American readers have a great pleasure in store early next year when Baker Book House publishes J. I. Packer: A Biography, by Alister McGrath. Their British cousins have already received this volume, in which the life of one of the preeminent figures in the postwar evangelical resurgence is presented by one of the leaders from the next generation of evangelical theology.

In this excerpt, adapted from McGrath's narrative, we pick up Packer's story in the 1970s, at a time when attempts to draw the boundaries of evangelicalism grew particularly intense.

One of the distinctive features of J. I. Packer's theology is its strong pastoral intent. It is no accident, then, that many of Packer's writings have come in response to the pressing needs of the moment. On his reading of church history, Packer is convinced that controversy is an appropriate means by which clarification of Christian teaching can be achieved. One particularly significant debate to break out around this point came to be known as the "Battle for the Bible," and focused on the issue of the inerrancy of Scripture. The nature of this controversy, and Packer's role within it, are important and require discussion.

Packer's concern for the authority of Scripture is evident from his earliest writings. In general, the question of the precise nature of biblical authority did not become an issue within British evangelicalism. British evangelicals were content to affirm the inspiration and authority of Scripture without feeling the need to stipulate the precise manner in which these were to be formulated. The Inter-Varsity Fellowship Basis of Faith referred to Scripture as "infallible" yet made no reference to the term inerrancy. For many British evangelicals, inerrant was American in origin, exotic in its implications, and was associated with various obscurantist attitudes and beliefs for which British evangelicals had no enthusiasm. The leading British evangelical New Testament scholar, F. F. Bruce, who had a major influence on a generation of evangelicals, avoided the term, seeing it as unhelpful.

Packer himself can be seen as having made a significant contribution to the defense of the term infallibility and the acceptance of the term inerrancy within British evangelicalism, not least by pointing out that the negative tone of the words nevertheless pointed to a positive affirmation concerning the "total reliability" or "total truth and trustworthiness" of Scripture. Packer took a much more positive attitude toward the terms and was one of the very few English evangelicals to do so in the 1960s. Most British evangelicals were quite content to affirm that Scripture was true and trustworthy in all its statements without using the vocabulary that was emerging in North America. Packer argued that the terms inerrancy and infallibility stated these positive ideas, although in a negative manner, and thus prepared the way for their increased use in British evangelical circles.

Packer found himself being called upon to defend the authority of Scripture against liberal critics at an early stage in his career. During the period 1956-58, he was especially concerned to defend a high view of Scripture against its critics, as the background to the writing of "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God in 1958 indicates. This concern continued in the next decade. For example, in 1962, the English journal Breakthrough arranged for a debate to take place between Hugh Montefiore (dean of chapel at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) and Packer over the doctrinal basis of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship. Montefiore argued that conservative evangelicals (whom he was careful to distinguish from "fundamentalists") held teachings concerning the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture that many thinking people found difficult to believe. In the course of a good-natured and lively debate, Packer responded by clarifying and defending the evangelical use of these terms and the truths they denoted.

"Infallible" means "not liable to be mistaken, or to mislead"; "inerrant" means "free from all falsehood." Both words express negatively the positive idea that the Bible is entirely reliable and trustworthy in all that it asserts. To profess faith in the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture is therefore to express the intention of believing all that it is found to teach, on the grounds that it is true.

… The conservative evangelical differs from his liberal brother, not by committing himself to interpret the Bible in a different way, but by committing himself in advance to believe whatever the Bible turns out to be saying.1

Packer here spoke as an evangelical for evangelicals; the issue of biblical authority and inspiration served to distinguish evangelicals from liberals and acted as a rallying point around which evangelicals could unite. There were, however, rumblings of distant thunder, clouds gathering on a distant horizon, which would draw Packer into a debate of major importance in North American evangelicalism.

