Responding to Mike Winger's Sectarianism ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/pXq3XBFzgKI/maxresdefault.jpg) All right, let's see it. >> You don't get to invent your own version of Christianity. I mean, this is just a logical reality, right? Like, if I wanted to become Muslim, I don't get to create a new version of Islam. >> So, this is just profoundly uninformed and misguided. And it is very clear Mike has never thought at all hard about any of this because not only do you get to invent your own version of Christianity, you have absolutely no other choice but to invent your own version of Christianity. And I'm going to talk about three reasons why that's the case. To start, there's no such thing as pure Christianity. Christian is a social identity. It's a conceptual category. It cannot be reduced to a set of necessary and sufficient features. There is no pure Christianity and there is no authority over what Christianity is. And no, the New Testament is not that authority because even if you go try to construct a view of Christianity from the New Testament, you have to negotiate with the text. You have to choose between a variety of different positions where the New Testament authors disagree with each other. And so you are the one who is inventing your version of Christianity, even if you're just going to the New Testament to try to find out what Christianity is in the New Testament. And I'll give you an example. Does Christianity require you follow the law of Moses until the heavens and the earth pass away? Well, that depends on who you give priority to. If you give priority to the gospel of Matthew, then yes, followers of Jesus are required to follow the law of Moses until the heavens and the earth pass away. If you reject the authority of Matthew on that question, then no, that is not required of followers of Jesus. Now, what Christians have done overwhelmingly is imposed a unifying framework on the Bible. The presupposition of inspiration, of inherency, of univocality, and of historicity. And what that means is that you are not allowed to let that tension stand. You have to resolve that tension, which means you have to reinterpret Matthew to bring the Gospel of Matthew into alignment with the other passages you've already decided are going to be prioritized and are going to be centered in this particular negotiation. So you have to do that hundreds and hundreds of times just to try to construct a notion of Christianity from the New Testament. Which means you are inventing through all of your many different choices, all of your many different decisions about how to answer these questions your own version of Christianity. And that's just to get something down on paper. And that brings up the second issue. When we look around the world today, there are hundreds and hundreds of different versions of Christianity on paper. And those versions of Christianity on paper are the outcome of that process of negotiation between individuals in their social and their historical circumstances, their received tradition, their goals for the future and the authoritative texts. And because social and historical circumstances, receive traditions and goals for the future are constantly changing, so too the outcomes of those negotiations are also changing. So we will always have new and different versions of Christianity on paper. And that brings up the third issue. The version of Christianity that is on paper will never isometrically exactly identically match anyone's lived Christianity because your lived Christianity multiplies those questions and those answers and those decisions and those choices by hundreds of hundreds of times and no two are going to be exactly alike. So, every last Christian who has ever existed has made decisions and answered questions and made choices about what their Christianity is, that creates a phenomenally complex constellation of ideas about what their Christianity is that will not match anyone else's. Even if two people endorse the same version of Christianity that is on paper, if they talk about what their Christianity is and how they live it, at some point they are going to arrive at something they disagree on. It might not be something that they consider essential or critical or central. But the threshold of where that is is also going to differ. So you cannot have a pure Christianity. You cannot have an authority over all Christianity. Everyone invents their own version of Christianity. Even if a bunch of people get together and decide we're going to agree on a short list of necessary and sufficient features for our particular version of Christianity. But once you look beyond that threshold, which again is going to differ from person to person and from group to group, it all differs from there. So yes, you absolutely indisputably get to invent your own version of Christianity. In fact, again, you have absolutely no other possible choice but to invent your own version of Christianity. >> I have to believe it or not believe it. Take it or leave it. >> So Mike here would like you to believe that all Christianity is reducible down to a simple binary and you either take it or leave it. You believe it or you don't. which ignores that all versions of Christianity have always involved a number of different things that you can take or leave because you can be a Christian