![]() Packer moved back to Oxford in 1961, where he served as librarian of Latimer House in Oxford from 1961 to 1962 and warden from 1962 to 1969, an evangelical research centre he founded with John Stott. It was also during this time that he published his first book, Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958), a defense of the authority of the Bible, which sold 20,000 copies in that year and has been in print since. According to biographer Alister McGrath, it is widely agreed that his critique "marked the end of the dominance of the Keswick approach among younger evangelicals". He wrote an article denouncing Keswick theology as Pelagian in the Evangelical Quarterly. In 1955, his family moved to Bristol and Packer taught at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, from 1955 to 1961. In 1954, Packer married Kit Mullet, and they had three children, Ruth, Naomi, and Martin. He served as assistant curate of Harborne Heath in Birmingham from 1952 to 1954. ![]() He was ordained a deacon in 1952 and priest in 1953 in the Church of England, within which he was associated with the evangelical movement. He wrote his dissertation under Geoffrey Nuttall on the soteriology of the Puritan theologian Richard Baxter. He obtained his Master of Arts degree in 1954, and Doctor of Philosophy in 1954. In 1949, Packer went back to Wycliffe Hall, Oxford in 1949 to study theology. During this 1949–1950 school year, he sat under the teaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel, who also would have a great influence on his thinking, and who he would know and interact with later. Īfter college, he spent a brief time teaching Greek and Latin at Oak Hill College in London. Lewis at Oxford, whose teachings would (though he never knew Lewis personally) become a major influence in his life. It was during this time that Packer became exposed to the Puritans through OICCU's library, which were an influence he carried for the rest of his life. In a 1944 meeting of the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (OICCU), Packer committed his life to Christian service. He won a scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he was educated at Corpus Christi College, obtaining his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948. In 1937, Packer went to The Crypt School, where he specialized in the classics. He went on to cherish typewriters for the rest of his life. At 11 years of age, Packer was gifted with an old Oliver typewriter. When he was seven, Packer suffered a severe head injury in a collision with a bread van, which precluded him from playing sports, so he became interested in reading and writing. His father was a clerk for the Great Western Railway and his lower-middle-class family was only nominally Anglican, attending the local St. Packer was born on 22 July 1926 in Twyning, Gloucestershire, England to James and Dorothy Packer. His last teaching position was as the board of governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, in which he served from 1996 until his retirement in 2016 due to failing eyesight. He was one of the high-profile signers on the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a member on the advisory board of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and also was involved in the ecumenical book Evangelicals and Catholics Together in 1994. He was considered one of the most influential evangelicals in North America, known for his best-selling book Knowing God, written in 1973, as well as his work as an editor for the English Standard Version of the Bible. James Innell Packer (22 July 1926 – 17 July 2020) was an English-born Canadian evangelical theologian, cleric and writer in the low-church Anglican and Calvinist traditions.
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