J I Packer on the Doctor
January 6, 2012
From JIP's Collected Shorter Writings 4, pp. 84 and 87:
"In some way there was in the Doctor's preaching thunder and lightning that no tape or transcription ever did or could capture -- power, I mean, to mediate a realisation of God's presence.... Nearly forty years on, it still seems to me that all I have ever known about preaching was given me in the winter of 1948-49, when I worshipped at Westminster Chapel with some regularity. Through the thunder and lightning, I felt and saw as never before the glory of Christ and of his gospel as modern man's only lifeline and learned by experience why historic Protestantism looks on preaching as the supreme means of grace and of communion with God. Preaching, thus viewed and valued, was the centre of the Doctor's life: into it he poured himself unstintingly; for it he pleaded untiringly.... Pulpit dramatics and rhetorical rhapsodies the Doctor despised and never indulged in; his concern was always with the flow of thought, and the emotion he expressed as he talked was simply the outward sign of passionate thinking.... He embodied and expressed 'the glory' -- the glory of the God, of Christ, of grace, of the gospel, of the Christian ministry, of humanness according to the new creation -- more richly than any man I have ever known. No man can give another a greater gift than a vision of such glory as this. I am forever in his debt."(Emphasis mine)
"In some way there was in the Doctor's preaching thunder and lightning that no tape or transcription ever did or could capture -- power, I mean, to mediate a realisation of God's presence.... Nearly forty years on, it still seems to me that all I have ever known about preaching was given me in the winter of 1948-49, when I worshipped at Westminster Chapel with some regularity. Through the thunder and lightning, I felt and saw as never before the glory of Christ and of his gospel as modern man's only lifeline and learned by experience why historic Protestantism looks on preaching as the supreme means of grace and of communion with God. Preaching, thus viewed and valued, was the centre of the Doctor's life: into it he poured himself unstintingly; for it he pleaded untiringly.... Pulpit dramatics and rhetorical rhapsodies the Doctor despised and never indulged in; his concern was always with the flow of thought, and the emotion he expressed as he talked was simply the outward sign of passionate thinking.... He embodied and expressed 'the glory' -- the glory of the God, of Christ, of grace, of the gospel, of the Christian ministry, of humanness according to the new creation -- more richly than any man I have ever known. No man can give another a greater gift than a vision of such glory as this. I am forever in his debt."(Emphasis mine)
