The Little Friar

"What  makes us humans is, of course, being more loving.  And sin is a defect in this love.  To say that Jesus was without sin just means that he was wholly loving, that he did not put up barriers against people, that he was not afraid of being at the disposal of others, that he was warm and free and spontaneous.  That is what really lies behind the portentous sentence:  'He spoke as one with authority.'  It makes him sound so magisterial and solemn.  In fact it just means that what he said came straight from him warmly and immediately.  He was never looking over his shoulder at the textbooks and traditions." -- Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters

I'm reminded this morning of a quote from my favorite modern Catholic writer, Herbert McCabe.  He was a Dominican theologian who taught at Oxford.  (If you've never read his book God Matters , you're missing a real treat.) " The whole of our faith is the belief that God loves us; I mean there isn't anything else.  Anything else we say we believe is just a way of saying that God loves us.  Any proposition, any article of faith, is only an expression of faith if it is a way of saying that God loves us.   I think we have a whole society (known as the Free World) which is so structured as to destroy belief in love, to eat away at the confidence people have in each other, to replace friendship by competitiveness, generosity by domination and submission, community by national security, love by fear.   The Christian notion of God is based on a belief in a love which simply can never fail." (It's from his Faith Within Reason , pp. 33-34.)