; he’s there when we need him. But when you ask them who Jesus is, they can’t say. They can’t tell you the significance of the cross nor anything about the Trinity. He called it “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” Although a lot of these kids were going to church regularly, he said that there’s a failure to pass on the distinctive denominational traits. What are your thoughts about that and about how many Christians are passing on faith to the next generation?
First of all, I don’t doubt what he affirms is true, and I put it down to the fact that churches by and large have lost the habit of catechism, and so they don’t teach young people doctrine. Even the syllabi in degree courses are defective here for those who are going to be youth leaders and who are currently being educated at seminaries; most youth leaders are much better at telling stories and organizing games than they are at teaching the faith. I think that catechism-that is, formal instruction-needn’t be by question and answer in the old-fashioned way, though it needs to be in a form of education that involves the young people as thoroughly as possible. This has to be recovered; and at the moment the Roman Catholics are doing far better than we evangelicals are in educating their young people. I am hoping that from that we’ll stand both a fuller recovery of adult catechesis across the board in Christian education, and a reaching out to recover catechesis for young people whereby you teach them the basic Christian truths. From my standpoint, generalizing about evangelicals, I am able to say with confidence that it’s the same biblical truths, the same gospel truths that every evangelical congregation wants to impart to its young people; but it does mean a change of mindset about the way to deal with young people and their groups and so on. We haven’t got very far along that road as yet, so you can’t be surprised at results like these which highlight the fact that the gospel is not known to the young people in our evangelical churches.
Do you think part of the problem is that we’ve turned our worship into outreach? Is there a difference between outreach evangelism and Christian worship?
Yes, I think so. I think of the churches that have given themselves to “seeker services”-twice a Sunday if they have two services and once a Sunday if they don’t. The seeker services are exclusively or narrowly focused on the people who aren’t yet believers but whom the church is hoping to interest and intrigue. I must confess that in my limited experience of seeker-sensitive services, what is done both in the way of music and of drama is all superficial. The bottom line is that at the end of one of these seeker-sensitive occasions, the saints who came to be fed have not been fed. They came to worship God and they’ve been allowed to do precious little of that; and the folk from outside, if any have come in, have been fed so superficially that they haven’t got the authentic Christian message either. Putting it in secular terms, it’s been a flop. Churches that have specialized in seeker-sensitive ministry are beginning to see it’s a flop, starting at the top-I mean, Willow Creek has acknowledged that there was an unrecognized superficiality in the whole way in which they sought to involve, intrigue, and disciple folk; and they’re telling the world that they’re going to try and do better. Well, I think they’ll have to change the formula.
I recently visited a megachurch youth center where kids were skateboarding, playing video games, racing motorcycles-on break from what was more like a rock concert than worship. In many cases, we don’t want kids to get bored in church so we’re making them ultra-excited. Then-and here is where some of these megachurches admit they’ve failed-the kids go off to college, but they don’t interact with adult churches. They’re used to the kid fun and they can’t find it when they’re in college. What are your thoughts about all that?
You are absolutely right. That’s the way it is and it’s very sad. It’s a wrong pattern and it’s harming rather than helping the kids. It’s asking them to leave behind what they thought of as Christianity. There’s enough temptation and pressure at the modern university to do that anyway. We don’t want to set them up for falling victim to that pressure by the way that we nurture them in church. So, I’m absolutely at one with your uneasiness about this kind of youth work which maximizes entertainment and fun and getting them excited. Real Christianity will get them excited too, but in a different way, at a different level; and of course what I say about youth applies also to adults. All Christians ought to be excited about their faith. There’s been something lacking in the discipling if they aren’t; but excited in a different way from this hysterical entertainment-oriented excitement.
In a traditional Anglican service, for example, when kids come in, they may be bored, especially when you compare it to many other entertainments. Is it wrong for us to bore a kid?
