Thirty-nine Articles: James Packer and Treading Grain

James I. Packer, D.Phil, Oxford
1926-present

Treading Grain offers the following post at:  http://treadinggrain.com/2012/j-i-packer-the-creeds-and-the-articles-together/

I am enjoying quite a bit the reading I’m doing as preparation for our spring/summer sermon series on the 39 Articles. Peter Moore dropped off his copy of +John Rodgers’ new book on the Articles. It’s next on my reading list having finished J.I. Packer’s nice little treatise: The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today.

In his essay, Packer writes of the dual role the Creeds and Articles play in the development of a coherent, robust and authentic Anglicanism.

The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds challenge every generation of the world church: do you still stand with us on the Trinity? on the Incarnation? on the second coming of our Lord, and the Christian hope? If not, why not? Are not our positions scriptural? Go to the Bible and see. And if you find they are, will you not labour to teach and stress and defend these things in your day, as we did in ours? And the Articles, supplementing the Creeds, ask each generation of Anglicans further questions. Do you stand where we stand with regard to the sufficiency and supremacy of Scripture? the gravity of sin? justification by faith alone in and through Christ alone? the nature of the sacraments as seals of the gospel promise, means of grace because they are means to faith? loyalty to the gospel in word and sacrament as the sole decisive mark of the church? the dangerous, anti-evangelical tendency of Roman doctrines and practices? If these things are not at the centre of your faith and testimony, why not? Test these contentions by Scripture: is it not the case that where we are positive, the Bible was positive before us? And if we were right then to treat these points as evangelical essentials, ought not you to be seeking ways and means of proclaiming and vindicating them now?

If there is any substance in what we have been saying, it is clear that we many not just casually cast off the Articles because they are old. Until they are decisively refuted from Scripture (which has not been done yet), we have no warrant for rejecting them, or for relaxing the requirement of clerical subscription.