Refuse to be "intimidated by claims about the relativism of interpretation"

"When people talk about Scripture and divine revelation, it's all about interpretation:  You've got your interpretation.  I've got my interpretation.  And then you develop a set of buckets or whatever set of images you've got.

"Here is where we must stand firm.  When God speaks to us in Scripture, God is not incompetent.  When he says 'yes,' we understand it.  When he says 'no,' we can understand it.  And otherwise we've got a totally incompetent deity.  We have a God who didn't make us in such a way [that] we can hear him and understand him, and when he speaks to us in his word, he can't get through to us.  That's not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And that's why we're not intimidated by claims about the relativism of interpretation.

"God is not incompetent.  He's spoken to us and we're going to stand by the revelation that's given in Scripture."

     William J. Abraham, address to the Fourth Global Gathering of the Wesleyan Covenant Association, as reproduced in "Turning point," Good news:  leading United Methodists to a faithful future, January/February 2020, 19 (18-20).  Cf. this.

Harvard's List Professor of Jewish Studies on inclusive language for Jesus Christ

Source:  Harvard Divinity School

"Imagine:  in an institution once explicitly and formally Christian and still culturally so, largely dedicated to the education of ministers, one can deny with utter impunity that Jesus was born of a virgin or raised from the dead.  But if one says that he was the son of God the father, one runs afoul of the institution’s deepest commitments.  If the ancient christological confession is to be retained at all—and this, presumably, is only a matter of personal preference—it must be recast in gender-neutral terms.  Though our dinner companion did not say so, I assume that the older formulation may still be employed for purposes of critique, to show the alleged androcentrism of the early church, but not for purposes of affirmation, at least not without an immediate qualification to the effect that the traditional language is a historically conditioned convention and an unhappy one at that."

     Jon D. Levenson, "Theological liberalism aborting itself," The Christian century 109, no. 5 (February 5-12, 1992):  139.

"Only a very determined thoughtlessness could believe what is now common opinion"

"Only a very determined thoughtlessness could believe what is now common opinion:  'What someone does in bed is not the law's business, so long as no one is hurt.'  On the contrary, what I do in bed is the area of my action in which the community has the most urgent interest, the area for which it must legislate if it is to legislate at all."

     Robert W. Jenson, Systematic theology, vol. 2, The works of God (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 90.

"the shape of the body I am"

"my femaleness or maleness is constituted not in malleable or contingent psychology or social construction but in the shape of the body I am, which can be hated and even mutilated but cannot actually be given the shape of its counterpart, not even by the most sophisticated technology."

     Robert W. Jenson, Systematic theology, vol. 2, The works of God (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 89-90.  "Thus sexuality is the fact of that identity of subject and object that is the peculiar structure of humanity."

"no gesture left for final commitment"

     "Intercourse is the ultimate creaturely gesture of this sort, the movement of my body to the other that cannot be surpassed without harmful consequences.  For here the one body actually engulfs the other and that body enters the first, only in this active abolition of distance to be mutually the bodies they are.  Therefore if intercourse is a gesture and not a mere technique of sensation or reproduction, it can be the embodiment of an ultimate promise:  the promise of myself if it kills me, of share life 'until death do us part.' . . .
     "We can of course stipulate together that intercourse shall be the sign of a lesser address.  We can make it be the gestural embodiment of 'I am yours forever, maybe,' or 'I am yours for this pleasant weekend.'  But then we have no gesture left for final commitment, and so become incapable of it.  A society in which this was a widespread condition could not long cohere."

     Robert W. Jenson, Systematic theology, vol. 2, The works of God (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 92.

Sin boldly (Esto peccator et pecca fortiter)

     Martin Luther, letter no. 424 to Philipp Melanchthon, 1 August 1521, WA Br 2, p. 372, l. 84.  I was put onto the track of these famous words, which it had not occurred to me to look for, by Ryan Reeves, "Did Luther really tell us to 'love God and sin boldly'?," The Gospel Coalition, as posted by Michael D. Zibell.

"Icons do with color what Scripture does with words"; or, more accurately, "That which the narrative declares in writing is the same as that which the icon [(ἡ ἀναζωγράφησις)] does [in colours]."

"Modern viewers of art tend to see form in terms of line. . . . Gregory, however, expresses a late antique belief in the manifestation of form and reality through color[, a belief] that persisted throughout the Byzantine period."

     Liz James, "Color and meaning in Byzantium," Journal of early Christian studies 11, no. 2 (Summer 2003):  226 (223-233).  The lines immediately preceding, from pp. 225-226, are these (there is much more of great value):

     [Following classical philosophy,] The church fathers also perceived a significant role for color in making an image vital.  In his First Sermon on the Song of Songs, Gregory of Nyssa linked the creation of form to the use of colors[, speaking of] '. . . the form which the artist has created in colors.'  Colors direct the viewer to form:  they make it possible to apprehend form.  In case this should be seen as mere rhetorical flourishing and the display of cliché, John Chrysostom was even more explicit, implying that the image is not present until it is colored.  'As you see these things [the subject of the painting] being sketched, you do not know the whole, and yet you are not entirely ignorant of it, but you know faintly that a man and a horse are being drawn.  Who the emperor is, and who the enemy, you do not know exactly until the true colors have been applied, making the image clear and distinct.' . . . 'As long as somebody traces the outline as in a drawing, there remains a sort of shadow; but when he paints over it brilliant tints an lays on colors then an image emerges.'  On a spiritual level, this true likeness is Christ. . . . the sketch represents the shadow, that is, the Old Testament, and the true colors represent truth, that is the New Testament. . . .
. . . what Chrysostom says makes it clear that color was the more important element, without which an image was incomplete (and thus a false likeness) and unfinished.  This image of the underpainting preceding the colored picture that is the true image is one which recurs in the Fathers, from Cyril of Alexandria to Patriarch Germanos and John of Damascus, who described Melchisedek as the σκίασμα of Christ, the underpainting preceding the colored picture.
    This appears to express a widely-held and consistent belief that color gave an image form and reality.

Headline from the sixth session of the Second Council of Nicaea (i.e. Fr. Stephen Freeman and Daniel J. Sahas (Icon and logos:  sources in eighth-century iconoclasm:  an annotated translation of the sixth session of the seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicea, 787) (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1986), 69) respectively).
     Thanks to Ben McFarland for putting me onto this emphasis on color specifically, via the Freeman version of those words.