"J. I. Packer: Anglicans and the Authority of Scripture": A Film Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
J. I. Packer: Anglicans and the of Scripture: A Film Review Packer: Anglicans and the of Fox Video Production and Post, 2004. 135 minutes. Distributed by Fox Video Production and Post, P.O. Box 681027, Franklin, TN 37068 USA, (615) 771-6440, www.foxvp.com DVD $20.00 and videotapes $20.00. Sometime early in 2004, J.I. (James Innell) Packer (b.1926) gave two lectures at the Church of the Resurrection in Franklin, Tennessee, which were videotaped and recorded. The first lecture, slightly over an hour (63:14), was titled Understanding Our Crisis of Truth and Authority while the second slightly longer lecture (71:17) was called Biblical Wisdom for Today. The videotaping alternated regularly between J.I. Packer's lecture from a podium at the front of the large church and the facial expressions of various members of the congregation listening to him. J.I. Packer needs no introduction in the world of evangelical Anglicanism or that of evangelical Christianity in general. Director of Anglican Studies and Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada, he has taught systematic and historical theology there for over twenty-five years. Prior to that he taught and preached in Great Britain for twenty-seven years. A senior editor of Christianity Today, he is also a widely read author, having published such classics as Knowing God, Evangelism and Sovereignty, and Fundamentalism and the Word of God. The present videotape/DVD is perhaps most valuable as a historical record: part of the collected oral history of J.I. Packer's enormous contribution to Anglicanism, towards the end of his career, which is still going strong. These lectures are vintage Packer, who has traveled around the globe preaching and teaching for many decades. Early in the first lecture, he describes himself as having been formed by the Anglicanism of the 1930s. More importantly, he dates the present of truth and authority to two figures of the 1950s (Paul Tillich and John MacQuarrie) whose teaching about the Bible and theology are the source of all of our present troubles. Well, perhaps not all of our present troubles: for Packer, things began to decline during the eighteenth century Enlightenment. In the second lecture, therefore, having analyzed the crisis of truth and authority, he deals with it constructively by taking his listeners back before the fall. His strategy is a very long (about forty minutes) formal exposition of the title and table of contents of the great puritan divine Richard Baxter's (1615-1691) standard treatise on Christian conduct, familiarly known by its short title, The Christian Directory. This is indeed a bold move, both theologically and strategically. In more practical terms, i.e., its basic attention-keeping value and, therefore, its potential use in most adult-education programs, the first lecture will be much more accessible. Before returning to Packer's take on the present of truth and the authority of Scripture, it may be helpful to summarize his own description of his social location within it. Packer was part of the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster; but since, in his view, it has been led astray by its bishop to false teachings and practices, he has therefore joined (or more probably was instrumental in founding) a group of parishes that have declared themselves out of communion with their diocese. Instead, he considers himself in communion with the true Anglicanism represented by the Network (a group of parishes and some bishops who have declared themselves out of communion with the Episcopal Church, USA) and by certain African and other provinces of the Anglican Communion who are protesting the theology and practices of the North American (United States and Canada) churches. Packer's four-point program, then, which he describes at the end of his first lecture, involves realignment (Packer's euphemism for schism); re-education (the fundamentals of Anglicanism and Bible for churches overfed with Tillich and MacQuarrie); re-centering on Jesus Christ: and re-engagement as witnesses for Jesus Christ bringing the Word to the church and the world around us. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".