J. I. Packer said:

Knowing God is crucially important for the living of our lives...We are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. disregard the study of God, and you sentenced yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and loseyour soul.

This quotation is from Knowing God (p.14). Found at Theocentric Preaching.[HT: Milton Stanley]

Caught in the Toils of Synergism

I'm going to continue today with one more lengthy quotation from Packer's 1958 introduction to John Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. In this passage Packer further explains his critique of the contemporary church (ca. 1958). As I said yesterday, it's remarkably relevant to our situation today. This is a longish quote, but stay with it, because Packer is saying something quite important here.

We said earlier that modern evangelicalism, by and large, has ceased to preach the gospel in the old way, and we frankly admit that the new gospel, insofar as it deviates from the old, seems to us a distortion of the biblical message. And we can now see what has gone wrong. Our theological currency has been debased. Our minds have been conditioned to think of the cross as a redemption which does less than redeem, and of Christ as a Savior who does less than save, and of God's love as a weak affection which cannot keep anyone from hell without help, and of faith as the human help which God needs for this purpose. As a result, we are no longer free either to believe the biblical gospel or to preach it. We cannot believe it, because our thoughts are caught in the toils of synergism. We are haunted by the Arminian idea that if faith and unbelief are to be responsible acts, they must be independent acts; hence we are not free to believe that we are saved entirely by divine grace through a faith which is itself God's gift and flows to us from Calvary. Instead, we involve ourselves in a bewildering kind of double-think about salvation, telling ourselves one moment that it all depends on God and next moment that it all depends on us. The resultant mental muddle deprives God of much of the glory that we should give him as author and finisher of salvation, and ourselves of much of the comfort we might draw from knowing that God is for us.

And when we come to preach the gospel, our false preconceptions make us say just the opposite of what we intend. We want (rightly) to proclaim Christ as Savior; yet we end up saying that Christ, having made salvation possible, has left us to become our own saviors. It comes about in this way. We want to magnify the saving grace of God and the saving power of Christ. So we declare that God's redeeming love extends to everyone, and that Christ has died to save everyone, and we proclaim that the glory of divine mercy is to be measured by these facts. And then, in order to avoid universalism, we have to depreciate all that we were previously extolling, and to explain that, after all, nothing that God and Christ have done can save us unless we add something to it; the decisive factor which actually saves us is our own believing. What we say comes to this - that Christ saves us with our help; and what that means, when one thinks it out, is this - that we save ourselves with Christ's help. This is a hollow anticlimax. But if we start by affirming that God has a saving love for all, and Christ died a saving death for all, and yet balk at becoming universalists, there is nothing else that we can say. And let us be clear on what we have done when we have put the matter in this fashion. We have not exalted grace and the cross; we have limited the atonement far more drastically than Calvinism does, for whereas Calvinism asserts that Christ's death, as such, saves all whom it was meant to save, we have denied that Christ's death, as such, is sufficient to save any of them. We have flattered impenitent sinners by assuring them that it is in their power to repent and believe, though God cannot make them do it. Perhaps we have also trivialized faith to make this assurance plausible ('it's very simple - just open your heart to the Lord . . .'). Certainly, we have effectively denied God's sovereignty, and undermined the basic conviction of true religion - that man is always in God's hands. In truth, we have lost a great deal. And it is, perhaps, no wonder that our preaching begets so little reverence and humility, and our professed converts are so self-confident and so deficient in self-knowledge and in the good works which Scripture regards as the fruit of true repentance.

J. I. Packer on the state of the Gospel in 1958

I've just been reading (well, skimming actually) J. I. Packer's 1958 introduction to John Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. This seems a remarkable document, and Packer's anaylsis of the church's condition in 1958 remains a strikingly accurate description of its present condition, now a half-century on! Packer asserts, for example, that the most urgent need of the church in 1958 was "the recovery of the Gospel."

