Retire? Not in Bible, Not in Plans

It's been a good year for J.I. Packer, one of the world's best-known theologians. In March, the Anglican pastor and Regent College professor won Bible of the Year and Book of the Year honors for editing the English Standard Version Study Bible. 

He also released two of his own books -- "Praying: Finding Our Way Through Duty to Delight," in June, and a yearlong devotional using his seminal work, "Knowing God," due out later this month.

Packer, listed as one of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America" in 2005, sat down with The Bee at the Christian Book Expo in Dallas earlier this year to talk on a wide range of subjects, from growing up in England to C.S. Lewis' impact on his life to becoming embroiled in the Anglican/Episcopal dispute. Here's what he had to say:

A: 82. You know, the Bible doesn't have the word "retirement" and it doesn't even have the words "slow down."

A: A teacher. Not because I knew anything about the various professional possibilities, but because my mother had been a teacher and a very good one. I know now that if I'd been properly assessed in terms of potential -- none of that was done in the 1930s and the early 1940s -- I'm sure I should have been a lawyer. I think I could have practiced law quite efficiently and with sufficient interest to guarantee competence. But at age 18, I became a believer, and the Lord said something different that I had never thought about before.

A: I was doing the Oxford general degree, just a four-year affair with an emphasis on the classics, Latin and Greek, language, culture, literature, so on. And I came to realize that I wouldn't get job satisfaction from any life activity except shepherding the Lord's people and holding out the Gospel in the hope of seeing more people coming to faith and enlarging the flock. That is how it came to me: "Shepherd, shepherd, look after the flock."

A: Yes. The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect affect on me. Lewis, of course, was a Catholic-Anglican rather than an evangelical, but he erected around me all the scaffolding of orthodox Christianity, in terms of which I was opened to the authentic Gospel. His writings still help me. He was certainly the 20th century's No. 1 apologist. The older I get, the more I appreciate his real genius in Christian insight and communication. He was never my professor. He was a professor of English and the most popular lecturer at Oxford. He was, in fact, operating weekly as the anchor man in the Socratic Society. It was a club where inquirers, with an interest in Christianity, could hear the pros and the cons of the Christian faith.

A: It rang a bell because it covered ground and did a job that many people felt needed to be done, but which nobody was attempting at that stage. What was happening was that in evangelical circles, all the emphasis was being laid on personal experience and devotion in the sense in which husbands and wives are devoted to each other. There was not a great deal of intellectual effort going along with it. What I did in "Knowing God" is to write a series of practical articles intended to lead the reader to faith.

I was starting with the very basics that Christians believe about God and working through the aspects of God and the Trinity. I went on with the Gospel and to a series of chapters in the book that were called "Behold Your God." They were all about living by faith ... as the true focus of real life (so that) you are more alive, you see more, you understand more, and you live in a deeper level than anyone can do otherwise. Well, it rang a bell. So the book has sold well and continues to sell well, something like 30,000 copies a year. It's found a niche.

A: The inerrancy of Scripture applies to the material as prepared for publication. I'm saying that quite deliberately because I want to allow the editor in. In some Old Testament books, it's very evident that an editor has been at work. That's quite all right. It's part of the process.

A: I'm saying that an editorial process that is preparing the material for publication counts as part of the inspiring process whereby God, in his sovereignty, gave every word. Some people ask for trouble by not allowing for the reality of editorial processes. The editorial process is very important for preparing the work for public consumption. It's part of the inspired process.

A: Non-Christian forms of spirituality have had such a massive run for their money in the last half century. It's not just the spirituality of major religions, but spirituality of all sorts of complexes and variations on particular aspects of inner life that particular teachers have come up with. Christianity has stayed stable, as it must do. The doctrines don't change. The understanding of what it means to walk with God doesn't change. The reality of worship doesn't change, not at heart anyway. So Christianity appears to be stuck.

I think that the number of lively evangelical Christians in North America is in fact increasing. I think that if overall statistics show that churches are losing ground, it's because the dead wood is dropping off the branches. Amongst younger people, there is a very great deal of evangelical Christianity. It's not always deep, but it's there.

Having said all of that, there's a great divide between all the spiritualities of the world and Christian spirituality because Christian spirituality is at every point a relation to the triune God of the Bible. Secular spirituality isn't focused on God, if God even comes into it, but on me and my fulfillment. My self-discovery. My inner peace. The more you look at that gap, the wider it gets. It's the difference between self-centeredness and God-centeredness. It's unhelpful, actually, that both sorts of concern are called spirituality.

A: That's precisely why the book was written. It's focused on people who have got stuck in their praying and need something to get unstuck to get going again. The thought that runs all the way through it is a thought from the Psalms, which give you a launch pad, the thought of a shepherd and his sheep. That's the fundamental concept.

A: It sets a new level of Bible aids. This is not just comments on the text, making clear everything in the text, but it's also a guide to the Christian life. There's a whole string of articles to do that. Also articles on other religions. The study Bible is intended to set the Christian up for Bible study, for living, so that if the study Bible is the only thing to get you through life, you're covered.

A: The first thing to say about our parish (St. John's in Vancouver) is that it is the largest and liveliest parish in the Canadian Episcopal Church, called the Anglican Church in Canada. And our property, all of which we use at the moment, is worth something like $15 million, perhaps rising.

Of course they want it back. In court, what we will argue is that property that was built, land acquired, buildings put up and maintained ever since 1926, without the diocese contributing a penny to any of that, that equipment is held by trustees for the benefit of the users, rather than held by trustees for the benefit of the diocese. This has never been settled by law in Canada. There's no canon in the Canadian church, as in the States, declaring that the diocese owns all church properties in all church parishes. So the claim has to be decided.

I'm glad to say the congregation -- between 800 and 1,000 attend regularly on the Lord's day -- knows we may lose the property. We're prepared to lose the property rather than losing the Gospel.

A: The full story is that (Southern Cone Archbishop) Greg Venables as our Primate has relicensed all of the clergy who have come under his care, about 50 of us clergy and two dozen dioceses. Then, two weeks after that, the bishop of New Westminster, citing a canon in the Canadian system that doesn't actually relate to inter-Anglican difficulties, but only to clergy who leave the Anglican church to minister in free church context, declared and sent the message around to all the bishops in Canada that the ministry of those in his dioceses who had left the diocese had been terminated. His termination language suggested that we had been unfrocked, as they say, that we had ceased to be clergy. Since we had already been relicensed by the archbishop of the Southern Cone, none of us lost any sleep over that.

A: I suppose the fact that I know God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and God remains alive. That is testified to in Scripture and it comes through when I read the Bible. Understood in that way, it's reading the Bible that keeps me fresh. The living God keeps coming through in all sorts of ways. You're always in process of seeing things that you never saw before.

Also, of course, I should say the attempt to live out the truth you see keeps you fresh because it keeps you on your toes. You have to keep thinking, keep adjusting, because the world in which you're trying to live these things out keeps at surface level changing its shape. Fundamentally, nothing changes, but at surface level, yes.