Others will write of Packer’s personal conversion to Christ; his academic career as a minister, administrator, and teacher; his defense of biblical authority; his painful struggles with colleagues and friends; his constant travels as a much-loved speaker; and, perhaps most of all, his many powerful books, which have shaped generations of Christians throughout the world. These stories have been told and will be retold. 

On a narrow strip of the northern California coastline grow the giant Redwoods, the biggest living things on earth. . . . They do not have much foliage for their size; all their strength is in those huge trunks, with foot-thick bark, that rise sheer for almost half their height before branching out. . . . They dwarf you, making you feel your smallness as scarcely anything else does.” These opening words of J. I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness refer to the Puritans, a “breed of giants” no less imposing than the Redwoods of northern California. Convinced that affluence has made “dwarfs and deadheads of us all,” Packer turned to the Puritans for inspiration. Those who knew him had no doubt that his lifelong reading of the Puritans fertilized his heart and mind. With Packer’s passing into glory last week at age 93, we have lost a giant.

Others will write of Packer’s personal conversion to Christ; his academic career as a minister, administrator, and teacher; his defense of biblical authority; his painful struggles with colleagues and friends; his constant travels as a much-loved speaker; and, perhaps most of all, his many powerful books, which have shaped generations of Christians throughout the world. These stories have been told and will be retold.

In this brief reflection on the legacy of Dr. Packer I want to highlight just one aspect: his self-styled identity as a “meer catholick.” In 1994, First Things published “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” The momentous statement was signed by twenty Catholics and twenty evangelicals, including J. I. Packer. Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus may have been the driving force behind ECT, but it was the theological depth of Dr. Packer and Avery Cardinal Dulles that would shape the discussions and documents that First Things would publish in the decades following. It is with much gratitude that current ECT participants (and, no doubt, the First Things constituency) look back on Packer’s unwavering commitment to ECT.

But I run ahead of myself. It’s the Redwoods that taught Packer the importance of ecumenism. Packer’s 1954 dissertation on the seventeenth-century pastor Richard Baxter—the inventor of the term “mere Christianity”—was an early exercise in ecumenism. The main criterion that the young Packer used to evaluate Baxter’s theology was that of catholicity. Ever the logical thinker, Packer asked how consistent the self-styled “meer catholick” Baxter had been in expressing his catholicity theologically. In general, Packer was convinced, “Baxter’s theology has the ‘catholic’ shape.” To be sure, Packer was not afraid to criticize Baxter. The Kidderminster pastor leaned too far in the direction of Arminianism for the Calvinist convictions of the Oxford DPhil student. Packer fell in love, however, with Baxter’s “practical theology”—his spiritual writings that promoted regular meditative practices and encouraged heavenly-mindedness. Packer recognized all this as genuinely catholic.

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