Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015) was one of the most influential and theologically deliberate leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born on September 10, 1924, in Brigham City, Utah, the tenth of eleven children, he overcame childhood polio, served as a bomber pilot in World War II, and earned a doctorate in education from Brigham Young University before dedicating his life to religious service and teaching. Called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1970, he served as its acting president from 1994 to 2008 and as its president from 2008 until his death on July 3, 2015.
Packer’s career spanned more than five decades of general authority service. He worked extensively within the Church Educational System, overseeing seminary and institute programs, and served as a mission president in New England. He served on the scripture revision committee that produced the landmark 1979–1981 LDS editions of the Bible and standard works. He dedicated temples and missions across multiple continents and was a prolific author and teacher. He was also a gifted visual artist, known for his paintings and sculptures of birds—a dimension of his character that reflected a disciplined attention to the natural world and a belief that beauty and truth are inseparable.
Packer’s theological legacy is marked by a deep reverence for the eternal sweep of Mormon cosmology. In one memorable interview, he cited the hymn ‘If You Could Hie to Kolob’—that most expansive of Mormon texts, celebrating eternal progression, a plurality of Gods, and worlds without end—and connected it to Brigham Young’s conviction that learning is not a process approaching a terminus but one that opens onto ‘an eternity of knowledge.’ That orientation—toward an unending, ever-expanding intelligence—runs beneath much of Packer’s teaching about the relationship between mortality and eternity, between what we now see and what God sees.