The debate, which at times threatened to destroy the unity of American evangelicalism, can be seen as focusing particularly on the changing stance of Fuller Theological Seminary concerning the inerrancy of Scripture.2 Packer became involved in the debate over inerrancy and was one of a very few delegates from outside the United States to attend a conference called to discuss the issue in June 1966.3 The conference, which met at Wenham, Massachusetts, failed to secure agreement over the issue of inerrancy; indeed, the final statement avoided the use of the term and spoke instead of "the entire truthfulness" of Scripture.

It is likely that the format of the conference itself contributed to that failure in that it tended to highlight differences rather than provide an atmosphere in which serious discussion and rapprochement could take place. Packer felt that the organizers seemed to have based the structure of the conference on the assumption that differences could be settled by merely reading papers to each other. In the event, poor chairmanship in the early stages of the conference led to the discussions becoming so polarized that agreement would be complicated by issues of personality. "There were some very rough moments," as Packer recalls, including sessions at which Fuller faculty were accused of duplicity by some of their more combative opponents. In such a poisoned atmosphere, reconciliation or mutual understanding was impossible.

The issue was further polarized to the point of near catastrophe through the publication of Harold Lindsell's Battle for the Bible, which appeared in April 1976. Lindsell singled out Fuller for special criticism and took the step of making commitment to inerrancy, in the strict sense of the term, a criterion of evangelical identity. This single-issue approach to evangelical identity was widely regarded as simplistic and confusing. Lindsell's uncompromising views caused serious difficulties even for evangelicals who were inerrantists, such as Carl Henry, who felt that Lindsell's "theological atom bombing" hurt evangelical allies as much as their enemies. In a subsequent volume, Lindsell argued that the term evangelical should be abandoned in favor of fundamentalist as a demonstration of (at least part of) the movement's commitment to inerrantism.4 Inerrancy by now had ceased to be a doctrine; it was a weapon.

Packer, who has always insisted on the inerrancy of Scripture, was something of a diplomat in a conversation often dominated by power politics and institutional rivalry.5 For example, it has been argued that the debate can be seen as an attempt by the northern evangelical establishment to impose its technical language on the entire evangelical coalition in the United States.6 Some of those present at the earlier debates between Fuller faculty and their opponents had certainly gained the impression that Trinity Evangelical Divinity School was trying to set itself up as a rival to Fuller as the leading postfundamentalist theological community.

As an outsider to the often claustrophobic world of North American theological institutional rivalry, Packer was able to focus on the theological issues without being dragged into the power struggles that were linked with the debate. In 1977, he became a founding member of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, chaired by James Boice of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia. Indeed, it can be argued that Packer's inclusion in this council determined its title; as the only non-American member, his inclusion necessitated the term "International" rather than "National." Packer was active in the three summit meetings of the council in Chicago (1978, 1982, and 1987), and the two congress meetings in San Diego (1982) and Washington, D.C. (1988), and drafted the "Expositions" for the summits of 1978 and 1982.7 Each of these "Expositions" can be seen as a masterly summary of a classic evangelical approach to the issues involved.

The 1978 exposition focused on the total trustworthiness of Scripture as the foundation of the Christian life. Canonical Scripture is to be interpreted on the basis of the recognition that it is infallible and inerrant—two negative terms that express and "safeguard crucial positive truths." Packer set out clear guidelines by which these concepts were to be understood:

We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant. However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of his penman's milieu, a milieu that God controls in his sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise.8

Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims.

So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: since, for instance, nonchronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectation in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.

In his exposition on the theme of biblical interpretation, Packer developed a classic approach, along the lines set out by Reformed and Puritan writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Three activities were identified as of central importance:

1. Exegesis, which is to be understood as the extracting of meaning from the text.

2. Integration, in which the interpreter seeks to correlate what one particular biblical passage has to say with others, to ensure that the entire weight of the biblical testimony is being conveyed.

