Love Quote by Charles Williams

Williams is doing a neat reversal: he takes a soothing bumper-sticker theology and turns it back into something bristly and adult. The popular reading of "God is love" shrinks divinity down to a mood - the warm, permissive feeling that asks little of us beyond affirmation. Williams calls that move what it is: emotional indulgence dressed up as doctrine. The sting is that we prefer a God who feels familiar, because familiarity is manageable. It doesn’t interrupt our habits; it blesses them.

His counterproposal is strategically unsettling. If God is truly "other" - not just bigger-than-us but categorically different - then love, if it participates in God, can’t be reduced to sentimentality or personal comfort. It should carry the same destabilizing charge: awe, demand, even fear. "Terror" here isn’t a threat of punishment so much as the vertigo of encountering something real enough to rearrange you. Love becomes less like a private emotion and more like an objective force with edges, obligations, and consequences.

As an editor and a key figure in the mid-century British Christian literary world (and adjacent to the Inklings), Williams is reacting to a modern tendency: smoothing religion into moral niceness. His language resists the domestication of the sacred. The subtext is cultural as much as theological: when a society recasts love as self-expression and God as validation, it empties both of their power. Williams insists that if love is divine, it must also be difficult - not because hardship is holy, but because reality is not tame.