Review of Packer’s ‘Proclaiming Christ in a Pluralistic Age’

Posted on July 24, 2024 
Filed under Moore College, Resources, Theology

“I was eating pizza the other night with two young men, one a Christian, the other a seeker. We talked about what it means to be a Christian and some of the challenges of the Christian life.

The first surprise was that they/we couldn’t get through two family-sized pizzas. The youth of today!

The second was that they thought that becoming a Christian in 2024 was a way of rebelling.

One told how his boss, a Gen X Roman Catholic, explained that young men shouldn’t be going to church but should instead be finding a girlfriend to sleep with and getting drunk. The young man found this boringly orthodox, ignoble, and distasteful. He felt certain that there must be a better way to live.

I’m having conversations like these more and more these days. Are we seeing early signs of a spiritual awakening among young people? I wonder whether the Lord is beginning a new work among these younger generations.

What I know for certain is that the Church must be ready to receive young seekers. That means that our churches must be refuges of radical, self-sacrificial love. Parched and thirsting for meaning and community in today’s desert of online isolation and spiritual desolation, nothing will attract young people more than an actual flesh-and-blood loving Christian community. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

This kind of strange Christ-like love can arise only from an intimate relational knowledge of Jesus himself.

This is where a book like Proclaiming Christ in a Pluralistic Age comes in.

J. I. Packer (1926–2020) was a British theologian, author of the now-classic Knowing God (1973), who for most of his working life was a professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver. He stands alongside John Stott, F.F. Bruce, Michael Green, Dick Lucas, Martyn-Lloyd Jones and other superb conservative-evangelical British preachers and theologians of the twentieth century.

The book is in fact a lightly edited transcription of five lectures that Packer first delivered at Kuyper College in Grand Rapids in 1978, and then at Moore College in Sydney. …”

–At AP, Campbell Markham reviews J I Packer’s Proclaiming Christ in a Pluralistic Age. (Bold added.)

And you can also see or hear Packer’s five lectures at the Moore College Annual Lectures in 1978 – in glorious grey and white, thanks to the Donald Robinson Library at Moore College.

His series title was “We Preach Christ Crucified”. Very much worth watching.

At about an hour each, why not consider watching these with your Bible Study?

Lecture 1 –  We’ve a Story to Tell.
Lecture 2 – The man Christ Jesus.
Lecture 3 – He emptied himself: the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Lecture 4 – The wonderful exchange.
Lecture 5 – No other name: the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.

Related:

The Moore College Annual Lectures 2024 with Tom Schreiner.