Puritan Portraits: J. I. Packer on Selected Classic Pastors and Pastoral Classics, by J. I. Packer. Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus, 2012, 188 pages, $14.99, paper.

James Innes Packer is one of the pioneers of the Puritan studies that restored, or in most cases introduced, them to the evangelical world. A generation before, secular Ivy League historians Perry Miller and Edmund S. Morgan had rejuvenated the Puritans’ reputations in academic circles. Miller and Morgan demonstrated how different the real Puritans were from the late Victorian prudery with which they had become perennially confused.

Packer is his usual lucid and interesting self as a thinker and writer. But this extremely readable style only amplifies the deep connection Packer has with his subject. He sets the stage with a chapter explaining the Puritan clergy and their message in general categories: “Puritan Pastors at Work.” Their literary legacy is their most important contribution to the church since by it we may learn the nature of their ministries. Packer appreciates and thus elaborates on the profound blend of deep theology and pastoral application.

Part II gives the profiles of seven Puritan pastors, highlighting a major work of each: Henry Scougal, Stephen Charnock, John Bunyan, Matthew Henry, John Owen, John Flavel, and Thomas Boston. Actually, Packer explains three of Boston’s works. Part III presents “Two Puritan Paragons,” in the work of William Perkins and Richard Baxter. He concludes with a very useful epilogue: “The Puritan Pastor’s Programme.”

Not only is Packer imbued with Puritan divinity but he is a theologian who is painfully aware of the modern situation of the Western church.

And have you not noticed that much of Western Christianity is treading this path to extinction? It seems clearly so to me. What then can stop the rot and turn the tide? One thing only, in my view: a renewed embrace of the Puritan ideal of ministerial service. Without this nothing can stop the drift downhill. (181)

I leave you with a brief sample of my favorite Thomas Boston treatise, The Crook in the Lot (1737). During my college years my wife and I attended the auction of the George Woodbury estate in Bedford, New Hampshire, where I had been raised. He had left his Harvard post as a professor to restore his ancestral estate and rebuild the John Goffe Mill. This estate had a mysterious aura for those of us raised in the area. Woodberry had restored the mill to saw lumber and grind grain as it had done centuries before. I remember accompanying my mother to have wheat ground. So even though we were poor students, we felt compelled to attend the auction on a fair summer day.

I had just begun to collect antiquarian books and found a box of leather treasures. The one that caught my eye was Boston’s bewildering title The Crook in the Lot. It was a 1791 London edition with Eliza B. G. Woodbury’s signature, dated 1811. I didn’t dare bid when the box came on the block. It would have been little use as it went for a price way beyond my meager budget.

But several years later I found the very same book in a bookstore for a price I could manage. So I discovered that the crook has nothing to do with theft, but with the wacky path life in a fallen world takes us down. The book is made up of three sermons on how to deal with “losses and crosses” (104–13). Ecclesiastes 7:13 inspired the book’s title: “Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?” (KJV). Packer sums up Boston’s pastoral conclusion:

A just view of afflicting incidents is altogether necessary to a Christian deportment under them; and that view is to be obtained only by faith, not by sense; for it is the ” Word alone that represents them justly, discovering in them the work of God, and consequently, designs becoming the divine perfections. (110)

So what of today, queries Packer? He wisely observes that Boston’s biblical teaching will cause serious cognitive dissonance for the modern Christian because the world around us teaches that “trouble-free living is virtually a human right” (112). How necessary, then, is the wisdom of this little book in the present.

This is a masterful selection, given the volume of material available. It is laid out in bite-sized portions, not for fast-food consumption, but for slow, thoughtful chewing. For the busy pastor Packer’s summaries will remind us of the gist of works we have already read and stimulate us to read them over or read some for the first time.

Gregory E. Reynolds serves as the pastor of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant. Ordained Servant Online, February 2016.