Top 79 Robert Farrar Capon Quotes
#2. The only reason that judgment comes into it at all is the sad fact that there will always be dummies who refuse to trust a good thing when it's handed to them on a platter.
Robert Farrar Capon
#3. Salvation is not a matter of getting a reward that will make up for a rotten deal; it is a matter of entering by faith into the happiness - the hilarity beyond all liking and happening - that has been pounding on our door all along.
Robert Farrar Capon
#4. It cannot be said too often that in the New Testament, the opposite of sin is not virtue, it is faith.
Robert Farrar Capon
#5. To make belief the touchstone of the kingdom's operation is simply to turn faith into just one more cold work. Of course we must believe; but only because there is nothing left for us to do but believe.
Robert Farrar Capon
#6. We are saved gratis, by grace. We do nothing and we deserve nothing; it is all, absolutely and without qualification, one huge, hilarious gift.
Robert Farrar Capon
#7. Jesus didn't shy away from sinners, so why should the church? And don't tell me the church welcomes sinners. I know better. It welcomes only sinners who repent and then never seriously need forgiveness again.
Robert Farrar Capon
#8. Older women are like aging strudels - the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling has come at last into its own.
Robert Farrar Capon
#9. Only miracle is plain; it is in the ordinary that groans with the weight of glory.
Robert Farrar Capon
#10. The secular, for all its goodness, does not defend itself very well against mindless and perpetual consumption. It cries out to be offered by abstinence as well as use; to be appreciated, not simply absorbed. Hunger remains the best sauce.
Robert Farrar Capon
#12. The new heavens and the new earth are not replacements for the old ones; they are transfigurations of them. The redeemed order is not the created order forsaken; it is the created order - all of it - raised and glorified.
Robert Farrar Capon
#13. And the sad fact is that the church, both now and at far too many times in its history, has found it easier to act as if it were selling the sugar of moral and spiritual achievement rather than the salt ofJesus' passion and death.
Robert Farrar Capon
#14. Unless I am mistaken, it was Mr. Welch himself (an adamant total abstainer) who persuaded American Protestantism to abandon what the Lord obviously thought rather kindly of.
Robert Farrar Capon
#15. Everybody, even the worst stinker on earth, is somebody for whom Christ died.
Robert Farrar Capon
#16. It's just misery to try to keep count of what God is no longer counting.
Robert Farrar Capon
#17. The Christian religion is not about the soul; it is about man, body and all, and about the world of things -with- which he was created, and -in- which he is redeemed. Don't knock materiality. God invented it.
Robert Farrar Capon
#18. Man was made to lead with his chin; he is worth knowing only with his guard down, his head up and his heart rampant on his sleeve.
Robert Farrar Capon
#19. Grace doesn't sell; you can hardly even give it away, because it works only for losers and no one wants to stand in their line.
Robert Farrar Capon
#20. Only when you are finally able, with the publican, to admit that you are dead will you be able to stop balking at grace.
Robert Farrar Capon
#21. The world has taken a five-thousand-year bath in wisdom and is just as grimy as ever.
Robert Farrar Capon
#22. The only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody.
Robert Farrar Capon
#23. Cover each with plastic wrap (you see, I hope, that I am no mere antiquarian, insisting on barefoot walks through unimproved sculleries. I am as grateful as anyone for real progress as any modernist. More so, perhaps. Anything that preserves freshness for the pot is on the side of the angels.
Robert Farrar Capon
#24. What it leads to is the mischief of confusing liturgy with magic
of imagining there are only a handful of properly effective formulas for conjuring up the mystery, when in fact the mystery is always at work, independent of any formula whatsoever.
Robert Farrar Capon
#25. The wickedness of the church can be one thing and one only: turning the Good News of Jesus into the bad news of religion.
Robert Farrar Capon
#27. A world in which no sparrow falls unknown, but-so much for the neatness of our diagrams-it is the Father's will that sparrows fall.
Robert Farrar Capon
#28. An eye for an eye won't work because all it does is double the number of eyeless people.
Robert Farrar Capon
#29. If you take the view that one of the chief objects in life is to remain in loving relationships with other people, straight-line power becomes useless.
Robert Farrar Capon
#30. IMITATION CITRUS FLAVORED DIETARY ARTIFICIALLY SWEETENED CARBONATED BEVERAGE. That, I submit, is not a label; it is an incantation. Someday, it should be set to a suitable plainsong tune or Anglican chant.
