Growing Young and Growing Old: The Legacies of John Lewis and J.I. Packer

The maturity of youth and the vibrancy of age both serve the true needs of our day.

“The glory of young men is their strength, gray hair the splendor of the old.” Prov. 20:29

Within a span of 24 hours, we learned of the deaths of two titanic figures—civil rights leader and United States Congressman John Lewis, and evangelical theologian J.I. Packer. Both were old—Lewis was 80 and Packer 93—but upon reflection, I couldn’t help but see each, in my own imagination, at radically different periods in life. With Lewis, I saw the smiling, young civil rights worker in the mug shot after his arrest in Mississippi. With Packer, I saw the frail, wizened theologian ambling through a library, a stack of books precariously cradled in his arms.

Lewis and Packer were both young once. Any who paid attention likely recall images of each from their youth—Lewis at the 1963 March on Washington, or Packer as a young scholar at Oxford. What intrigued me, however, was how the first image in my mind was of Lewis as the strident and exuberant demonstrator and of Packer as the elderly sage. I could envision the old John Lewis to be sure, but I had to work my way there from the past. For Packer, it was the reverse. Some of this is due, no doubt, to the primary callings of each. Lewis was a thinker and a politician, but his primary mark was as an activist. Most of us came to know Packer by reading his books on the authority of the Bible, or knowing God, or on the Puritans, or by reading his columns in Christianity Today.

But there’s more to it.

Our knowledge of these two stalwarts comes to us in the guise of what popular culture would call an “origin story.” In the narrative version of Lewis’s life—at least as we know it—a signature moment …

Continue reading

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.