Packer praised as “Valiant-for-Truth”
A “champion of the faith”: Dr Jim Packer. photo: Maarten Stolk/Erdee Media Groep Apeldoorn
Tributes are being paid to one of the foremost evangelical thinkers and writers of the 20th century, theologian and author J.I. Packer, who died last month at the age of 93. Dr Packer, who passed away just five days short of his 94th birthday, ranks alongside John Stott as a giant of Anglican evangelicalism. Packer wrote dozens of books, and was known to millions of Christians around the world for his popular classic, Knowing God, published in the 1970s. But he was already an established scholar of note thanks to earlier works from the 1950s and ’60s: Fundamentalism and the Word of God and Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. James Innell Packer was an Englishman by birth and, after 35 years of ministry there, moved to Canada in the late 1970s to teach at Regent College in Vancouver. He provided firm leadership in the face of the liberal collapse of the Anglican Church in Canada when the congregation at which he was honorary assistant minister, St John’s, Shaughnessy, led an exodus of orthodox Christians out of the Diocese of New Westminster. The parish eventually aligned with the newly formed Anglican Church of North America, in which he was made Theologian Emeritus. Dr Packer was also made an honorary Canon of Sydney’s St Andrew’s Cathedral in 2008. SouthernCross
12
AUGUST 2020