3. Application, which aims to bring together thought and action.

It must be stressed that the term inerrancy meant different things to different people. Indeed, at times one gains the impression that the "Battle for the Bible" was waged on the basis of a wide range of understandings of what that battle concerned and the identity of both allies and enemies. Some North American evangelicals were adamant that all forms of the theory of biological evolution were contrary to Scripture and therefore were explicitly off-limits to evangelicals. Packer expressed reservations concerning this point:

I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, and maintain it in print, but exegetically I cannot see that anything Scripture says, in the first chapters of Genesis or elsewhere, bears on the biological theory of evolution one way or the other. On that theory itself, as a non-scientist, watching from a distance the disputes of the experts, I suspend judgment, but I recall that B. B. Warfield was a theistic evolutionist. If on this count I am not an evangelical, then neither was he.9

More generally, Packer can be seen as developing Calvin's understanding of the way in which biblical interpretation and scientific analysis may interact:

It should be remembered, however, that Scripture was given to reveal God, not to address scientific issues in scientific terms, and that, as it does not use the language of modern science, so it does not require scientific knowledge about the internal processes of God's creation for the understanding of its essential message about God and ourselves. Scripture interprets scientific knowledge by relating it to the revealed purpose and work of God, thus establishing an ultimate context for the study and reform of scientific ideas. It is not for scientific theories to dictate what Scripture may and may not say, although extra-biblical information will sometimes helpfully expose a misinterpretation of Scripture.

In fact, interrogating biblical statements concerning nature in the light of scientific knowledge about their subject matter may help toward attaining a more precise exegesis of them. For though exegesis must be controlled by the text itself, not shaped by extraneous considerations, the exegetical process is constantly stimulated by questioning the text as to whether it means this or that.10

In his 1978 exposition, Packer commented that Scripture "is sometimes culturally conditioned by the customs and conventional views of a particular period, so that the application of its principles today may call for a different sort of action."11 At a conference organized by the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada, held over the period February 11-14, 1985, Packer amplified these comments. He stressed the importance of the truthfulness of Scripture and noted how this was to be applied to the issue of the cultural difference between the world of Scripture and our own situation:

The fact that certain cultural and dispensational changes have changed the application of certain biblical passages to our time, as compared with the time when they were first written, must not be confused with the trustworthiness—that is, the inerrancy—of the passages themselves, as expressions of the truth and will of God for those to whom they were first addressed, and as applications of those unchanging truths about God and man which we also must apply, as God's wisdom leads us, to our own different situation.12

The situation to which biblical truths must be applied may have changed; that truth itself has not.

Packer's views about biblical inerrancy can be studied to advantage from his approach to the subject in the course of his regular teaching at Regent College. In these lectures, Packer was free to develop his ideas in a noncontroversial and constructive context. We shall explore them from the lecture course, Systematic Theology I: Knowledge of God, delivered in the fall term of 1987.13 Packer notes that the terms inerrant and infallible tended to mean different things to different people. However, the definition of inerrancy that "expresses most accurately and persuasively what those who use the term and defend it" are essentially concerned about seems to be "total trustworthiness as a consequence of entire truthfulness." This neat aphorism stands out as a superb summary of a debate that was often characterized by verbal turgidity. Turning to deal with the questions of the meaning of the older term infallibility, Packer argues for its core meaning as being "complete reliability, neither misled nor misleading."

What, then, is the difference between these two terms? Do we have a distinction without a difference, as some more puzzled readers of the Chicago Statement certainly felt was the case? Packer's summary of the situation once more seems admirable: "Inerrancy and infallibility thus become synonyms, differing only in nuance and tone (the former accenting trustworthiness as a source, the latter accenting trustworthiness as a guide). Neither word need to be used; both may be used to advantage."

Although a vigorous defender of both notions, Packer identifies four reasons why the term inerrancy in particular is disliked by some evangelicals. For Packer, the term "conjured up fear" of a number of things:

Bad apologetics. Here, Packer is concerned that rationalist claims that the truth of the Bible can in some way be proved may turn out to be flawed, with serious implications for biblical authority.

Bad harmonizing. Citing the attempt to solve the problem of apparent differences over the exact timing of Peter's three denials of Christ by suggesting that there were actually six denials, of which only three were mentioned in any one Gospel, Packer argues that such "intellectually disreputable expedients must be avoided."

