Theology

One of my favorite books on the topic of a relational, personal God is entitled, simply, Knowing God by British-born Canadian theologist J.I. Packer.

Just as Morpheus in The Matrix said “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path”, Packer in his book similarly states,

“There’s a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. When you truly know God, you have energy to serve him, boldness to share him, and contentment in him.”

Owing to the density of Packer’s thorough and comprehensive Biblical references, I would almost consider this book a handy and easily digestible commentary on the entire Bible. For this reason I keep it among a handful of books I read perennially, and I often catch myself reminiscing over, and referring to, many of Packer’s deft strokes of wisdom.

It is likely I will end up writing more on some of the concepts I feel ought to be highlighted for those who don’t necessarily intend to read the book, and even more likely that I will accidentally plagiarize some of Packer’s thoughts as my own, but for now I will simply quote the foreword, allowing his introduction to speak for itself. I hope it moves you to consider reading his work…

He writes:

As clowns yearn to play Hamlet, so I have wanted to write a treatise on God. This book, however, is not it. Its length might suggest that it is trying to be, but anyone who takes it that way will be disappointed. It is at best a string of beads: a series of small studies of great subjects, most of which first appeared in the Evangelical Magazine. They were conceived as separate messages, but are now presented together because they seem to coalesce into a single message about God and our living. It is their practical purpose that explains both the selection and omission of topics and the manner of treatment.

In A Preface to Christian Theology, John Mackay illustrated two kinds of interest in Christian things by picturing persons sitting on the high front balcony of a Spanish house watching travellers go by on the road below. The ‘balconeers’ can overhear the travellers’ talk and chat with them; they may comment critically on the way that the travellers walk; or they may discuss questions about the road, how it can exist at all or lead anywhere, what might be seen from different points along it, and so forth; but they are onlookers, and their problems are theoretical only. The travellers, by contrast, face problems which, though they have their theoretical angle, are essentially practical — problems of the ‘which-way-to-go’ and ‘how-to-make-it’ type, problems which call not merely for comprehension but for decision and action too. Balconeers and travellers may think over the same area, yet their problems differ. Thus (for instance) in relation to evil, the balconeer’s problem is to find a theoretical explanation of how evil can consist with God’s sovereignty and goodness, but the traveller’s problem is how to master evil and bring good out of it. Or again, in relation to sin, the balconeer asks whether racial sinfulness and personal perversity are really credible, while the traveller, knowing sin from within, asks what hope there is of deliverance. Or take the problem of the Godhead; while the balconeer is asking how one God can conceivably be three, what sort of unity three could have, and how three who make one can be persons, the traveller wants to know how to show proper honour, love and trust towards the three persons who are now together at work to bring him out of sin to glory. And so we might go on. Now this is a book for travellers, and it is with the travellers’ questions that it deals.

The conviction behind the book is that ignorance of God — ignorance both of his ways and of the practice of communion with him — lies at the root of much of the church’s weakness today. Two unhappy trends seem to have produced this state of affairs.

Trend one is that Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room for only small thoughts of God. The modern way with God is to set him at a distance if not to deny him altogether; and the irony is that modern Christians, preoccupied with maintaining religious practices in an irreligious world, have themselves allowed God to become remote. Clear-sighted persons, seeing this, are tempted to withdraw from the churches in something like disgust to pursue a quest for God on their own. Nor can one wholly blame them, for churchmen who look at God, so to speak, through the wrong end of the telescope, so reducing him to pigmy proportions, cannot hope to end up as more than pigmy Christians, and clear-sighted people naturally want something better than this. Furthermore, thoughts of death, eternity, judgment, the greatness of the soul, and the abiding consequences of temporal decisions are all ‘out’ for moderns, and it is a melancholy fact that the Christian church, instead of raising its voice to remind the world of what is being forgotten, has formed a habit of playing down these themes in just the same way. But these capitulations to the modern spirit are really suicidal so far as Christian life is concerned.

Trend two is that Christian minds have been confused by the modern scepticism. For more than three centuries the naturalistic leaven in the Renaissance outlook has been working like a cancer in Western thought. Seventeenth-century Arminians and Deists, like sixteenth-century Socinians, came to deny, as against Reformation theology, that God’s control of his world was either direct or complete, and theology, philosophy and science have for the most part combined to maintain that denial ever since. As a result, the Bible has come under heavy fire, and many landmarks in historical Christianity with it. The foundation-facts of faith are called into question. Did God meet Israel at Sinai? Was Jesus more than a very spiritual man? Did the gospel miracles really happen? Is not the Jesus of the gospels largely an imaginary figure? — and so on. Nor is this all. Scepticism about both divine revelation and Christian origins has bred a wider scepticism which abandons all idea of a unity of truth, and with it any hope of unified human knowledge; so that it is now commonly assumed that my religious apprehensions have nothing to do with my scientific knowledge of things external to myself, since God is not ‘out there’ in the world, but only ‘down here’ in the psyche. The uncertainty and confusion about God which marks our day is worse than anything since Gnostic theosophy tried to swallow Christianity in the second century.

It is often said today that theology is stronger than it has ever been, and in terms of academic expertise and the quantity and quality of books published this is probably true; but it is a long time since theology has been so weak and clumsy at its basic task of holding the church to the realities of the gospel. Ninety years ago [as of the author’s writing in 1972 — 133 years ago as of today] C. H. Spurgeon described the wobblings he saw among the Baptists on Scripture, atonement and human destiny as ‘the down-grade’; could he survey Protestant thinking about God at the present time, I guess he would speak of ‘the nose-dive’!

“Stand ye in the way and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16). Such is the invitation which this book issues. It is not a critique of new paths, except indirectly, but rather a straightforward recall to old ones, on the ground that ‘the good way’ is still what it used to be. I do not ask my readers to suppose that I know very well what I am talking about. “Those like myself”, wrote C. S. Lewis, “whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached. If we describe what we have imagined we may make others, and make ourselves, believe that we have really been there” — and so fool both them and ourselves (The Four Loves). All readers and writers of devotional literature would do well to weigh Lewis’s words. Yet “since we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, ‘I believed, and so I spoke’, we too believe, and so we speak” (2 Corinthians 4:13) — and if what is written here helps anyone in the way that the meditations behind the writing helped me, the work will have been abundantly worth while.

— J.I. Packer, Knowing God