On balance, yes, I think it is wrong to bore a kid because kids know no response to boredom except simply to switch off. The world of secular grade school education is using enough imagination and ingenuity to keep the kids’ interest from beginning to end. In other words, it can be done. And I would say, let our churches learn from the good teachers in the grade schools. I don’t believe it’s impossible for us thoroughly to reform our way of nurturing kids and teenagers to keep them from boredom, but to feed them regularly the substance of the faith, and a fascination with the Bible as a landscape of life in which the faith is being illustrated, expressed, and sometimes hidden. There are all sorts of challenges to the mind that an ingenious teacher can do.
I’m a great believer in the importance of trinitarian thinking in discipling. A lot of what has weakened discipling is the result of thinking of only one person of the godhead at any one time-think about the Holy Spirit and what he does; think about Jesus and his death on the cross for us; think of the Father and of his love and goodwill. But you’re not thinking, you see, of the three together: the divine team which works in the unity of a single program and plan, each person in the team fulfilling his part in our salvation, so that the gospel is much less “what a friend we have in Jesus,” but “what a team of friends we have through Jesus”-it’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our discipling instruction will be infinitely strengthened if we present it that way. Sometimes people say, “I’ve never heard it put like that before.” People will be deistic unless they are taught the Trinity.
Can the gospel be understood if it’s chiefly explained in terms of lifestyle change rather than the objective nature as, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul explains how God raised Christ from the dead and the trinitarian elements that are involved there? When most people think of the gospel, especially in many popular churches, they focus on their own life-change, becoming a better person, their testimony, and so on. What are your thoughts?
My thoughts are that those two things never should have been separated and that each loses its power when separated from the other. Proclaiming the doctrine of the atonement that Christ wrought for us all on the cross without proclaiming life-change through the power of the risen Christ and his Holy Spirit weakens the testimony of the cross. If you talk about lifestyle change without focusing on the cross of Christ followed by his resurrection-which is the objective foundation for the transformation-you weaken, indeed you falsify, what is being said about the God who changes your life.
But what is the nature of the gospel itself?
It is the good news that for us lost and ruined souls, God-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-has done something which saves us, which transforms us, which gives us hope and community that is the life of love, friendship, and trust; God has done something which imparts value to life in a way that we never conceived, but it’s all founded on what God did at the cross and in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and it all focuses on the person of the Lord Jesus and his gift of the Spirit as he draws us into sonship with him to the Father and to the service of Father, Son, and Spirit together. That’s the wholeness of the gospel and it’s got to be presented in that way.
I’ve asked pastors, “If I was to ask people in your congregation about crucial doctrines like justification, propitiation, imputation, how do you think they’d answer?” Most of them said, “Oh, probably all over the map.” Can we be evangelical but not be well grounded in these crucial doctrines? Or is it okay for us to have different opinions about justification?
No, I don’t think it’s okay for us to have different opinions about these key doctrines. I think your question calls attention to something we talked about before, namely the fact that catechesis-that is, teaching the truths that people live by and teaching them how to live by those truths-has pretty much perished from our evangelical churches for more than a century now. In fact, historically among evangelicals there has been consensus concerning them or virtual consensus; and amongst literate evangelicals today, there continues to be consensus; and textbooks of theology and so forth are steadily being produced which explain and celebrate that consensus. But, yes, it is the case that for lack of anything that does the catechetical job in our church life, we have lots of people in the pews who don’t understand these doctrines, don’t even know why they need to understand these doctrines, and certainly don’t know where to look in order to get an understanding. Expository sermons often fail to give a doctrinal understanding. In my vision of church life, catechesis and expository sermons go together. But either without the other is going to be deficient in practice as a way of generating lively mature adult disciples.
Would you agree that Pelagianism is a natural outgrowth of being in Adam and that unless we’re taught these crucial doctrines of grace and justification, we will by nature want to think in terms of saving ourselves?
