Quote by J.I. Packer
“A marriage, or a marriage partner, may be compared to a great tree growing right up through the center of one’s living room. It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going––to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door––the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around. It is somehow bigger and stronger than oneself. True, it could be chopped down, but not without tearing the house apart. And certainly it is beautiful, unique, exotic; but also, let’s face it, it is at times an enormous inconvenience.”
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Dr. Packer, the Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology at Regent College, was hailed by TIME as “a doctrinal Solomon” among Protestants. “Mediating debates on everything from a particular Bible translation to the acceptability of free-flowing Pentecostal spirituality, Packer helps unify a community [evange licalism] that could easily fall victim to its internal tensions.”
Knowing God, Dr. Packer’s seminal 1973 work, was lauded as a book which articulated shared beliefs for members of diverse denominations; the TIME profile quotes Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington as saying, “conservative Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists could all look to [Knowing God] and say, ‘This sums it all up for us.’”
In a similar tribute to Dr. Packer almost ten years ago, American theologian Mark Noll wrote in Christianity Today that, “Packer’s ability to address immensely important subjects in crisp, succinct sentences is one of the reasons why, both as an author and speaker, he has played such an important role among American evangelicals for four decades.”
For over 25 years Regent College students have been privileged to study under Dr. Packer’s clear and lucid teaching, and our faculty, staff and students celebrate the international recognition he rightly receives as a leading Christian thinker and teacher.
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