and you can leave something that another brand of Christianity finds central or critical or essential and you can take something that another version of Christianity actually thinks disqualifies you from being Christian. There is no single pure Christianity. every lived Christianity is different from every other one. And even if we're talking about the doctrinal kind of Christianity you can write down on paper, there are thousands of different versions of that. And again, it all goes back to attempts to construct Christianity from a pluroiform collection of texts that frequently disagree with each other regarding what Christianity is, who Jesus was, and what being a follower of Jesus demands of you. But if you take the label Christ and then you stand for things that Jesus is opposed to, right? Like Jesus would have believed the Old Testament where it talked about disciplining your kids. Jesus would have believed the Old Testament where it talked about corporal punishment, including Romans 13 where we read that even after the uh advent of Christ, we have an affirmation of corporal punishment of the death penalty actually. So here Mike is just arrogating to himself the prerogative to declare arbitrarily and without argument what Jesus would have believed on questions that are nowhere answered by Jesus in the New Testament. But even if we did have answers in the New Testament, remember the New Testament frequently disagrees with itself. And when it comes to capital punishment, we actually have in the New Testament Jesus overruuling the Hebrew Bible's position on capital punishment when he refuses to endorse the execution of a woman who was supposed to have been caught in the very act of adultery with some guy who was also engaged in adultery but was just let off. Jesus says, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." sidest stepping, overruling, undermining what the Hebrew Bible says about capital punishment. So Mike here is disagreeing with Jesus, or at least the Jesus of this particular story, which critical scholars today agree was not written by the author of the Gospel of John, was only added to the text centuries later. So there's a question we have to answer before we decide what Jesus would have believed about these things. Throughout the New Testament, we find instances where Jesus is actually altering what the Hebrew Bible says and is being accused by others of altering or ignoring or contradicting things the Hebrew Bible says. because the Jesus of the New Testament is also inventing his own version of Greor Roman period Judaism which he had no other possible choice but to do and this is one of the reasons you find a lot of different versions of Jesus in the New Testament because they're all using Jesus to facilitate their invention of their own version of Greor Roman period Judaism and then this way of Jesus following which would become known as Christianity. So these things are important and they're genuinely connected to Christianity. >> Well, they're genuinely connected to Christianity as identity markers for certain versions of Christianity that people have invented. And there are other versions of Christianity that people have invented that have abandoned those identity markers because they know they're harmful and stupid. And so they would rather be better parents and raise better children than wave around an identity marker that hurts people. >> And I know you don't like them. You may not enjoy them. Just don't be Christian then. But don't kid yourself and pretend the blood of Jesus is covering you when you spit in the face of the things that Jesus believes and taught and stood for. That's not Christian. That is an incredible offense to Christ. So, nothing in this video demonstrates that believing it's not okay to hit your kids is spitting in the face of the things that Jesus taught because Jesus never taught anything related to that. And all Mike has done in this video is assert again arbitrarily without argument that Jesus would have accepted the endorsement of beating your kids from the Old Testament. There are no data that indicate that and Mike is certainly not going to engage the fact that Jesus renegotiates an awful lot of what's going on in the Hebrew Bible and that the authors of the New Testament renegotiate an awful lot of what Jesus stood for and disagreed with each other in a lot of different ways. So Mike has not demonstrated a single word of this. Saying it's wrong to hit your kids doesn't spit in the face of anything that Jesus taught. It just disagrees with the version of Christianity that Mike has invented and is endorsing and is performing conviction regarding not to convince anybody who doesn't already agree but to perform confidence and conviction for people who already agree and not because they need to be convinced of anything but just because that helps jin up that collective effervescence of identity politics and in this case right-wing authorit arian identity politics. People who hit their kids are going to feel better about hitting their kids if Mike can say, "Well, it's spitting in the face of the things Jesus taught to say, no, the Bible's wrong. You shouldn't beat your kids." And that's just pathetic. And the fit for this video has been Adonai and his Asher., Responding to Mike Winger's Sectarianism, YouTube, 01kdr28zd4wv7mfpckhbd6y5gq.