Sixty two years ago.
Before the Space program.
Before President Kennedy was elected.
Before air travel was common place. (That’s back!)
Before TV had more than three stations.
J.I. Packer was writing about the importance of Biblical Authority and the doctrine of inerrancy. He was right then and he is more right now. His words continue to ring true in an age that is rapidly running from God to the pig slop of an anti-biblical worldview that raises secular ideology and human reason above the clear and authoritative teaching of the word of God.
Today, the Theologian Emeritus of the Anglican Church of North America, is one month shy of 94. In the last two years, he has gone blind, but his books and his ministry continue to thrive and continue to call the church back to the Word of the Living God, the only sure word about Christ, salvation, man, sin, justice and love. We would do well to listen to his voice from 62 years ago. They are more relevant now than they have ever been.
“We have to choose whether we will accept the biblical doctrine of Scripture as it stands or permit ourselves to refashion it according to our fancy. We have to choose whether to embrace the delusion that human creatures are competent to judge and find fault with the words of their Creator or whether to recognize this idea for the blasphemy that it is and drop it. We have to decide whether to carry through our repentance on the intellectual level or whether we shall still cherish our sinful craving for a thought-life free from the rule of God. We have to decide whether to say that we believe the Bible and mean it or to say it and look for ways whereby we can say it without having to accept all the consequences.
If the human mind is set up as the measure and test of truth, it will quickly substitute for man’s incomprehensible Creator a comprehensible idol fashioned in man’s own image; man wants a god he can manage and feel comfortable with and will inevitably invent one if allowed. He will forget (because he cannot understand) the infinite gulf that separates the Creator from his creatures and will picture to himself a god wholly involved in this world and wholly comprehensible (in principle, at any rate) by the speculative intellect. It was no accident but a natural development that made the liberal theology of the nineteenth century so strongly pantheistic. Once people reverse the proper relationship between Scripture and their own thinking and start judging biblical statements about God by their private ideas about God, instead of vice versa, their knowledge of the Creator is in eminent danger of perishing and with it the whole idea of supernatural religion.”
J.I. Packer
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