J. I. Packer and the Book that Started It All

Abstract

 J. I. Packer’s first book, ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (1958), was written into a particular moment: the controversy that erupted around Billy Graham’s 1954–1955 British crusades and the invitation to lead the Cambridge University mission. This article reconstructs that context, considering the attacks of churchmen such as Michael Ramsey and Christopher Chavasse, and Gabriel Hebert’s Fundamentalism and the Church of God—before showing how the young Bristol tutor answered it. Against Hebert, Packer argued that the real issue was not biblical interpretation but biblical authority and that so-called fundamentalism was simply historic confessional Protestantism. The article traces Packer’s account of inspiration as divine concursus rather than dictation, his defence of the terms ‘infallibility’ and ‘inerrancy’, and his grounding of scriptural authority in the teaching and Lordship of Christ. It sets Packer alongside Warfield, Machen, and Stott while distinguishing him from a narrower American fundamentalism, and follows his thought through God Has Spoken, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, and his final works. The conclusion is that Packer’s book gave evangelicalism the theological ballast underlying Graham’s confidence in what the Bible says.