Knowing God

Throughout Knowing God, Packer interacts with the ideas of several different groups of writers, often quoting from them extensively. One of these groups is the Reformers, the theologians who shaped Protestant Christianity when it broke off from Roman Catholicism in the 16th century. Packer mostly references the leaders of the magisterial Reformation, which included Packer’s own Anglican tradition, along with Lutheranism and the Reformed churches (but not the various free-church traditions that also emerged from the Reformation). Foremost among these magisterial Reformers was Martin Luther, the German theology professor who famously sparked the Reformation by nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. The overriding theme of Luther’s work was the grace of God, as developed from his interpretation of the epistles of the apostle Paul. Luther insisted that the Bible was the only reliable guide to true doctrine (as opposed to church traditions which had developed over the centuries), thus articulating the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura—Scripture alone—a principle which also characterizes Packer’s approach to knowing God.

Another important Reformer was John Calvin, a French theologian who led a Protestant enclave in Geneva, Switzerland. His magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, framed a version of Christian theology which came to be called Calvinism (or Reformed theology).