Mike's arguments are sophistic for the following reasons.
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1) Mike is always arguing from his sola Scriptura and sola fide (faith alone) position, which is in turn based upon the principle of private interpretation. As private interpretation is against the nature of public revelation, Mikes position is always fallacious. Public revelation from the OT and Christ and the apostles is always through the church Christ founded. As the OT church was Israel, which had the authority to teach divine revelation, so too, the NT church also has the same authority. That church in the NT is the same church in church history as the Catholic church comprised of Popes and Bishops in union with the Pope.
Mikes position of private interpretation replaces and supplants the historical church's power to teach, and bind and loose on all matters of faith and morals. As John Henry Newman has stated, the historical church is Roman Catholic, Mike has replaced the power and authority of Rome which is well recorded in church history with his own unfounded authority and his fallible and errant opinions. The Achilles heel of all of Mikes arguments is his anti-historical church position, with Mike's accompanied deformation of church authority as a public witness and protector of divine revelation. Mike's position reduces public revelation down to a large number of competing private opinions about the meaning of a large document that is thought to have been authored by God.
The Protestant usurpation of Catholic church authority as the only public authority to protect the meaning of divine revelation reduces Christianity down to a closet form of agnosticism. The Protestant Christian is confronted with the problem of each doctrine is contended for and doctrinal disagreements are encountered at every turn. Really the Protestants do not know the meaning of many texts, so they invent arguments to promote their own preferences and then claim they have the one true gospel. When in fact all they have is a collection of Catholic doctrines and their own ad hoc doctrines that cannot be proven from the text and cannot be integrated into any systematic theology, let alone be squared with the beliefs found in church history.
2) Mike ignores the practice of baptising babies in church history but wants us all to believe his own arguments from a man living 2,000 years after the text was written. Mike ignores the practice of Christian 500 years after Christ, but wants us all to embrace his own practices 2000 years after Christ. The inconsistency here is breathtaking to see. Mike ignores church history, and then invents his own version of church practice. Mike is the judge and inventor of church history. For all we know, 500 years from now another Mike Winger will emerge and take another spin and ignore all of church history and come up with yet another version of the baptismal controversy.
3) Mikes understanding of some Pauline texts about justification as excluding works is truncated and in error. St Paul uses the term "works" in more than one sense in the NT, which Mike seems to overlook. Mike then projects only one meaning into the texts and make a false claim that justification/salvation is without works. Mike must claim only one meaning to the word, "works", then conclude he has the gospel of faith alone, by grace alone in Christ alone.
4) The obvious fallacy of truncation is also connected to the mutual exclusion of the three alones stated above - faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone. for if justification is by faith alone, then faith excludes anything else, including the exclusion of grace and Christ. Similarly, the two other alones of grace alone and Christ alone also exclude each other. The mutual exclusion of all of the three alones infers Mikes version of Protestant Christianity is a jumbled collection of illogical slogans without any real content.
5) Because Mikes gospel of faith alone, grace alone, and Christ alone are all exclusive phrases and are not in the bible, nor church history, Mikes gospel is only a collection of phrases that are ahistorical, abiblical and illogical.
6) Mike has to assume the exact words used in scripture are the only way God has chosen to pass down divine revelation to Christians outside the apostolic age. For example, Mike cites a passage in Acts about the baptism of children and concludes infants are not included in St Peters speech. Yet, the same NT says many times, the gospel was preached which infers the apostles used many different ways to express the doctrine of baptism in relation to infants. Apparently, the reality of variability in preaching has no impact on Mikes understanding of a text. For, according to Mike we only have access to the text and church history must be ignored. And yet all the while church history, which is a recording to practice that followed from oral preaching includes infant baptism. Mikes approach to the NT texts is extremely wooden and thereby unrealistic.
7) Mike cites a number of texts which are at best ambiguous with regard to infant baptism. Mike fails to acknowledge the ambiguity within the text intentionally placed by the Holy Spirit to put believers to the test and thereby rely upon the church to teach, rather than their own fallible opinions of a number of texts.
8) Mikes position of private interpretation must ignore the above problems, which lead him towards an overconfidence in his own opinions. Mike then becomes the judge of the content and meaning of divine revelation. Such a position is untenable.
9) Paradoxically, Mikes position also leads towards a lack of confidence in the scriptures which have brought, and continue to bring more division and uncertainty within Protestant Christianity. Because of the adoption of the false principle of private interpretation, the believer tends to disregard the doctrinal content of the text and thereby conclude the text is of little significance at all. The falsity of private interpretation leads many Protestants to leave Christianity altogether and enter into a life of unbelief.
Prediction - the above points will be deleted because the points show the fallacies involved in Mikes positions.