Bad interpretation. Here, Packer notes the problems that emerge when the defense of inerrancy leads to a preoccupation with what are actually the minor aspects of the Bible and a failure to focus on its central message. It can lead to a "majoring in minors and minutiae, e.g. genealogies, rather than in central gospel truths."

Bad theology. The danger here is that the human character of Scripture can easily be overlooked, or that Scripture can be treated simply as a source of information, thus missing its Christocentric dimension.

But all of these are dangers—and dangers can be avoided. Packer has no doubt that the concept of inerrancy—if properly understood—affirms biblical inspiration, determines interpretative method, and safeguards biblical authority. It is a theme that is essential to evangelical biblical interpretation and application.

Packer has always been a peacemaker in terms of the controversies into which he has been drawn and concerned to ensure that controversy does not blind evangelicalism to truths that it needed to hear. Although a vigorous defender of inerrancy, he felt there was a danger that evangelicalism might fail to engage with some critically important issues through its preoccupation with this matter:

It will be sad if zeal for inerrancy entrenches a wholly backward-looking bibliology. Fruitful questions thrown up in the liberal camp—questions about revelation as communication, about hermeneutics as the theory of understanding, about the use of Scripture in preaching and theology, about the way in which the historically relative may have absoluteness and finality for all time, about the epistemological status and quality of the knowledge Scripture gives us and so on (I could extend the list, couldn't you)—await evangelical exploration, which as yet they have hardly had. The battle for the Bible must continue as long as unbelieving babble about the Bible continues, but as Archbishop Michael Ramsey once said, the best defense of any doctrine is the creative exposition of it, and the creative exposition of the doctrine of Scripture requires work on these questions which still waits to be taken in hand.14

Inerrancy, in Packer's definition, entails "total trustworthiness as a after all, we proudly proclaim that consequence of entire truthfulness."

It could be said that Packer's entire theology is founded on "the trustworthiness—that is, the inerrancy" of Scripture. It is a debatable point as to whether Packer understood the term inerrancy in quite the same terms as others who were participants to the debates of the 1970s and early 1980s. But that is a matter that can be left to future historians to discuss; it is questionable whether it is of real significance. What is unquestionably of enduring importance is Packer's affirmation, defense, and application of the trustworthiness of Scripture to Christian thought and life—or, to use the terms that have now become widely used, to systematic theology and to spirituality.

Alister McGrath is principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, and research professor at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This article is adapted from the forthcoming book J. I. Packer: A Biography, by Alister McGrath. Copyright 1997. Used by permission of Baker Book House.

1. "Questions About IVF," Breakthrough, Vol. 11 (May 1962), p. 15.

2. See George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1987).

3. Other European attendees included Donald Wiseman and Andrew Walls (UK) and Hermann Ridderbos (The Netherlands).

4. See Lindsell's later The Bible in the Balance (Zondervan, 1979), especially the concluding comments at pp. 319-22.

5. Packer's own account of the debate may be found in his article "Thirty Years' War: The Doctrine of Holy Scripture," in H. Conn, ed., Practical Theology and the Ministry of the Church (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1990), pp. 25-44.

6. A suggestion put forward by Glenn T. Sheppard, in Union Seminary Quarterly Review, Vol. 32 (1977), pp. 81-94.

7. These may be found reprinted in the 1988

edition of God Has Spoken (Baker Book House, 1988), pp. 149-55; 163-72.

8. God Has Spoken, p. 152.

9. The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem, Latimer Study No. 1 (Oxford: Latimer House, 1978), p. 5.

10. God Has Spoken, pp. 170-71. On Calvin's approach here, see Alister McGrath, A Life of John Calvin (Blackwell, 1990), pp. 253-57.

11. God Has Spoken, p. 153.

12. "Biblical Authority: What It Means Today," in Biblical Authority for Today. Basic Baptist Beliefs 3 (photocopied), p. 9.

13. Citations from photocopied handout for lecture 12, "Notes on Biblical Inerrancy."

14. "Battling for the Bible," Regent College Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Fall 1979), no page.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

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