1926–1943

Childhood & teenage years

James Innel “J. I.” Packer (“Jim” to close friends and family) was born on July 22, 1926, in Twyning, Gloucestershire, England. He started National School London Road, Gloucester, when he was just seven years old. Packer, who didn’t fit in well with the other boys, had barely started school when a schoolmate chased him out of the playground into the street where he was hit by a bread truck. A resulting brain injury (which he describes as “like the effect of hitting an eggshell with a spoon”) requiring immediate surgery left him in serious condition.

Young James was left with a hole on the right side of his skull, which remained visible for the rest of his life. He returned to National School in 1934 but had to wear a protective plate over his injury, preventing him from participating in usual schoolboy games and sport. Packer would later say of this season that he always “felt weak”—a theme he would carry throughout his life.

However, it was during this time that he developed a love for reading, and though his bookishness isolated him from friends, this newfound pastime would prove beneficial later in life.

In 1937 Packer left National to start Crypt School in Greyfriars, Gloucester. In his book J. I. Packer: His Life and Thought, Alister McGrath writes that Packer was the only student in his class who chose to specialize in the classics, and as a result, “he was taught on a one-to-one basis by the headmaster of the school, David Gwynn Williams.” Williams would later become an intellectual role model to Packer. In 1943 Packer was awarded the Oxford Hugh Oldham Scholarship, which he deferred for one year. Though summoned for military service at 18, his childhood brain injury prevented him from serving in the war.

At this point in his life, he had little interest in Christianity, but reading C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, The Screwtape Letters, and three smaller booklets that would later become Mere Christianity piqued his curiosity. (Packer would later write that Lewis continued to impact him the more he read and reread his work.)

1944–1954

Oxford, conversion, and ordination

A year later in October 1944, Packer started at Corpus Christi College, Oxford—the first time he would live away from his family. Just two weeks in, he was invited to hear a sermon organized by InterVarsity, where the preacher shared his own conversion experience. Though Packer found the first half of the message dull, the second part appealed to his imagination. He saw himself looking through a window into a room where people were playing games and enjoying each other’s company. “As he watched, he found he could understand the rules of the games they were playing,” McGrath wrote. “But he was outside, while they were inside. Packer recalled grasping his situation with [a] crystalline clarity. He needed to come in.” At that moment, Packer says everything became clear: “The Lord Jesus was breaking into my life and was calling for a personal response to himself from me.”

That night, Packer responded and made a personal commitment to Jesus. “What hadn’t registered,” he would later write, “is that the Christian faith—the truth—is not something that you keep at arm’s length. It’s something that you live by.”

He was soon exposed to the Puritans, including the seventeenth-century Puritan John Owen. Packer would later write that he “owed more to John Owen than to any other theologian, ancient or modern.” Almost immediately after his conversion, Packer began the ordination process under the Church of England.

After graduating from Oxford in 1948, Packer taught Greek and Latin at Oak Hill Theological College in London, and it was during this year McGrath says Packer “discovered his potential as a theological educator”—and that British evangelicalism needed a more robust, scholarly defense. From 1949 to 1950, he sat under the teaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who would greatly influence his thinking. Around the same time, he returned to Oxford to study theology. He was ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church in 1952 and one year later, a priest, and then spent three years serving as a minister at Birmingham Cathedral.

His first article, “The Puritan Treatment of Justification by Faith,” was published in Evangelical Quarterly in 1952. Around this time, Packer teamed up with Raymond Johnston and Lloyd-Jones to organize an annual Puritan Studies Conference. The first conference drew just 20 people—but within a few years, attendance was over a hundred. Packer received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1954, and in that same year, on July 17, fell in love and married Kit Mullet. They adopted three children: Ruth, Naomi, and Martin.

1955–1969

Early work

Packer and his family moved to Bristol in 1955, where he worked as a lecturer at Tyndale Hall for six years. In a 2017 Convivium article on Packer, Neil Bramble writes that Packer became enmeshed in his first significant controversy during his time at Tyndale when he published an article in Evangelical Quarterly attacking the Keswick teaching on sanctification. Bramble writes the article “created a firestorm that nearly cost him his teaching position.”

After speaking to a student group in London in 1957, an editor from InterVarsity asked him to turn the address into a pamphlet. So he did, and after 18 months, submitted what would become his first book: Fundamentalism and the Word of God, published in 1958—a defense of the Bible’s authority. It sold 20,000 copies in its first year, and according to Leland Ryken, “has never been out of print since then.” The book would “transform the general perception of Packer within evangelicalism” and “significantly extend his influence and enhance his reputation” writes McGrath.