From here he begins to contrast the "old Gospel," which the church needed to recover, with the "new gospel," which was then prevalent in the church. Now, see if the following quote does not apply as much to the contemporary church in 2007 as it did in 1958:

It [the new gospel] fails to make men God-centered in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not primarily what it is trying to do. One way of stating the difference between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be 'helpful' to man - to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction - and too little concerned to glorify God. The old gospel was 'helpful', too - more so, indeed, than is the new - but (so to speak) incidentally, for its first concern was always to give glory to God. It was always and essentially a proclamation of divine sovereignty in mercy and judgment, a summons to bow down and worship the mighty Lord on whom man depends for all good, both in nature and in grace. Its center of reference was unambiguously God. But in the new gospel the center of reference is man. This is just to say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is not. Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach people to worship God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better. The subject of the old gospel was God and his ways with men; the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed.

Booksnip (7)

In Packer's Knowing God, the chapter on propitiation is called "The Heart of the Gospel." Hmmm. If that's the case, if propitiation really is "the heart of the gospel," then it seems we're missing the heart quite often and sometimes quite spectaularly in the contemporary church.

My program for myself of late has been to re-connect with this old school evangelicalism. I'm looking for the gold, the real value, the deep things beneath the chaff of the contemporary. In my experience, preachers tend to talk a lot about God's ability to take care of us, to see to our circumstances. Ah, yes, "circumstances." God will help you through them. God is greater than them. Are you dealing with money issues, relationship issues, these issues, those issues? Give 'em to God. He's good, strong, and loving. He'll take care of you. That's the adumbrated contemporary gospel. And you know what? It's not the gospel of the New Testament. Here's what Packer had to say about it way back in 1971. His words are even more relevant now than then:

We have all heard the gospel presented as God's triumphant answer to human problems--problems of man's relations with himself and his fellows and his environment. Well, there is no doubt that the gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving a deeper problem--the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man's relations with his Maker; and unless we make it plain that the solution to these former problems depend on the settling of this latter one, we are misrepresenting the message and becoming false witnesses to God--for a half-truth presented as if it were the whole truth becomes something of a falsehood by that very fact. No reading of the New Testament can miss the fact that it knows all about our human problems--fear, moral cowardice, illness of body and mind, loneliness, insecurity, hopelessness, , despair, cruelty, abuse of power, and the rest--but equally no reader of the New Testament can miss the fact that it resolves all these problems, one way or another, into the fundamental problem of sin againt God. By sin the New Testament means, not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, definace of, retreat from, and consequent guilt before, God the Creator; and sin, says the New Testament, is the basic evil from which we need deliverance, and from which Christ died to save us. All that has gone wrong in human life between man and man is ultimately due to sin, and our present state of being in the wrong with our selves and our fellows cannot be cured as long as we remain in the wrong with God.

Booksnip (6)

I've been re-reading J. I. Packer's Knowing God, because it seems to me to embody an older and truer wisdom than we are likely to find in the contemporary Christian scene. On page 102 I came upon this incredible nugget of pure gold:

We are familiar with the thought that our bodies are like machines, needing the right routine of food, rest, and exercise if they are to run efficiently, and liable, if filled up with the wrong fuel--alcohol, drugs, poison--to lose their power of healthy functioning and ultimately to 'sieze up' entirely in physical death. What we are, perhaps, slower to grasp is that God wishes us to think of our souls in a similar way. As rational persons, we were made to bear God's moral image--that is, we were made to 'run' on the practice of worship, law-keeping, truthfulness, honesty, discipline, self-control, and service to God and our fellows. If we abandon these practices, not only do we incur guilt before God; we also progressively destroy our own souls. Conscience atrophies, the sense of shame dries up, one's capacity for truthfulness, loyalty, and honesty is eaten away, one's character disintegrates. One not only becomes desperately miserable; one is steadily being de-humanized. This is one aspect of spiritual death. Richard Baxter was right to formulate the alternatives as 'Saint--or Brute': that, ultimately, is the only choice, and everyone, sooner or later, consciously or unconsciously opts for one or the other.