Religion & Law

Prof. Bradley Lewis (CUA) notes, in a recent Letter to the Editor in the Washington Post, that "the object of religious faith is not the experience of God; it is God."  Nice.  It reminds me of another observation -- I'm not sure whose:  Christianity is not about an ethic, it's about a real encounter with Jesus Christ.

UPDATE:  D'oh!  As a reader kindly pointed out to me this morning, I almost certainly heard this observation from the Pope:

That Christ opens the door to freedom is easily forgotten when Christianity is reduced to a system of rules to follow just to avoid damnation. As Ratzinger noted in a 2005 funeral [RG:  for Fr. Guissani] homily, "Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story." The solution to the problem of moralism is an emphasis on love: "God is love and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him" (1 John 4:16). According to Ratzinger, morality is fundamentally about the true and lasting fulfillment found in loving God, neighbor, and self.