then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life

"whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life — which means, of course, that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at 50 what you believed at 15, then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life."
 
Christian Wiman

I'VE POINTED OUT before that there are lots and lots of atheists who proudly declare they'd had it all figured out by the time they were fourteen, or twelve, or nine.   Or eight.  They had it all figured out that religion was all bunk and, it's pretty clear they've never changed their minds since.  I could add that their arguments about religion generally show that their thinking remains at about that age level if you engage with them on the issue.  Unfortunately, they're not the only ones who are cases of frozen development, there are lots of people within religion who never thought seriously enough about religion to question their beliefs to come to a more mature view of things.  

That quote at the top of this post comes from an article by Jonathan Merritt about a famous biblical scholar who I'm not very familiar with, Richard B. Hays, who wrote a book in 1996 which contained a  argument against LGBTQ relationships that, apparently, was much cited by those who wanted to discriminate against us.  I don't travel much in white evangelical circles so I'd never had "chapter 16" from that book pulled on me in arguments, oddly, I don't think I've ever had a Catholic care to get into it with me and any arguments I had on it were on grounds of would-be science and secular stereotyping.  But a lot of People do get into it with "evangelicals."  The article gives some of the angry, frightened responses from white evangelicals to the news that the man who provided them with their arguments has changed his mind in a forthcoming book he wrote with his son, also an eminent biblical scholar.  Some of them are blaming the son with leading the father into apostasy.

I was interested in that because another very respected bible scholar, the very Luke Timothy Johnson who I've cited a lot recently, said that he had been guilty of the sin of homophobia until some of his out of the closet students and his own Lesbian daughter had shown him what he believed about LGBTQ+ People was wrong. The accusation made by one evangelical conservative that Hayes had been led into apostasy by his son makes me think that it's not surprising that it would be younger People who did because the older generation, including mine, grew up with LGBTQ+ People being invisible and silent.   By the time the elder Hayes reached adulthood, he might have lived his life in a milieu in which LGBTQ+ People didn't figure much, just as some can live a life in which they don't have much direct contact with members of other targeted minority groups.  Their concepts of us were based, not on direct and open knowledge, but on lurid stereotypes and imaginations.  Their knowledge of the lives of gay people might be like someone basing their knowledge of straight Peoples' sex lives on what was presented in pornography.  Younger People  are more likely to have grown up knowing out of the closet LGBTQ+ People and knowing their lives showed the full range of relationships, from faithful, equal marriages to those who acted as bad as any straight immoralist.  Ranging from moral, responsible adults to self-indulgent perpetual 12-year-old boys to sadistic assholes and down to the likes of Lindsey Graham or Peter Thiele.

Johnson comes out of a Catholic background so there are differences in his own view of Scripture is bound to differ from that of someone with an evangelical orientation.  One that holds Scripture as important, even authoritative and at times to be taken literally but holding it loosely and not so tightly as to squeeze the life out of it.  The differences in quality and type of authority, perhaps, too.  I take Scripture as something to be considered and studied and thought about in coming to a variety of contingent conclusions as to how to live and think about things that can't be discovered through history or science or secular literature.  And that exercise can't possibly be done without thinking about it apart from our own, lived experience.  The Scriptures are full of People doing that, especially the literature of the Bible that Jesus cited the most, the Psalms and the Prophets.   That's especially true of a Christian whose understanding of Jesus the Christ is that Jesus is the Living Christ.  

Luke Timothy Johnson has pointed out that Scripture is merely one way of knowing the living Jesus and said one of the ways we learn about the living Jesus is in our life experience and, especially, in our interactions with other People, those close to us in our families and acquaintances and also in those who live lives on the social, economic and political margins, those without power.  There are certainly Biblical, especially Gospel and New Testament texts that support that idea, especially that the "Kingdom of God" is open to those on the sexual margins.  Jesus told the religious establishment, the "white evangelicals" or "good Catholics" of his time that prostitutes as well as tax collectors would enter into the Kingdom of God before they would.  He didn't say "reformed prostitutes" or even "reformed tax collectors" though in the case of Zacchaeus the tax collector who climbed a tree to see him, he said he'd stop stealing and give back what he'd stolen.   I could point out that in another Gospel Jesus didn't give the Samaritan woman a lecture on her less than faithful sex life before he offered her the "living water" which is certainly the same as an invitation to the Kingdom.  Paul might have had qualms about those who practiced same-sex sex, though it's pretty clear he had no idea about People who had an exclusively same-sex orientation, he figured they were out of control hetero-sexual libertines.  As the theologian Cheryl Anderson and Audre Lorde would say, he was thinking of everyone as a member of his expected authoritative default.   I think it's quite possible that two thousand years of hostility to LGBTQ+ People is based on the naivety of Paul in regard to sex and a misunderstanding of his use of that in his more general arguments in Romans and elsewhere, out of those are a few other clobber passages in the Bible which, as I've pointed out before, are as fraught with issues as the parts of the Bible dealing with slavery and other issues.  Johnson, a deep scholar of the Pauline literature, says that whenever Paul was up against the dominant mores of Mediterranean patriarchal culture, his radical egalitarianism went out the window.  He then made distinctions that he otherwise and eloquently rejected as being relevant to the Church he was helping to establish.

The Bible is not read today as it was written in societies in the very ancient and classical Eastern Mediterranean regions.  We can't reproduce the mind-sets of that time or the times and conditions lived under, we can't un-live the cultural accretions that are part of the world and lives we have lived and continue to live.  We can try to understand it on something closer to the writers own terms and thinking than a naive and dishonest "literal reading" of it will produce.  We can understand when churches doctrines and dogmas are an inheritance from the past that was, as well, conditioned by their own lives and understanding to judge if those are valid interpretations and valid ways to decide how to live.  And we can certainly grow in our understanding of it as we learn from living our lives, that is if we choose to learn anything from experience and, really, how can you exclude that and not be spiritually as well as intellectually dead.  But ignoring Scripture, a rich repository of the inspired writing of many People like us and unlike us in so many ways would be to give up one of the richest spiritual and literary and, for want of a better word, psychological resources there is. So that's not a productive option, either.