I am taking advantage of the Internet facilities in the air-conditioned lounge at Doha International Airport, Qatar, on my way to Khartoum to post this latest book review.

In pursuit of my goal of reading one preaching related book a week I am currently reading books about preachers in order to learn about preaching from their example.

Alister McGrath’s biography of James Packer, ‘To Know and Serve God’ has been a fascinating and enlightening read on a number of fronts but, I must confess, not very strong on Packer as a preacher. In fact only some three of more than 300 pages focus on this aspect of Packer’s ministry, something which I found disappointing.

What it did bring out was that his first sermon as an Anglican Curate was on Matthew 5:3 and led the young daughter of his Vicar to comment, “He’s a better preacher than Daddy, isn’t he?” The Vicar’s main encouragements to the developing preacher were that he needed to lighten up a little.

Packer’s long ministry provides a running commentary for some of the most significant developments in evangelicalism in the second half of the 20th century in UK and, to a certain extent in North America, and McGrath has structured his record of Packer’s life by providing a chronological record of the significant milestones in his ministry and their links with wider happenings on the church scene. He records the painful process leading to the establishment of Trinity College in Bristol in the 70s and his engagements with such issues as the Keswick holiness teaching and the burgeoning charismatic movement. Indeed it strikes me that given Packer’s significant involvement in so much that happened through the years reading his life is a necessary companion to any account of the period.

Packer is, of course, better known as a theologian or, as McGrath prefers to call him, a theologiser, than a preacher, and I found some of his recorded views and statements invaluable and memorable. Take, for example, his summing up of the uniqueness of Christianity, “Christianity is a religion of revelation received; all other faiths are religions of revelation rejected.” Or his definition of the importance of inerrancy, “total trustworthiness as a result of entire truthfulness”; or infallibility, “complete reliability, neither misled or misleading”.

McGrath’s style of writing is hugely readable and engaging and he writes with enormous sympathy for his subject. Indeed, my main criticism of the biography would be that it is, if anything, rather uncritical of his subject. Without exception he jumps to Packer’s defence in the various controversies he got involved in and most notably in what was perhaps the most controversial issue of all, the ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’ paper of 1994. McGrath, sometimes quoting Packer but sometimes writing on his own behalf, is, at times for my liking, too broad in his terminology, including Roman Catholics more than once in his definition of Christian denominations on a par with Protestants. Packer himself defended his unpopular stand by maintaining that the “slide into secularism and paganism that is so much a mark of current culture” necessitated an “alliance of all who love the Bible and its Christ”. He spoke of those who, in McGrath’s words, ” trust and love the Lord Jesus Christ on both sides of the Reformation” knowing “that they are united in him, making some kind of collaboration entirely proper.”

Personally, I would have liked to see McGrath make a much clearer defence of the distinctions between those on either side of the Reformation, something he could easily have done without in any way diminishing his obvious and perfectly understandable respect of Packer. Having said that, this is a great account of a great and influential servant of God of our times and necessary reading for anyone who really wants to understand those times.