J. I. Packer
Encyclopedia : J : JI : JIP : J. I. Packer
James Innell Packer (born July 22, 1926 in Gloucester, England) is a British-born Canadian Christian theologian in the Calvinistic Anglican tradition. He currently serves as the Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is considered to be one of the most important evangelical theologians of the late 20th century.
The son of a clerk for the Great Western Railway, Packer won a scholarship to Oxford University. It was as a student at Oxford where he first met C.S. Lewis whose teachings would become a major influence in his life. In a meeting of the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, Packer committed his life to Christian service.
After briefly teaching Greek at Oak Hill College in London, Packer entered Wycliffe Hall, Oxford to study theology and was ordained a priest in the Church of England. He became recognized as a leader in the Evangelical movement in the Church of England. In 1978, he signed the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which affirmed the conservative position on Biblical inerrancy.
In 1979, Packer moved to Vancouver to take up a position with Regent College. A prolific writer and frequent lecturer, Packer is widely regarded in Protestant circles as one of the most important theologians and church historians of the modern era. He is a frequent contributor to and an executive editor of Christianity Today. In recent years, he has become an outspoken proponent of the ecumenical movement but believes that unity should not come at the expense of abandoning orthodox Protestant doctrine. Nonetheless, his advocacy of ecumenicism has brought sharp criticism from some conservatives, particularly after the publication of the book Evangelicals and Catholics Together : Toward a Common Mission (ed. Charles Colson, Richard J. Neuhaus) in which Packer was one of the contributors.
Packer served as general editor for the English Standard Version, an Evangelical revision of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
Select Book Titles
- Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958; reprinted 1984) ISBN 0802811477
- Keep In Step With The Spirit: Finding Fullness In Our Walk With God (1984, reprinted 2005) ISBN 0801065585
- Knowing God (1973, reprinted 1993) ISBN 083081650X
- Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (1991) ISBN 083081339X
- A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (1994) ISBN 0891078193
- Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (2001) ISBN 0842339604
- One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus with Thomas Oden (2004) ISBN 0830832394
- Collected Shorter Writings in four volumes
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.