J. I. Packer or Donald Dayton? Sanhedrin Elder or Prophetic Witness -- by Ron Dart

J.I. Packer and the Evangelical Future: The Impact of His Life and Thought. Edited by Timothy George (2009).                          

From the Margins: A Celebration of the Theological Work of Donald W. Dayton. Edited by Christian Collins Winn (2007).

The Post-WW II Evangelical ethos has been largely dominated by a decided Reformed and Puritan theological tradition. Luther, and even more Calvin, have set the stage for how St. Augustine and St. Paul are to be read and interpreted. Those that dare to differ with the Reformed Sanhedrin are often banished from the clan or fated to live from the margins.

There is no doubt that J.I. Packer is one of the most significant leaders of the Reformed and Evangelical Sanhedrin, and J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future demonstrates why this is the case. All of the contributors to this tidy and hagiographical tome walk the extra mile to clarify how and why Packer has provided guidance and leadership for a new generation of reformed-evangelical theologians, pastors and academics. Packer’s biographer, Alister McGrath, sets the tone for the book by highlighting how Packer has been a lighthouse and gatekeeper for ‘The Great Tradition’ in an age of fragmentation and Christian capitulation to the liberal agenda in both the church and society. Charles Colson is yet another voice that lauds the contribution of Packer as do many other worthies in J.I. Packer and the Evangelical Future. The obstinate fact that the post-WW II evangelical ethos has been dominated by the reformed way has meant that those who see themselves as standing within such a tradition find it hard to have a voice if they question such a merging of evangelical and reformed thought at the highest levels of leadership, education, politics and ecclesial direction.

J.I Packer and the Evangelical Future is dedicated to Father Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) who played a significant role in challenging the church to move back into the naked public square, and do so in a subtle and sophisticated republican manner. Neuhaus was the founder of the much followed First Things, and First Things merged ‘The Great Tradition’ with American right of centre republican thought. Packer and Neuhaus worked closely to bring together Evangelicals and Roman Catholics in the 1990s. The synthesis, therefore, of post WW II evangelicals with reformed theology and republican politics is part of the line and lineage that Packer has held high. Packer has tended to be more explicit about his Puritan and reformed theology, and more implicit about his republican politics, but the dots can be easily connected when Packer links theology and politics. There is no doubt, though, that Packer’s theology and puritan politics shine through from his earliest writings. Packer’s first article for Christianity Today (the flagship for American reformed evangelicals) ‘Fundamentalism: The British Scene’(Volume 2, Number 25: 1958) brings together, in a suggestive and preliminary way, reformed theology and puritan politics. Billy Graham (his father in law) and Carl Henry were front and centre in the founding of Christianity Today. There is no doubt that an agenda was at work by these man in defining the ‘neo-evangelical’ agenda as reformed in theology and republican in politics.   Those that Packer works with lean in a definite republican direction—liberalism in the culture and theological wars is the obvious enemy. The banner of ‘The Great Tradition’ that is held so high by Packer and tribe is interpreted, though, in a worrisome republican and reformed way. It can be legitimately questioned whether ‘The Great Tradition’ can be equated with such an interpretive spin.

J.I. Packer came to Regent College in Vancouver in 1979. This was the same year that I began attending Regent College. I took classes with Packer from 1979-1981, but I was never quite convinced that Luther and Calvin were the best interpreters of St. Augustine and St. Paul, and I was equally not convinced that Luther and Calvin were the best way to read the 16th century Reformation. I found the insights of the Oxford Reformers (Colet, More, Erasmus and Vives more convincing).  Were there other legitimate ways to read these theologians? I was as committed as most to ‘The Great Tradition’ before it became popular to be so, and I did two MAs on the Patristics (West and East). Could the Oxford Reformers and the Fathers of the Patristic era be equated with reformed theology and republican politics? I don’t think so. And, more to the point, could the linking of republican politics and American empire be equated with an authentic Christian prophetic witness? I had my doubts and questions. I did papers on Thomas Merton and Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God for Packer. Needless to say, Merton and Robinson were never guides, shining lights or mentors for Packer.  

