Knowing God
Understanding God, transforming life
Description
In 1973, a British-born theologian named J. I. Packer published a book assembled from a series of articles he had written for a small evangelical magazine over the previous decade. He was in his mid-forties, teaching at a theological college in Bristol, not a household name outside a narrow circle. The book was called Knowing God. It went on to sell millions of copies across the English-speaking world and became, for several generations of readers, the book they reached for when they wanted to think seriously about what the word God is supposed to mean. It was not a work of academic theology, though Packer was a formidable scholar. It was closer to a long, patient conversation about a single conviction: that most people, including most religious people, know a great deal about God and hardly know him at all.
That distinction is the hinge of the whole book. Packer opens with an image borrowed from an eighteenth-century preacher: a man can study the map of a country, learn its rivers and its capitals, and never once set foot in it. Theology, he argues, is often exactly this — a map studied by people who have never made the journey. We can accumulate correct opinions about God's attributes and stay strangers to God himself. And the strangeness, Packer thinks, is not harmless. It leaves us with a religion of information that never quite touches how we live, grieve, or hope.
So the book sets out to close that gap, working through the classic themes — the Trinity, God's sovereignty, his wrath, his grace, his fatherhood — but always bending each one back toward the same practical question. What difference would it make to actually know this? Packer writes with an intensity held under tight control, more like a man handing over something precious than a professor delivering a lecture.
The question we’re asking : What does Packer mean by knowing God, as opposed to knowing about him, and why does he think everything turns on the difference?What we’ll see : How one theologian tried to turn Christian doctrine back into something a person could live inside — and what he thought was at stake in the attempt.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The difference between knowing about and knowing
Packer's starting move is to insist that knowing God is a kind of knowledge with the structure of a relationship, not the structure of a fact file. He reaches for an everyday comparison. To know a person — a friend, a spouse — is not to have collected data about them; it is to have been let in, to have exchanged something, to matter to each other. We can recite a public figure's biography in detail and remain a total stranger to them. What separates acquaintance from knowledge, Packer argues, is that in real knowing there is mutual disclosure: the other has chosen to be known.
This is why, in his telling, knowing God is never something we achieve by our own investigation. It is something God initiates. We know him because he first turned toward us and made himself available to be known. The theological word for this is revelation, and Packer treats it not as an abstraction but as the difference between a locked door and an open one. The map can be studied from outside; the country has to admit you.
02Chapter 2 — God as he chose to describe himself
Having set the terms, Packer spends the long middle of the book on the content — who this God actually is. And his method is consistent: he refuses to let us build our picture of God out of our own preferences or intuitions. The God worth knowing, he argues, is the God who has described himself, and we are not free to edit that description down to the parts we find agreeable. This is where the book becomes bracing, because Packer insists on keeping the attributes modern readers tend to quietly drop.
He works through the familiar and the reassuring. God is unchanging, so that what he was to believers in earlier centuries he still is. God is majestic, wise, and sovereign — genuinely in control, not a well-meaning bystander to history. God is love, and Packer handles this one with particular care, because he thinks it has been sentimentalized into meaning little more than divine niceness. Love, in his reading, is God's settled purpose to give himself for the good of the loved, which is a costlier and stranger thing than affection.
03Chapter 3 — The offense of grace
The pivot of the entire book, and arguably the idea Packer most wants to land, is grace. He notices something odd about the word: Christians use it constantly, sing about it, name their children after it, and often mean almost nothing precise by it. So he tries to recover its edge, and the edge, he argues, is that grace is genuinely offensive to a certain kind of self-respect. It only makes sense against the background of the attributes he has just refused to soften.
Grace, in Packer's account, presupposes four things we would rather not admit. That we are, spiritually, in serious trouble and cannot fix it. That we deserve nothing from God. That God owes us nothing. And that any help we receive is therefore entirely a gift, unearned and unrepayable. Each of these cuts against the instinct to think we are basically fine and have made a decent case for ourselves. Grace is good news only to people who have stopped pretending, which is why, he thinks, it is so often admired and so rarely grasped.
04Chapter 4 — What knowing God does to a person
Step back from the individual doctrines and a larger claim about the whole enterprise comes into view. Packer is making an argument about what theology is for. He is writing against a habit he saw everywhere in the religious culture of his time and ours: the treatment of doctrine as a body of correct positions to be defended, catalogued, and argued over, as if being right were the finish line. For Packer, that is theology that has forgotten its own purpose. Doctrine exists to produce a changed life, and doctrine that leaves the theologian unchanged has, by its own standard, failed.
This is why the book keeps returning, after every doctrine, to the same question: so what would it mean to live as though this were true? The chapters on God as Father are the clearest case. Packer argues that adoption — the idea that the believer is not merely forgiven but taken into God's family as a child — is the highest privilege the gospel offers, higher even than justification, and that most Christians barely register it. To grasp it is not to add a fact; it is to change how one wakes up in the morning, how one prays, how one handles fear.
05Conclusion
Packer returns at the close to where he began: the man studying the map who never made the journey. The whole book has been an argument that the two — the study and the journey — were never meant to be separated, and that the tragedy of much religion is exactly their separation. Everything he laid out, the unedited attributes, the offense of grace, the strange privilege of being made a child, was aimed at a single outcome he stated on the first page. To know God, and to be, in the knowing, transformed.