“Think some more about the very young child. First of all, her faith th...” — Herbert McCabe Quote

“Think some more about the very young child. First of all, her faith that she is loved is not something that she works out by assessing her world and coming to a conclusion. It is something”

“The object of theology is to see the traditional teachings of the church as a unified whole, unified around the gospel that God loves us. Only when we see what the church teaches about sin or grace or the eucharist or the Trinity as all part of a revelation of the love of God - only when we see this - do we begin to understand these doctrines. And the only way to see this is to question them and to question our understanding of them.”

“I should say that there is such a thing as arrested development in human things (and a very bad thing it is) when people refuse to think for themselves and look around for some human authority to tell them what to think. Such people are afraid of the responsibilities of growing up. They want to remain children for ever - like the loathsome Peter Pan. What is wrong with such people is that when they have an opportunity of thinking for themselves they refuse it and cling to their faith. They are offered a higher and more mature way of knowing, but they won't have it.”

“The divine life does indeed grow in us even on earth, but we never reach full maturity; we never dispense with faith until we actually see God face to face. Now the question is: what is the relation between this divine life (and divine knowledge that we call faith) and human life (and human knowledge)? Some people have held that they are actually opposed to each other. You know that kind of person who thinks that you can't be a saint unless you're very slightly ill; this sort of person tends also to think that you can't have faith unless what you believe is humanly incredible. They think of faith not as a matter of knowing or of learning, but rather as a matter of courage, a leap into the unknown, a quixotic championing of the absurd. Now faith is certainly a leap into the unknown in the sense that what you believe is something that cannot be known by ordinary human power. But it is a leap which precisely tries to make this”

“Contemporaneous faith invokes a stance that is opposite to triumphalism, fact-gathering or apologetics.”

“A life which has never been laid open in penitence and faith before God has little permanence in eternity.”

“Right to leave religion is just as fundamental as right to religion.”

“Because all the things God isn't for me," she said, "you are. Because of you I see Him every day. So start talking lizardman, but I warn you, you've got a hard talk ahead of you if you're going to convince me there's no God after He gave you to me.”

“Love is the only thing that is real he said in a suddenly different voice and I wasn't sure how to respond to that. I said damn right.”

“The closer one approaches to God, the simpler one becomes.”