Book Review: J. I. Packer Proclaiming Christ in a Pluralistic Age: The 1978 Lectures (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024). 139 pages. $39.99 at Reformers Bookshop.
I was eating pizza the other night with two young men, one a Christian, the other a seeker. We talked about what it means to be a Christian and some of the challenges of the Christian life.
The first surprise was that they/we couldn't get through two family-sized pizzas. The youth of today!
The second was that they thought that becoming a Christian in 2024 was a way of rebelling.
One told how his boss, a Gen X Roman Catholic, explained that young men shouldn't be going to church but should instead be finding a girlfriend to sleep with and getting drunk. The young man found this boringly orthodox, ignoble, and distasteful. He felt certain that there must be a better way to live.
I'm having conversations like these more and more these days. Are we seeing early signs of a spiritual awakening among young people? I wonder whether the Lord is beginning a new work among these younger generations.
What I know for certain is that the Church must be ready to receive young seekers. That means that our churches must be refuges of radical, self-sacrificial love. Parched and thirsting for meaning and community in today's desert of online isolation and spiritual desolation, nothing will attract young people more than an actual flesh-and-blood loving Christian community. "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
This kind of strange Christ-like love can arise only from an intimate relational knowledge of Jesus himself.
This is where a book like Proclaiming Christ in a Pluralistic Age comes in.
J. I. Packer (1926–2020) was a British theologian, author of the now-classic Knowing God (1973), who for most of his working life was a professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver. He stands alongside John Stott, F.F. Bruce, Michael Green, Dick Lucas, Martyn-Lloyd Jones and other superb conservative-evangelical British preachers and theologians of the twentieth century.
The book is in fact a lightly edited transcription of five lectures that Packer first delivered at Kuyper College in Grand Rapids in 1978, and then at Moore College in Sydney.
The title was added by the publisher and is a bit misleading. I anticipated a penetrating analysis of twentieth-century philosophical pluralism, the notion that there is no absolute truth and that every opinion is therefore as valid as any other – excepting the opinion that there is such a thing as absolute truth. I hoped that Packer would then show me how to most effectively bring the Gospel to bear within the warm and murky fog of an anti-intellectual, pluralistic culture.
In fact, the five lectures represent straight-out Chalcedonian Christology: a perfectly sound, straightforward, fresh, and insightful description of the person and work of Jesus Christ. All beautifully expressed – vintage Packer.
Chapter 1, "We've a Story to Tell", explains that Christianity comes to us not as an abstract philosophy but in the true story of an historical person. After exposing unreasonable "scepticism masquerading as interest", he shows how Christianity rests upon a flesh-and-blood person and the works Jesus wrought in the same space and time in which we stand, albeit further downstream.
Packer helpfully describes the word Gospel as a "concertina word" which can be understood in both compressed and expansive ways: in the former case as describing the death and resurrection of Christ, in the latter as describing the far-reaching implications of Christ's work not just in the person of the Christian, but in the eschatological renewal of all creation. Similarly, the Gospel is not confined to one part of Jesus' work – his crucifixion, for example – but is a multi-stranded rope binding together the multifarious strands of Jesus' person and mission.
Chapter 2, "The Man Christ Jesus", describes the humanity of Jesus, focussing on his Messiahship and Sonship. First, Packer pulls apart liberal interpretations of the Gospels, which enervate it of its truth and power.
As a writer of books myself, I make bold to say to you, it is part of every author's responsibility to present the facts that he selects so that their meaning … will be most clearly understood by the readers…. Is that responsibility compatible however with falsifying the facts in order to make a point?... There is no reason to believe it was thought so in the first century AD.
Packer takes down any idea that Jesus is "just a very special person." He is the unique Son and Saviour, the Revelation of God. "God is Christ-like", says Packer. He writes movingly of the expansiveness of salvation, which means "adoption into the royal family and life as God's sons and heirs, objects of his special adopting love", and the hideousness of hopelessness, which "is hell, literally." Packer wants us to know "that exuberant, intoxicating, energising hope of joy with Jesus in the Father's presence."
Chapter 3, "He Emptied Himself", tackles the deity of Christ in relation to his humanity, humiliation, and exaltation. To be a Christian is to be "touched directly by the cross and by the resurrection involved in it."
Packer offers a straightforward paradigm for managing difficult Bible doctrines like predestination and the Trinity. We must refuse speculation and hold fast to no more and no less than what the Bible tells us. After all, no Bible doctrine is illogical or absurd, no matter how difficult it may be to get our little heads around it. One cannot pour the Indian Ocean into a coffee cup.
This chapter also treats us to some excellent exegesis of John's Prologue and the Philippians 2 Christ-hymn. Packer flays and dissects the "kenosis theory", a theological speculation that the Son "emptied" himself of his deity during his incarnation. It had a good run in the 1970s. So did the pogo stick.
Chapter 4, "A Wonderful Exchange", is the highlight of the book. It opens with some cracker quotations from Calvin and Luther: "All the prophets did foresee in spirit, that Christ should become the greatest transgressor, murderer, adulterer, thief, rebel, and blasphemer that ever was or could be in the world." (No prizes for who said that.)
Packer brilliantly explains what Jesus accomplished upon the Cross. The oft-reviled doctrine of penal substitution – that Jesus suffered the poena, legal penalty and retribution, for our sins in our place – conforms entirely to the biblical data. Only the death of Christ can lift the guilt of our sin and "God's displeasure for what we've done, the sense of which is in truth the start of hell – hell on earth", and which is "at the very heart of human misery."
Chapter 5, "No Other Name", comes closest to bringing orthodox Christology to bear against the naïve extravagancies of religious pluralism: the notion that there are many different aeroplanes flying to the same airport – Packer's analogy. He also nips universalism in the bud, the doctrine that all will be saved in the end. It seems warm and well-meaning, but "It doesn't sound in the least like anything that the Bible says."
Christians stand instead with the apostles as "fellow witnesses … proclaiming the same truth that has had the same transforming power in our lives as it had in theirs." This is the antidote to the cor incurvatum in se, "the heart bent back on itself", egocentrism.
When it comes to social justice Packer suggests that "Strictly speaking, the Christian mission includes good works as well as evangelism, Samaritanship as well as church planting, social action as well as proclamation of the Gospel. But there is no question that evangelism must come first."
Who might want to buy and read this book?
First, it is for those who enjoy J. I. Packer as a Christian author. Though this is a transcription – sometimes obviously faulty – of his spoken lectures, Proclaiming Christ has all the hallmarks of his warm and thoughtful style, classical training, deep reading of the Puritans, and plenteous flashes of wit and fun.
Second, it is for those who are looking for a shortish overview of orthodox Christology: of precisely who Jesus is and what he came to do. Though you will get the same substance in two or three chapters of any decent Reformed systematic theology (say Berkhof, Grudem, or Frame), and with more prooftexts and references, Packer's delightful approach and way with words will certainly deepen your view and equip you with some fresh ways of looking at old doctrines.
Back to my young friends, so surprisingly restrained in the face of hot pizza. We have to be ready for young men and women like these. We must build Church families that burn with the self-sacrificial love of Christ.
Loving feelings do not drop upon our doorstep complete, like a DoorDash meal. Instead, love multiplies and steadily permeates the dough of the heart and mind like baker's yeast.
This yeast is knowledge of Jesus – the more lucid and thorough the better. Packer's book will help you to develop the clear, powerful, and transformative Christological convictions that our church needs.
- Campbell Markham
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