"no longer . . . the cozy, comfortable middle-class world of the academy"

"it is hopelessly inadequate to reduce the issue to the pitting of one scriptural interpretation against another.  Revelation, unlike Scripture, is a threshold concept.  It is like crossing through a doorway into a whole new world that is not available to us until we get inside it and begin to explore it for ourselves.  To be sure, one has to identify a revelation.  To be sure, one has to interpret a revelation.  To be sure, one has to think through the application of divine revelation in new cultural or intellectual situations.  All these require the full mustering of all our cognitive capacities.  However, once one comes to see something as revelation, then one has to treat the revelation as knowledge.  One has to obey it, to hold tenaciously and even passionately to it, and in some instances to be prepared to die for it.
     "It is very easy to miss this point by retorting that when it comes to revelation the whole debate about the interpretation of revelation breaks out again.  As I have mentioned, of course, one has to interpret a revelation.  However, there is all the difference in the world in what is at stake once the issue is cast in terms of revelation.  One is no longer simply wrestling with a book or a set of texts.  One is wrestling with the word of God.  Sooner or later, whatever the complexity of interpretation, one has to fish or cut bait.  Either there is or there is not a revelation.  Either one has or has not gotten hold of it.  Once these issues are decided, one has crossed the threshold; and the call to treat the putative revelation as knowledge, to obey it, to be tenacious in holding to it, and to die for it kicks in immediately.  We are no longer living in the cozy, comfortable middle-class world of the academy.  We are dealing with the Word of God."

     William J. Abraham, "Chapter 1:  The Church’s teaching on sexuality:  a defense of the United Methodist Church’s Discipline on homosexuality," in Staying the course:  supporting the Church’s position on homosexuality, ed. Maxie D. Dunnam and H. Newton Malony (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2003), 24-25 (15-31).  Cf. his Crossing the threshold of divine revelation (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2006) and this.