Remembering Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The greatness of great men boils down to the conjunction in them of two things: great visionary power in formulating objectives, and great leadership power expressed in a masterful, indeed magnetic persuasiveness, linked with full personal consistency in pursuing what is envisioned. Martyn Lloyd- Jones was a great man, and still today, a generation after his death, his objectives (faithful preaching, faithful churches and revival) and the inspiring force of his advocacy for them remain powerful influences on many Christian minds. He was a titan: though physically small, apart from his oversized, domed head, he dominated any circle in which he was involved and it is no wonder that the first attempts to appreciate him in print should have been more than a little hagiographical and uncritical. Thirty to fifty years usually proves to be the first really adequate viewing distance for looking at persons and events of the recent past, and that is reason enough to welcome the present book, with its broader learning and more carefully nuanced perspectives, to which I am now privileged to contribute this foreword.

What are my qualifications for so doing? you may ask. Well, for twenty years I was the organizer of the annual Puritan Studies Conference which Dr Lloyd- Jones hosted and chaired; I actively supported him in fostering area preaching meetings around England, each of which he would himself visit every year; and I helped edit the now regrettably defunct Evangelical Magazine, which sought to give his type of Christianity a commanding voice at pastoral level. He, I think saw me in those days as a kind of Timothy to his Paul; at all events, we were quite close and during our years of working together I gained enormously from the relationship. To be sure, our ways parted abruptly when he realized that on the question of local church alignment I, a would- be reforming Anglican, was not with him nor was ever likely to be. But I have never ceased to regard him as a great man and indeed to celebrate him as the greatest I have ever known.

I am old now, a retired expatriate academic anchored in Canada, and this symposium is the work of younger scholars benefiting from, among other things, fresh thought and debate about all the fields of faith and practice on which Dr Lloyd- Jones expressed his mind and thereby offered leadership to the evangelical world of his day. As he was a generation ahead of me, and on some matters seemed to me to be quite old- fashioned, so no doubt my own thinking on some of the topics covered here might seem old- fashioned to some of the contributors to this book. But it will be clear, I think, that we are all together in regarding Dr Lloyd- Jones as, warts and all, one of the greatest Christian men of the twentieth century, a man whom God used powerfully to recall British evangelicals, both individually and corporately, to their true roots in the Bible, in the gospel and in theology – in other words, in Christ – at a time when such a recall was badly needed. Seeing him so, we join in honouring his memory, and in hoping that English- speaking evangelicals will continue to honour him as he deserves long after we ourselves are gone.

Professor J. I. Packer Regent College, Vancouver

IVP published a number of Lloyd-Jones' books, as well as a helpful introduction to the man by his grandson, and a collection of scholarly reflections by a team of historians and theologians. You could also listen to 1,600 of his sermons!