A hardened heart is already its own punishment; the refusal to love or be loved makes the love of others—or even just their presence—a source of suffering and a goad to wrath.

(And he is atonement for our sins, and not only for ours, but for the whole cosmos.)

I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace—starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say—that gave rise to almost all of these grim

Take a clear example: Christ instructs his followers to think of God on the analogy of a human father, and to feel safe in assuming that God’s actions toward them will display something like—but also something far greater than—

It is hard for me to know exactly how to respond to this vision of Christianity, I have to say. In part, this is because I know it to be based on a notoriously confused reading of scripture, one whose history goes all the way back to the late Augustine—a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin

“Is it not the case that no man among you, if his son should ask for a loaf of bread, would give him a stone? Or, if he should also ask for a fish, would give him a serpent? If you, therefore, who are wicked, know to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in the heavens give good things to those who ask him”

Theologians are often the most cavalier in their treatment of the texts, chiefly because their first loyalty is usually to the grand systems of belief they have devised or adopted; but the Bible is not a system.

This inevitably places Christian thought in the classical moral and metaphysical tradition that assumes that true freedom consists in the realization of a complex nature in its own proper good (the “intellectualist” model of freedom, as I have called it above). Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more

After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us? We are those others.