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96
J. I. Packer
These five points form the groundwork for what I have to say. My main
argument now follows.
The Demise of Authority
Our theme, the reconstitution of authority, presupposes that authority
has broken down. Indeed it has; we know that all too well. Once the Chris
tian outlook had authority for the entire Western world, giving purpose, per
spective, and coherence to all branches of human endeavour and imparting
a positive value to each individual’s personal life. Tha t has now become
largely a thing of the past in the countries that once called themselves Chris
tendom, and many facets of the paganism that Christendom displaced are
now reappearing. . . .
The Reconstituting of Authority
So we come to the existential question: can we conceive a strategy for
restoring the authority of Christian faith and morals in the modern West,
with a view to the re-hallowing of personal and community life under God?
The Humpty Dumpty of conviction that erected the culture now dissolving
all around us has had a great fall; can the king’s men ever hope to put
Humpty Dumpty together again? Not being a prophet nor a prophet’s son, I
shall not try to guess what the future may hold; but as one who is profession
ally required to try to be a theologian, I shall devote this final section . . . to
specifying three conditions without which, as I judge, any present-day
attempts to restore the authority of Christian faith are bound to fail, and that
for two very good reasons. The first reason for failure is: because it will not
in that case be the full and authentic Christian faith that we are commending,
but a genuinely arbitrary reduction of it to a form that really ought to be dis
missed as culturally relative. The second reason for failure is: because it is in
any case impossible to commend reduced Christianities convincingly. The
idea that the less you take it on you, as a Christian, to affirm and defend the
easier it will be to affirm and defend it, is totally mistaken. Versions of Chris
tianity that have been de-supernaturalized, de-doctrinalized and de-absolu-
tized get torpedoed by the following dilemma: if you believe as much as this,
why do you not believe more? But if you believe no more than this, why do
you not believe less? This dilemma exposes their arbitrariness and the real
ization of that arbitrariness annuls the authority to which they laid claim; for
it exposes them as so many private ideas of what Christianity ought to be, in
contrast to what it actually is in its biblical and historic form. To discourage
us from hankering to go this way, when in fact there is no road this way, and
to direct our attention to the only procedure that, in my view, holds out any
hope of restoring the true authority of the true faith, I venture now to make
the following claim: that restoration of the authority of Christian morals is