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98
J. I. Packer
natural life may have authority, too; but what authority could ever attach to
a version of the faith that scales down the supernatural work of God in
Christians and the church and reduces it to [the] vanishing point?
(iv)
Should we not be pointing to the
personal reappearance o f Jesus
Christ
to renew all things as the one sure and certain hope for the Christian,
the church and the world? We shall be wise not to embrace too confidently
any of the current rival opinions about the circumstances that will precede
and surround his
parousia
, but in an age of threatening catastrophe we shall
surely be far from wise to suppress this central New Testament theme, and
far from faithful if we try to explain it away. What authority will or should
attach to a version of Christianity that obscures the fact that the Creator is
going to have the last word in his own world?
These few sample questions suffice, I hope, to illustrate the sort of lame
ness and incoherence to which reduced Christianities lead, and so to justify
my conviction that Christianity can only come to men today with the author
ity of relevant divine truth when the full content of biblical belief is pu t for
ward. The reduced Christianities at which I have been tilting were produced
yesterday by old-style liberals intoxicated with the moonshine of their own
cultural optimism; today, with that cultural optimism a thing of the past,
they seem no better than a bad hangover, to be got rid of as soon as possible.
Second, I urge that the authority of Christian faith cannot possibly be
restored unless
the full Christian principle o f authority
is put forward.
Here we must distinguish two distinct questions. If, first, we ask: from
what source is knowledge of God ’s work, will and ways finally and defini
tively to be drawn?—the correct answer, in my view, is: the Bible. I cannot
here deploy my reasons for thinking that this is something that Christ and
his apostles clearly teach, though the case (which I have spelled out fully
elsewhere) does, in fact, seem to me unanswerable. Suffice it to say that with
Calvin, I believe that God himself convinces Christians that Scripture is his
authoritative word of instruction, and with Wesley, I believe that this entails
its inerrancy (for it was Wesley who wrote: “will not the allowing there is any
error in Scripture, shake the authority of the whole?” and “if there be one
falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of tru th .”) . . .
But if we ask the different question: what is the principle of authority in
Christianity?—it seems to me that an adequate answer must link together all
the following things: the overall claim of God upon us as our Creator and
Redeemer; Jesus’ requiring that his disciples submit to the God-taught
teaching of the Jewish Scriptures (our Old Testament) and of the apostles
(our New Testament); the work of the Holy Spirit interpreting, authenticat
ing and applying the canonical written word; the givenness and finality of the
gospel message; and, as a pointer to where God ’s authority is found, the wit
ness of the historic church as to what Christian faith and life actually are, the
witness that has traditionally been called tradition. . . .