Pastor Mike

 

 Inter-confessional polemics are not my thing as I have often said. You Tube pastor Mike Winger, though, still regularly posts videos detailing what is wrong with JW’s, Mormons, Catholics and other such riff-raff. I have zero problem with this personally. Pastor Mike is a preacher grounded in the reformed tradition and accepts its dogmatic formulas on justification, sanctification, the mediation of the saints and the blessed virgin and so on. He defends these vigorously and publicly as I suppose a clergyman should. One thing I notice though is that he has no new arguments. He repeats all the old ones. In his mind, and I have no personal problem with this, the theological polemics of the early modern period, the period in which Trent squared off against the reformers, are just as vital and relevant today as they were in the 16^th Century. These battles still need to be won and he is out there winning them. One reason I don’t blame him is that there are many old school Catholics and Anglicans who think and feel exactly the same. They STILL want to debate justification by faith and imputed vs. infused righteousness and other 16th Century matters even though, as an official matter, the Catholic and Lutheran churches no longer disagree about them. At the same time, I am not in the trenches battling Pastor Mike on these matters and have no desire to be. I cannot conceive why I should be bothered one bit if a guy I don’t know prefers Reformed theology to Catholic or Orthodox theology. Reformed theology is not trivial or weak or ‘bad’ (to use one of Pastor Mike’s words) and I can say this even though I do not subscribe to it (my theological master being Augustine not Luther or Calvin).

Of course, Pastor Mike will think this a serious fault in me and maybe he is right. If I don’t think Pastor Mike has THE right theology, then surely it is my Christian duty to convert him to the views I think are more correct. This is what he would do for me and in his own mind this would be the only just, charitable thing to do. Why this asymmetry? Why shouldn’t I be racing to convert Pastor Mike as he is racing to convert me? Do I not love him enough to save him from error? Well maybe I don’t and that is my besetting sin and my fault. As I mentioned above, though, the Catholic and Lutheran churches have agreed to agree (or agreed to disagree?) on justification: each theological system, they now claim, states what the other does, not in direct translation equivalents, but in analogous terms. In a similar way, English says “how old are you?” and French “how many years do you have?” using being in one case and having in the other to speak of the same thing (though apart from being or having what ‘is’ the underlying thing?). The reason I have zero desire to convert Pastor Mike is that I think something like this is true though it is not an easy concept to wrap your head around. I think there is a fundamental difference between doing theology in 2020 and doing theology in 1643 and when I try to work out what this difference is the problem of truth, and the historical determination of truth, is what it comes down to. I think differing doctrinal traditions can be valid models of theology even though external statements of doctrine may differ or even clash. I think Pastor Mike is fine where is though he may think I am swimming in error and folly.    

The difference between he and I, though, concerns text. He thinks there is an ‘objective and neutral’ technique of exegesis that gives us the ‘meaning of the text itself’ and I do not. He thinks theology can be grounded on the ‘plain sense of scripture’ and I do not. Further, he would regard my claims in this matter to be dangerous and relativistic. I would disagree. I don’t think there is an ‘uber theology’ that can resolve all confessional differences. Nor do I think there is a form of exegesis that can do the same as theological traditions create the text they depend on by enabling certain readings and excluding others. This is how I think the sciences work (data is constructed by theory as theory is constructed by data) and I think the same applies to theology. We can and must work within confessions but we cannot abolish fundamental theological differences through discursive arguments on You Tube or any other means.

I think I can readily show why this is the case. A 6^th Century Syrian monk would not speak about justification or other matters using the concepts and terminology Pastor Mike was raised in. Why is this so? He and Pastor Mike have exactly the same empirical text before them. The difference, then, cannot simply be the empirical text. Of course Pastor Mike has an easy response to this. The Syrian monk is looking at the text through the lens of a theological tradition whereas Pastor Mike is not. Pastor Mike is looking at the text, the real text, while the monk is not. Pastor Mike might add for good measure that the Syrian monk is a knave or a fool or deluded by Satan though he has no reason to go that far. There is ancient exegesis which is bad and modern (Protestant) exegesis which is good. The difference is that the second has the proper technique for reading a text while the former does not. If an Ethiopian Christian knew how to read he would read Paul as Luther, Calvin or perhaps Arminius read him. I have to say that, for me, this simply beggars belief. I once heard a Pentecostal fellow claim quite seriously that Luther was the first person to read the Bible. Naïve as this seems he actually had a point. HIS Bible was the artefact of a certain theological revolution and, indeed, before Luther, THAT Bible did not exist. When theological paradigms undergo a radical shift the text changes just as scientific revolutions alter nature. New and radically different readings become possible. After a time, though, these new readings become not just possible but necessary and inevitable. Indeed, they become the ‘simple plain sense of the text’ such that we cannot imagine what lying knave or fool would construe them any other way. The new reading becomes the literal sense of the text and the previous readings perversions of it. In this way previously unknown or un-thought things become ‘facts’ any child knows. Every modern child knows that the sky is blue for instance. Yet for an ancient Greek the sky was white (or brazen? or bright?). Did the ancient Greek simply fail to look up? Did he flunk kindergarten? The difference between Pastor Mike and I seems to be that he would have to answer yes to that kind of question. The modern child sees the sky correctly as he reads the text correctly. I, for myself, find that impossible to believe. I think, to be brutally frank, that judging one theological tradition by standards and interpretive practices internal to another is, at the end of the day, futile. I mean this in the strictest sense for at the end of the day it is a threat to unity and a threat to charity.