God Matters Quotes

“Revolution is not intelligible and certainly not reasonable within the thought forms and language of this current world; revolution requires faith. When he speaks of the new world, the world to come, the revolutionary cannot describe it as a change of conditions within this world which, upon calculation, will be found to be preferable, he can only speak in parables, hoping that he will awaken his listener to share his vision and faith.”
― Herbert McCabe, God Matters

“The story of Jesus is nothing other than the Triune life of God projected onto our history, or enacted sacramentally in our history, so that it becomes our story . . . I use the word projected in the sense that we project a film onto a screen. If it is a smooth silver screen you see the film simply in itself. If the screen is twisted in some way, you get a systematically distorted image of the film. Now imagine a film projected not on a screen but on a rubbish dump. The story of Jesus—which in its full extent is the entire Bible—is the projection of the trinitarian life of God on the rubbish dump that we have made of the world . . . That the Trinity looks like a story of (is a story of) rejection, torture and murder but also of reconciliation is because it is being projected on, lived out on, our rubbish [heap]; it is because of the sin of the world.”
― Herbert McCabe, God Matters

“[I]t seems to me that what we often call atheism is not a denial of the God of which I speak. Very frequently the man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing, he is denying what he thinks or has been told is a religious answer to this question. He thinks or has been told that religious people, and especially Christians, claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheistic too.

But a genuine atheist is one who simply does not see that there is any problem or mystery here, one who is content to ask questions within the world, but cannot see that the world itself raises a question.”
― Herbert McCabe, God Matters