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At the age of 93, famed Christian scholar and author J.I. Packer entered into glory on July 17, 2020. Many Christians have benefited from his writings on Reformed piety — such as Knowing God and A Quest For Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life — and other topics, including “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God. He was an Anglican divine, not Presbyterian, but he had some connections to authors found on Log College Press.
Don J. Payne, in The Theology of the Christian Life in J.I. Packer’s Thought: Theological Anthropology, Theological Method, and the Doctrine of Salvation, p. 63, writes: “The formulation of Packer’s theology and piety was a process involving multiple influences: the Puritans, J.C. Ryle, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and the theologians of the old Princeton Theological Seminary. He states that by 1947 he was aware of Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921) and had been encouraged to read him. In unpublished correspondence Packer writes, ‘There were some volumes of Warfield … including the two on perfectionism, in the OICCU library, and … the late Douglas Johnson was exhorting all who had any aptitude for theology to read Warfield, and that his name was bandied around in the circle of IVF’s Theological Students Fellowship and Tyndale Fellowship.”
Dr. Packer wrote this endorsement of James M. Garretson, Princeton and Preaching: Archibald Alexander and the Christian Ministry: “From Dr. Garretson comes a first-class account of a first-class delineation of the preaching ministry by a first-class theologian, mentor, and minister of the gospel – the versatile Archibald Alexander, who for its first generation virtually was Princeton Seminary in both its academic and its practical aspects, and who laid the foundation for all its future greatness. Alexander is a neglected figure, and it is high time for someone to begin to do him justice, as Dr. Garretson does. Enrichment and enjoyment in equal parts await the student of this excellent book.”
Packer wrote this endorsement of Gary Steward, Princeton Seminary (1812-1929): Its Leaders’ Lives and Works: “The quality and achievement of Princeton Seminary’s leaders for its first hundred years was outstanding, and Steward tells their story well. Reading this book does the heart good.”
Packer wrote the introduction to the Crossway Classic Commentaries edition of Charles Hodge on Romans, in which he said: “Charles Hodge (1797-1878), the greatest of Princeton Seminary’s nineteenth-century theologians, began his teaching career as Professor of Oriental and Biblical Literature in 1822, becoming Professor of Exegetical and Didactic Theology in 1840. The titles of his chairs show that for more than fifty years, up to his death in harness, he carried responsibility for interpreting the Bible, and classroom exegesis was a major part of his role. Four printed expositions resulted: on 1 and 2 Corinthians, on Ephesians, and a true masterpiece on Romans. B.B. Warfield, Hodge’s most distinguished pupil and ardent admirer, described Hodge as a teacher who, with limited philological and linguistic resources, was peerless and spellbinding in his power to pick out and display the flow of an argument, and it is this quality that sets Hodge’s Romans apart from most other expositions before and since. First published in 1835, its classic quality led to its being reprinted once already in this century (Eerdmans, 1951), and the present edited reissue should give it another lease of useful life. Hodge’s intellectual rigor, as a masterful Reformed theologian committed to state and defend his sixteenth- and seventeenth-century heritage, was a quality that all his peers respected, but his terse, springy, thrustful style of expression enabled him to write popular theology for his own era and makes his 150-year-old applicatory analysis of Romans very accessible and acceptable today.”
In Knowing God, p. 134, Packer refers to the famous hymn by Samuel Davies: “The reaction of the Christian heart contemplating this, comparing how things were with how they are in consequence of the appearing of grace in the world, was given supreme expression by the one-time president of Princeton, Samuel Davies:
Great God of wonders! all thy ways
Display the attributes divine;
But countless acts of pardoning grace
Beyond thine other wonders shine:
Who is a pardoning God like Thee?
Or who has grace so rich and free?”
In these snapshots, we glean the appreciation that Packer had for some Log College Press authors that we too are fond of, and in particular, the piety of old Princeton. We remember these things about him as facets of a life lived for the glory of God. He labored long as a teacher and author, the legacy he left behind is rich; but now we rejoice that he has entered into his rest in the arms of our Lord Jesus Christ.
