Scripture and Experience

For today's reflection I've included a few excerpts from an excellent article by the eminent scripture scholar and author Luke Timothy Johnson. Though Johnson offers many important insights for our consideration, what stood out for me is the point he makes about the role of human experience in helping the church to adapt the truth of the Gospel to the realities and needs of each new generation. Just as eventually it was no longer tenable to defend the institution of slavery by citing the Bible (despite the fact that the Bible clearly favors slavery in a number of passages), so too in our own time we're witnessing the gradual awakening of the community of believers in Christ to the fact that the Bible cannot legitimately be invoked in opposition to loving, committed same-sex partnerships or marriages.

May God's Spirit bless us all and quicken our own spirits in the non-violent fight we continue to wage for equality, justice, and the Good News of the Gospel for all God's beloved children.

Peace,

Padre Chuck


Commonweal Magazine
June 15, 2007 / Volume CXXXIV, Number 12

"Scripture & Experience" (excerpts)
Luke Timothy Johnson

Many of us who stand for the full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists-and of the early advocates for women’s full and equal roles in church and society. We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6). And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.

For me this is no theoretical or academic position, but rather a passionate conviction. It is one many of us have come to through personal struggle, and for some, real suffering. In my case, I trusted that God was at work in the life of one of my four daughters, who struggled against bigotry to claim her sexual identity as a lesbian. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner-a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others, and one that has borne fruit in a wonderful little girl who is among my and my wife’s dear grandchildren. I also trusted the many stories of students and friends whose life witnessed to a deep faith in God but whose bodies moved sexually in ways different from the way my own did. And finally I began to appreciate the ways in which my own former attitudes and language had helped to create a world where family, friends, and students were treated cruelly.

These are significant recognitions, ones that arise from hard-fought daily experience. It is extraordinarily important, however, that those of us who base our convictions on experience do not make the category of experience a form of cheap grace, as though whatever feels good is morally acceptable. By “experience” we do not mean every idiosyncratic or impulsive expression of human desire. We refer rather to those profound stories of bondage and freedom, longing and love, shared by thousands of persons over many centuries and across many cultures, that help define them as human. The church cannot say “yes” to what the New Testament calls porneia (“sexual immorality”); but the church must say yes to the witness of lives that build the holiness of the church.