“I’m sure I myself don’t have anything more than the most rudimentary understanding of what 'God is Love' really means, but I take it to understand that when I grow in my sense of love, I am simultaneously growing in my understanding of God. Perhaps even more to the point, when I think about the core principle of God’s being as Love, that helps me avoid getting caught up in the idea that God is mostly about wrath, or reward and punishment, or control, or domination, or purity, or any of the countless other ways that we ignore love when we try to understand God. And what goes for God also goes for the Bible. Love is the core message here — not love in any kind of limited human understanding, like the list I just provided, but love in its most transcendental, heavenly, holistic sense: love as ultimate compassion, ultimate concern, ultimate care, ultimate mercy, ultimate kindness, and so forth.”