The theological differences in Canada between the dominance of the reformed tradition and the more Wesleyan way were played out in a graphic and not to be forgotten way by J.I. Packer and Clark Pinnock. I was, as I mentioned above, a student of Packer between 1979-1981 at Regent College, and I worked with him on the Anglican Essentials movement in the 1990s and coauthored a booklet with him in 1998. When I was doing my doctoral studies at McMaster University between 1983-1988, I was in a house group with Clark and Dorothy Pinnock. Pinnock was teaching at McMaster Divinity Scholl at the time. Pinnock emerged in the 1980s-1990s as the leading Canadian critic of the way reformed theology had come to co-opt and define Biblical thought and the evangelical tradition. The differences between Packer and Pinnock could not be more obvious and pronounced than in their understanding of how the Bible is to be interpreted and their attitudes to reformed theology. I was quite fortunate to live through this clash of the two most prominent Canadian theologians. Needless to say, both men taught at Regent College (Pinnock in the mid- 1970s and Packer from 1979 onwards). Barry Callen’s tome, Clark H. Pinnock: Journey Toward Renewal: An Intellectual Biography (2000) brings to light the nature of Pinnock’s trying journey as he dared to question the reformed Sandhedrin and the price he paid for doing so.  

I am also a Canadian shaped and formed by an indigenous Red/High Tory way as embodied by George Grant in Lament for a Nation. Canadian conservatism can certainly not be equated with American republicanism. Grant and many other Canadians such as Donald Creighton, Eugene Forsey, Judith Robinson, Marya Fiamengo and Stephen Leacock to mention but a few offer an alternate Canadian read to the American understanding of conservatism. It’s too bad Packer, Neuhaus and disciples know not this older and deeper conservatism. Much hinges, of course, on what is being conserved. Canadian High Tory conservatism attempts to conserve something much different than American republican conservatism.     

I had been alerted to the fact that evangelical and reformed thought need not be equated by an ongoing study of church history, Canadian church history and politics and the timely publication of Discovering an Evangelical Heritage by Donald Dayton in 1976.  J.I. Packer and tribe tended to see liberalism as the enemy of the historic church, and the debate often turned on the  tight knit equation of conservatism=evangelical=reformed versus the corrosive impact of liberalism and progressivism. Liberalism was seen as a corrosive toxin in the pure body of conservatism. But, Dayton’s book made it abundantly clear that there were other streams in the evangelical way that were being ignored, and such streams could not be equated with liberalism.

The publication of From the Margins is a celebration of the life and thought of Donald Dayton. There are many fine essays by Dayton in this tome, and each essay usually has a couple of responses. Dayton has gone in the opposite direction of Packer and clan. There is a form of the historic evangelical way, Dayton argues, that is truer to Wesley (chapters 3-4) and many others that is decidedly not reformed, and most political but not republican (chapter 2). Such a tradition is not liberal, but it is evangelical. The fact that the tome is called From the Margins speaks volumes about how this alternate evangelical way has been marginalized. Dayton has, again and again, deconstructed the standard and establishment Evangelical Sanhedrin and the way such a tradition has tamed and domesticated the best of the more prophetic evangelical heritage.

Dayton, to his thoughtful credit, has dared to differ with Marsden’s standard work on the American evangelical tradition (chapter 9). Marsden’s Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (1987) argued that the American evangelical tradition could be best understood through the eyes of a reformed theology (Princeton style), a notion of the Bible that was inspired, inerrant and infallible and either a retreat from politics into an isolationist position or a turn to republican politics. Dayton thought that Marsden had only told part of the dynamic American evangelical tale. Dayton argued that the Holiness, Pentecostal and Wesleyan traditions within the American evangelical way were neither reformed nor pietistic/republican politically. In short, Marsden had seriously distorted the more complex American evangelical ethos, and, in doing so, offered up a false model and paradigm of evangelicals in the USA. Dayton argued that 19th century American evangelicals were much more engaged with the tough and demanding justice, peace and social issues, and the ‘neo-evangelicals’ of the 20th century had betrayed and distorted their more mature and fuller vision of faith. This is why, for example, Jim Wallis (founder of Sojourners) sees himself as a classical evangelical of the 19th century rather than 20th century ‘neo-evangelical’ that has capitulated to the American empire. It is significant that Dayton and Wallis worked closely together in the 1970s, and it was Dayton that did a great deal of revisionist history in reinterpreting the older American roots of the evangelical way. The publication, as I noted above, of Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (1976), was the product of Dayton’s articles for ‘Post-American/Sojourners’ on the more radical and prophetic roots of the historic American evangelicals. Dayton did much spade and sleuth work in the life and thought of Wesley, Holiness and Pentecostal traditions to offer up a alternate read from that of Marsden’s standard tome on ‘neo-evangelicals’. Sadly so, it is the reformed ‘neo-evangelicals’ as embodied in those like Billy Graham, Carl Henry and J.I. Packer that have dimmed and banished the more radical and prophetic evangelical way of the 19th century. Dayton deserves much credit for bringing to light what has been driven into exile by the reformed Sanhedrin. Dayton’s many insights from the margins need to be heard and heeded if a more mature recovery of the evangelical way is ever going to occur.        

