I don't like to talk about it in those terms; it's impossible to describe who or what God "is." Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn't do it.

I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched, miserable and sinful they are.

I've never known about anyone being helped by being told how wretched, miserable, sinful, and evil they are.

God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.

The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.

I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.

We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.