Keswick 2023.1 I’m probably beginning to repeat myself

This definitely isn’t the first time I’ve commented on the Keswick Convention (last year's posts begin here), and it probably won’t be the last. This is where we’ve spent a week each July for the last few years. Our motivations for coming here are multiple rather than single, and mixed rather than single minded. It is generally accepted that Keswick is pleasant and nestles in a spectacular setting (the English Lake District). It is only just “up the road” from where we live, so we don’t have to navigate the horrors of a summer airport or spend more than a couple of hours in a car. Even if there wasn’t a convention Keswick  would still be a popular spot (as it is for the forty-nine weeks of the year that the Convention isn’t on). There’s plenty of pleasant walks, water sports, tours (on and off of the water), interesting eateries and coffee shops, local(ish) literary history (i.e. William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter) and much more besides. Nice place for a break. But we can enjoy all this and there’s the Convention too! Since 1875 it has managed to attract Christians from a range of backgrounds to spend time thinking about stuff that the culture in general long ago turned its back on. So it is an odd thing to sit in a big tent (physically as well as metaphorically) and engage in Christian worship and teaching on Saturday night and the following week.

Of course, while it should not be so, Christians are as fractious as is the rest of humanity. So there is quite a lot of contemporary angst around about the label “evangelical”, whether it performs any useful function and if so what that function is. Personally, if properly defined, I think it does continue to be useful because it is sadly necessary to qualify “Christian” which is used in many senses today well removed from what the word actually means (for which see Acts 11:26). Mind you “properly defining” evangelicals has always been a bit of a problem, or at least has been a problem since “evangelical” became a mainstream sort of a word in the 18^th century. In the 19^th century both Spurgeon and Ryle were involved in the definitional battle. More recently historians like David Bebbington have given it a good go (see his influential “Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s”) as well as those of a more theological stripe (a good recent example is Michael Reeves in “Gospel People”). The debate can become quite spicy, even when conducted by those broadly within the fold comment about the fold, and this brings me back to Keswick.

The Convention has been seen as being fairly influential at least on the British evangelical scene (parking for a moment the question of whether there is such a thing). So I was interested to come across a paper written by J.I. Packer entitled “Keswick and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification” published in 1955 (the full reference is at the end of this post). Packer, an Anglican, was prominent from the 1950’s right up to his death in 2020; along with Martin Lloyd Jones he did much to establish evangelicalism as theologically and intellectually respectable. He, along with Lloyd Jones and others like John Stott, completely transformed the context for those who came after. My generation, with an evangelical subculture already created, resources and popular-level (but challenging) books like Packer’s “Knowing God”, had it much easier than those who went before. But Keswick, or at least the theology Packer saw flowing from it, was problematic. The Convention’s speakers (or at least some of them) and its publications (or at least some of them) were related to a stream of thought in evangelicalism known by various names like “higher life”, “perfectionism” or the “holiness movement” (there are many others). If this sounds a big vague, then that is charge Packer himself makes in his paper, pointing out that until someone put down on paper exactly what “Keswick teaching” was, it had been difficult to pin down. This changed (at least in Packer's mind) in 1952 when Steven Barabas published “So Great Salvation: The History and Message of the Keswick Convention”.

With a forensic precision Packer sought to show how Keswick teaching differed from reformed orthodoxy. Reading his paper just under seventy years later, a number of things struck me. First, it is a bit of an unfair fight. I’m not sure that Barabas was claiming to do more than describe the Convention and some of those associated with it and explain, at a largely popular level, what had been taught there over the years. It seems to be more about the phenomenology than the theology (although there is a bit of that). Packer critiques the theology (to the extent it can be drawn from Barabas’ book) with a professional acuteness that it may not have been capable of bearing. What he often ends up criticizing is what he takes to be logical theological implications of what is written, rather than what Barabas actually wrote. Secondly, “Keswick theology” probably doesn’t name a precise entity (we’re back to labels and their meaning) even when some (like Packer in his paper) want it to. I’m assuming that Barabas must have been doing some distilling and summarizing of teaching that had not been static over the period from 1875 (and has continued to change). We (or rather Packer) end up operating on the assumption that this distillation produces a reliable product. Maybe it did (I confess I haven’t read the book yet), but the distillation was probably more to the level of a rough hooch rather than a fine malt. Perhaps there was a certain lack of precision that Packer filled in. It's a matter of historical judgement how sticky his charges were. Thirdly, one shouldn’t assume that Packer’s view was typical of even the reformed “end” of evangelicalism. At one point he tells us he finds it “surprising that a Reformed reviewer should find in this book ‘no basic discrepancy between the Reformed and evangelical doctrine and the message of Keswick’". In contrast Packer is clear there are several glaring discrepancies. These he attributes to an insufficient attention to theology.

All of this is history of course, and is no less interesting for that. Packer’s analysis is acute and well worth reading and reflecting on. His real target is a creeping Pelagianism that always worth guarding against. But I think that there is probably also a bit of straw-mannery going on too. Acute theology and heart-warming Bible teaching are not antithetical. Indeed you probably can’t have the one without the other, even if the Bible teaching wears the theology lightly. Popularity isn't everything, but it probably is significant that all these years later, here we all are (several thousand of us) in Keswick for the Convention again. I probably won’t agree with everything I hear, and yet it will warm the cockles of the heart. So, at the risk of repeating myself, I say: "bring it on"!       

Packer, J. I. (1955). “Keswick”, and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification, Evangelical Quarterly: An International Review of Bible and Theology, 27(3), 153-167.