Quotes about Interpretation

As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.

The drift away from the Bible has weakened the church.

There is a fundamental syntactical distinction between saying "we question the Bible" and "the Bible questions us.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Whoever removes the Cross and its interpretation by the New Testament from the center, in order to replace it, for example, with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new center, no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith.

I walk into a scene, and I do the scene. That's my job. I don't have an objective. I have the words, and I have whoever I'm playing with.

One of the problems with compromise in one area of Scripture is where do you stop compromising? If Christians accept the idea of human evolution, then why not accept the idea that our sinful tendencies are really just evolved tendencies?

Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.

I believe there is complete equality between men and women. And I believe those passages in the New Testament, not by Jesus, but by Paul, that say women should not adorn themselves, they should always wear hats or color their hair in church - things like that - I think they are signs of the times and should not apply to modern-day life.

So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm.

During the Crusades, when Christians were in the mood to slaughter infidels, they were very cognizant of God's sanctioning faith-based mass murder in parts of the Bible. During the Cold War, when the United States was part of an international multifaith alliance that included Muslim and Buddhist nations, this motif was played down; whole generations of American Christians were weaned on a misleadingly sunny selection of Bible stories.

To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we're naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.