In fact, there is no way to return to the faith of your childhood, not really, not unless you've woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you'd been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, 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 that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived--or have denied the reality of your life.
I don't think Wiman means in any way that the source or grounding of our faith changes--God is not so mutable as to change as we age, Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever--but that the way we experience and interpret faith changes as we go through life. It has to. Otherwise that faith becomes idolatry, a dull imitation of faith by rote, more important to us than growing and experiencing God. If we cling tight-fistedly to our adolescent or childish understanding we might still believe something at the end of our life, but it will not be a faith equipped to deal with life.
As I read this I thought about the failings of the Jesus People that I wrote about a few weeks ago. The type of faith they promoted was inherently based on a youthful and immediate interpretation of Scripture. Acts 2 without Acts 5-28.
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