https://blog.ayjay.org/remembering-jim-packer/
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/j-i-packer-1926-2020/
Michael at Phoenix Preacher has written about Packer here.
https://phoenixpreacher.com/37931-2/
To the extent that I've been influenced by Reformed Anglicans and ended up being a Calvinist I'd say Packer was part of that process (I'm still a Calvinist, in case anyone who reads the blog on religious topics wants to know).
One of the things that jumps out in obituaries about Packer and memories of friends was that Packer was Reformed by not a systematics theologian and that might be partly why Packer's work resonated with me. I read Knowing God, of course, Keep in Step with the Spirit, and also his book Rediscovering Holiness. The latter book was in many ways the more formative read for me because as I was shifting out of Pentecostalism I had not come across any theologian who could explain in layperson's terms what the Keswick view of holiness, that a potent act of will can let one cross the threshold from "defeat" to "higher life" living.
Some folks close to me were getting immersed in quietest writings (and it doesn't get more Quietist in terms of legendary associations than Madame Guyon or Michael Molinos!) and I was reading Packer during that time. I leaned Packer more than Guyon or Molinos, and yet I began to notice something that has stuck with me, that a person can read the Quietists and cultivate all that "inner life" and "higher life" approach to spirituality and still not be particularly theologically literate on the one hand and throw themselves into ... I'm just going to say it ... the most reactionary and rabid political approaches possible in the United States this side of you-know-what. Views of total sanctification, secular or religious, seem to go a long way toward embracing and endorsing totalitarian approaches to life is what's been on my mind lately, whether reading about the total sanctification aspirations of the religious right or woke capitalists or social justice warriors. The flesh and blood reality that we are at our best not so great is not only easily forgotten but easily rejected in the realm of social media. I am grateful to have read Packer's explanations of how sanctification is a lifelong process that never ends and through which Christians must always proceed before I got exposed to social media, where his description of the problems of Keswickian total sanctification can seem to describe all too well the vices of Twitter and other social media systems.
I am grateful to have read even some of his work and it's taken me a few stages to try to articulate since his passing what it is in his work I have found beneficial. So this post has evolved by stages.
POSTSCRIPT (I) (undated)
It seems I wasn't the only person who had a positive impression of Keep in Step With the Spirit. Carl Trueman mentions the book as helpful to him, though he mentions it was one of Packer's least well-received books. I normally avoid linking to TGC but Packer's death and Trueman's thoughts about Packer are the exception that proves the rule.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/thank-you-lord-j-i-packer/
POSTSCRIPT II: 7-19-2020 3.50pm
Some thoughts have taken time to come to mind over the weekend and some of them I shared at Phoenix Preacher in comments. At the risk of quoting myself a little with spelling corrections, a little:
https://phoenixpreacher.com/37931-2/#comment-589197
...
As someone who’s benefited from works by Packer, Stott and Martyn-Lloyd Jones I was glad to read Trueman say that decades on Packer’s humility and character proved he was the better man than many official evangelicals who did not run the race as faithfully despite looking like they had better dogmatics on paper.
I read Packer during a phase when people close to me were diving into Quietest theology on the one hand and rabid New World Order red-state stumping at the same time so Packer felt like a very badly needed antidote to that dual impulse I was getting exposed to in a key youthful phase of my life. I was turning into an ex-Pentecostal Reformed type but was immensely grateful that Packer’s Keep in Step with the Spirit graciously highlighted what he thought was good about Pentecostalism and charismatic theology without going MacArthur Charismatic Chaos in criticism. I thank God that I ended up reading Packer from the Reformed wing rather than ... [left off naming names because Michael at Phoenix Preacher would know which TR super-Calvinists I have in mind]
One of the lines in the Trueman piece, a subheader, said that Packer was too good for evangelicalism. I suppose a way to unpack that would be to say that whatever American evangelicalism has become in the last fifty years, Packer was not the kind of Anglican who fit readily into that.
Michael pulled a quote from Trueman that seems worth quoting here, too:
“He never became a powerbroker. He seems to have lacked all personal ambition. He didn’t bother to build his brand. He didn’t trumpet his own greatness from Twitter. He simply wrote good, helpful books, gave solid lectures, and steadily preached the Bible.”
My sense of Packer's life and work was that he understood that if you're going to be a Christian who ends up being any kind of leader you lead first and foremost by example, in learning and speech and prayer and conduct and then, after all that, through formal instruction.
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