Yes, I do. It has often been said that Pelagianism is the heresy of the natural man. We need to teach sin at the deep level the Bible teaches it-the heart of man is desperately wicked and who can know it? Only God knows it and only God can show you the sickness of your own heart. But, yes, my hope is that the evangelical church will come to see that the teaching that contradicts Pelagianism-the teaching that pins us to the wall as helpless spiritually, unable to save ourselves, helpless in the presence of God, lost and ruined-must be given thoroughly, as well as that teaching which exhibits the cross of Christ-his substitutionary atonement, where he took our place, bearing the retributive judgment due to our sins, and the resurrection of Jesus whereby as the living Lord he became available as a personal minister and friend in the life of those into whose lives he breaks. Again, superficiality and sentimentality which disfigure so much of our evangelical testimony these days must be transcended.
What do you think about some of the ideas coming out of someone such as N. T. Wright-especially his interpretation of the gospel and of St. Paul?
I think his material is somewhat like the curate’s egg in the old British cartoon, where the dithery young clergyman tells the bishop who asks him whether he’s enjoying his boiled egg, “Oh yes, sir, it is very good in parts.” Actually, it’s a rotten egg. I think Tom Wright’s material is very good in parts. A price always has to be paid for originality in any field of study; original contributors are going to get some things wrong, just as they’re going to get other things magnificently right; and I think that is how it is really with Tom Wright. He pushes some of the things that he’s seen too hard, but at the same time I am grateful for some of the things that he’s seen clearly and said with crashing weight and strength-most notably in his recent book, which I think is absolutely masterly, on the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and his being set loose now as a personal influence throughout the human race. That’s superb; that’s a magnificent achievement. There is reality in his thought that the gospel came into a world where Jewish theology was living with the notion that we haven’t yet seen the full release from the captivity of half a millennium before. There was that strand in Jewish theology, but I think he pushes it too far. And I think that he’s wrong actually in his understanding of Paul on justification. I don’t need to do more here than refer to a book which has come out recently and shows this, I think, very compellingly. It’s the book on the future of justification by John Piper, where courteously but firmly he shows that what Tom Wright has said about justification is pointing in the right direction but off the wavelength-as with radio, if you’re almost on wavelength, but not quite, you don’t get the sound that you need to hear. This is the case when Tom Wright talks about justification.
Would you say that it approximates the Roman Catholic view?
It’s not quite Roman Catholic, no. The Roman Catholic view is that justification is a process that begins when sacramental grace first finds you, and it continues until after purgatory when you’re finally perfected in glory. By putting it that way, Catholics obscure the momentousness of justification as a reality in a person’s life. A momentousness consists precisely-so I would say and I have all the Reformed heritage on my side-of the fact that this is the last judgment that will ever be passed on where you are to spend eternity; the judgment is being passed here and now in time, and when it’s been passed, your destiny is assured for time and eternity so you may have an assurance of a kind which a Roman Catholic cannot have.
What do you think about a niche marketing approach that has by virtue of the different worship styles-teen pop, alternative, and adult boomer-created generational segregation?
We have separated the ages, very much to the loss of each age. In the New Testament, the Christian church is an all-age community, and in real life the experience of the family to look no further should convince us that the interaction of the ages is enriching. The principle is that generations should be mixed up in the church for the glory of God. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t disciple groups of people of the same age or the same sex separately from time to time. That’s a good thing to do. But for the most part, the right thing is the mixed community in which everybody is making the effort to understand and empathize with all the other people in the other age groups. Make the effort is the key phrase here. Older people tend not to make the effort to understand younger people, and younger people are actually encouraged not to make the effort to understand older people. That’s a loss of a crucial Christian value in my judgment. If worship styles are so fixed that what’s being offered fits the expectations, the hopes, even the prejudices, of any one of these groups as opposed to the others, I don’t believe the worship style glorifies God, and some change, some reformation, some adjustment, and some enlargement of spiritual vision is really called for.
