I'm reading an old book by Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God, and enjoying it so far. Naturally, parts of it make me laugh out loud.

I'll share those:

Evangelicalism, however, seeking as it does to acknowledge in all things the supremacy of Scripture, is in principle Christianity at its purest and truest.

We would not, indeed, deny that Evangelicals often fall below their principles, just as Roman Catholics and Liberal Protestants are themselves sometimes inconsistent and give to Scripture a position of authority which their principles would seem to disallow.

OK, sometimes, by mistake, non-Evangelicals get it right and sometimes, by mistake, Evangelicals fall short. But, wait, it gets better:

For we think that part of the reason, at least, why "Fundamentalism" impresses its critics as distorted Christianity is that their own conception of Christianity is, in fact, distorted ...

Voilà.

Could have guessed it. This sort of ad hominen goes back to Chesterton's Orthodoxy, in pardonable hypotheticals:

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation.

Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair.

One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation.

He might be the right shape.

Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde.

Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.

And how would you know?

At any rate, I'm glad to see Packer relying on Catholic thought, at least a little.

This is my Lenten penance. Oh, goodness, I'm joking, of course.