Also during the 1960s, the editor of the small bimonthly Evangelical Magazine invited Packer to write a series of articles—he accepted and penned nearly two dozen articles every other month for five years.

Then came a pivotal time in Packer’s evangelical life. During the 1966 National Assembly of Evangelicals, Lloyd-Jones challenged attendees to exit denominations “tainted” by growing theological liberalism—like the Church of England. John Stott chaired the opening session—and after Lloyd-Jones finished speaking, publicly opposed the proposal. Packer, though not at the Assembly, sided with Stott, sparking tension between him and Lloyd-Jones.

Packer and Stott had started Latimer House in the 1960s, a research center to strengthen the Church of England theologically, and during this time, his passion for biblical inerrancy grew. After returning to Oxford in 1961, Packer served there for nine years as librarian and then warden. That same year, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God was published, which would become one of his most influential books.

1970–1983

Knowing God

The situation between Packer and Lloyd-Jones blew up in May 1970 when Packer coauthored Growing into Union: Proposals for Forming a United Church in England with another evangelical and two Catholics. Sadly, the book and Packer’s stance created an irreparable schism between him and Lloyd-Jones, the latter ending the Puritan Conference they had cofounded—it was a painful end to a long-held friendship.

Packer returned to Tyndale Hall in 1970 as principal and then, in 1971, as associate principal of the newly formed Trinity College in Bristol. Still on the editorial board of The Evangelical Magazine, Packer’s editor mentioned she had nothing on the theme of God to put in her readers’ hands—and so Packer put pen to paper and began writing a set of articles.

Years later, he approached InterVarsity about publishing those articles as a book. InterVarsity declined, but Hodder and Stoughton took on the project—and his most-read work, Knowing God, was published in 1973. Since then, it has sold more than 1 million copies, has been translated into more than 20 languages, and ranks in the top 50 influential books in shaping evangelical beliefs.

Packer’s strong opinion about biblical inerrancy remained steadfast, paving the way for a monumental event. In 1977 he met with R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner, Norman Geisler, and Greg Bahnsen for a conference on the authority of Scripture at Mount Hermon, California. The meeting resulted in the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy and the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy, which Packer signed.

Then, in 1979, Packer received an invitation from a friend that would send him and his family across the ocean on a new adventure: Packer was asked to teach at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. He accepted, keeping his credentials as a minister in the Anglican Church. He taught systematic theology and classes on the Puritans until his retirement.

In the early 1980s, he was asked to come on board with Christianity Today, first as a contributing editor and then as a senior editor. It would be a role he would carry for the next 30 years, which often involved mentoring other writers.

1984–2019

The later years

In later years, Packer published several classic works including Keep in Step with the Spirit in 1984 and The Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life in 1994. But the closest thing to a systematic theology Packer would write was his seminal work, Concise Theology, published in 1993. Growing in Christ was published shortly after in 1994.

Exerting his strong opinion once again, he cosigned a 25-page document in May 1994, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” along with Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus, who represented the two sides of the discussion. The document stated that Protestants and Catholics should unite and declare a common witness to the modern world. Some scholars called it an “ecumenical landmark,” while others refuted it, arguing that a shared mission between the two religions is not possible because of doctrinal differences.

He retired from Regent College in 1996, but McGrath writes that he “continued to play a role in the college’s teaching ministry for two further decades” and remained a theological advisor and contributor to Christianity Today. Then in 1999 he was asked to participate in a project he would later call “most important thing that I have ever done for the kingdom”—Packer was invited to be the general editor of the English Standard Version Bible (he suggested the name), and theological editor of the ESV Study Bible.

As the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close, Packer—aging and contemplative of his life experiences of frailty stemming from when he was hit by the truck as a child—wrote Weakness Is the Way: Life with Christ Our Strength (published in 2013). In this poignant work, he argued that for Christians, weakness should be a way of life, but we should embrace that weakness and find our strength in God alone. And in 2014, he and a team of other Anglican leaders published To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism, which renewed the tradition of catechesis for today’s Christians.

But by 2015 his health was rapidly declining. He struggled with macular degeneration in his left eye, and when it moved to his right, he could no longer read or write. He retired in 2016, but even so, read his Bible daily with the help of a magnifying glass.