The question then becomes this: whose definition of evangelical will prevail and why? There is no doubt that the Packer reformed way has dominated the stage, but the counter cultural way of Dayton remains as an alternate voice and vision. J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future perpetuates the myth and illusion that evangelical=reformed=republican politics. From the Margins offers an alternate way to read and interpret the historic evangelical tradition. Packer or Dayton? Sanhedrin or Prophetic? You choose.

Ron Dart

Comments

[Cheryl B.]

What a great article. It helps me to understand why I find myself drifting away from things "Reformed", as I try to journey closer and closer to Jesus.
"Evangelical Sandherin" is a phrase that I have never heard before but is sure to be a permanent part of my psyche--thanks!!
I had the pleasure of making Ron's acquaintance in the 80's when I was taking a religious studies course at UBC and he was the TA. There was always the aroma of Jesus about him, but he did not fit into any of the Christian molds that we were offered then (or now for that matter). This article gives me more insight into why that was. Keep stretching us "thou good and faithful."

[Wayne Northey]

Thanks Ron for drawing attention to “the weightier matters of the law”.

I first met Dr. Packer on a Regent College committee to select a new ethics professor after Dr. Klaus Bockmuehl had died. When Dr. Packer heard that I worked at the time for the Mennonite Central Committee Canada, he offered me a spontaneous and succinct critique of Anabaptists. While I share with you, Ron, that Anabaptists were part of the “DNA of schism” that at the Reformation sowed ever since disunity in the body of Christ, that was not Packer’s critique who idolizes the Reformed tradition. In response, I remember quoting James (2:18): “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do…” In short, the “Sanhedrin” in Jesus’ day as in ours fails to do “justice, mercy and faithfulness” (Jesus in Matthew 23:23 – quoting the high water Hebrew Bible ethical text of Micah 6:8:
He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.)

When I was doing my Master of Theological Studies at Regent College, I was given a Systematic Theology reading list of a few thousand pages drawn up by Dr. Packer. When I eventually mentioned to him that (as I recall) only one publication was not by or about Reformed theologians/theology, he smiled and said his philosophy was getting to know one tradition well before examining others. I was grateful at the time that he was on a Sabbatical and another list was made available that represented instead 2,000 years of Christian thought.

Over against the “Sanhedrin”, we are called to this profound ethical impulse: “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’( Matthew 9:13) ” Matthew’s Gospel twice quotes Jesus quoting Hosea (6:6): “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.” In the end all theology (“acknowledgement of God”) is heresy (false choice) if its central dynamic is not mercy towards/love of neighbour. This is the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2–17; Deuteronomy 5:6–21) boiled down to two by Jesus (Matthew 22:37 – 40 on which “All the Law and the Prophets hang…”) boiled down in Paul (Romans 13:8 – 10) and James (2:8) to one Royal Law: “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right.” In this context, Hosea, Jesus, Paul and James would have all added, “you are doing right ‘theology’ ”. Love is “the most excellent way” (I Corinthians 12:31, 13:1 – 13), for “God is love (I John 4:16).”

[Editor]

Note that we've posted a significantly revised version of the essay.

[FrGregACCA]

What is interesting to me, having grown up in a primarily Arminian/Wesleyan environment (which was, however, being eroded, at least politically, by neo-Evangelicalism some 35-45 years ago), is that this tradition represents a turn away from Calvinism and back toward Roman Catholicism/Orthodoxy.

[Logan Runnalls]

Helpful. Thank you.