Robert Farrar Capon
#32. The proper self-knowledge and self-love of every created thing is ipso facto a participation in the knowledge and love of God. The entire universe moves by desire for the Highest Good simply because every part of it loves what God loves - namely, its own being.
Robert Farrar Capon
#33. The truth that makes us free is always ticking away like a time-bomb in the basement of everybody's church.
Robert Farrar Capon
#34. In the Bible, the opposite of Sin, with a capital 'S,' is not virtue - it's faith: faith in a God who draws all to himself in his resurrection.
Robert Farrar Capon
#35. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.
That is the unconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God.
Robert Farrar Capon
#36. God does not punish people for being nonpacifists; war alone is punishment enough.
Robert Farrar Capon
#37. People always assume that the church's primary business is to teach morality. But it isn't; it's to proclaim grace, forgiveness, and the free party for all. It's to announce the reconciling relationship of God to everybody and to invite them simply to believe it and celebrate it.
Robert Farrar Capon
#38. We are not saved by what Jesus taught, and we are certainly not saved by what we understand Jesus to have taught. We are saved by Jesus Himself.
Robert Farrar Capon
#39. If you take all your meals seriously, none of them gets a chance to matter.
Robert Farrar Capon
#40. Every real thing is a joy, if only you have eyes and ears to relish it, a nose and tongue to taste it.
Robert Farrar Capon
#41. With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people's satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.
Robert Farrar Capon
#42. The bread and the pastry, the cheeses and wine, and the sugar go into the Supper of the lamb because we do. It is our love that brings the city home. It is I grant you, an incautious and extravagant hope. But only outlandish hopes can make themselves at home.
Robert Farrar Capon
#43. I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.
Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm.
Robert Farrar Capon
#47. We were never told that it would not hurt, only that nothing would ever finally go wrong; not that it would not often go hard with us but that there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.
Robert Farrar Capon
#49. There is only one unpardonable sin, and that is to withhold pardon from others.
Robert Farrar Capon
#50. Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.
Robert Farrar Capon
#51. Even to this day, grace remains hard to swallow. Religiosity and moralism go down easier than free forgiveness.
Robert Farrar Capon
#52. Religion, therefore - despite the correctness of its insistence that something needs to be done about our relationship with God - remains unqualified bad news: it traps us in a game we will always and everywhere lose.
Robert Farrar Capon
#53. It is precisely our sins, and not our goodnesses, that most commend us to the grace of God.
Robert Farrar Capon
#54. People converted by fear-mongering are people converted from evil, not to the truth.
Robert Farrar Capon
#55. Judgment falls not on the unacceptable but only on those who will not accept acceptance
Robert Farrar Capon
#56. Grace cannot prevail ... until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.
Robert Farrar Capon
#57. Perhaps you see, therefore, why I think taste must come before nutrition? Our infatuation for the quasi-scientific has left us easy marks for con men and tin fiddle manufacturers.
Robert Farrar Capon
#59. Goodness itself, in other words, if it is sufficiently committed to plausible, right-handed, strong-arm methods, will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind.
Robert Farrar Capon
#60. Your stew, so long deferred, stands finally extra causas. Greet it as your fellow creature. It is as deliciously unnecessary as you are.
Robert Farrar Capon
#61. Do you seriously envision St. Paul or Calvin or Luther opening bottles of Welch's Grape Juice in the sacristy before the service? Luther at least would turn over in his grave.
Robert Farrar Capon
#62. God makes the world not out of necessity but by a divine Whim, and the world he makes is a whimsically romantic place. We're all crazy about each other because we're made in the image of Someone who's been crazy about us.
Robert Farrar Capon
#63. Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works.
Robert Farrar Capon
#64. At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives.
Robert Farrar Capon
#65. prepackaged slices or the Supermarket swiss (which has the texture but no where near the flavor, of rubber gloves)
Robert Farrar Capon
#66. The church is not in the morals business. The world is in the morals business, quite rightfully; and it has done a fine job of it, all things considered.
Robert Farrar Capon
#67. Grace perennially waits for us to accept our destruction and, in that acceptance, to discover the power of the Resurrection and the Life.
Robert Farrar Capon
#68. It turns out that what makes history come out in triumph is some dumb sheep that couldn't find its way home.
Robert Farrar Capon
#69. The notion that people won't sin as long as you keep them well supplied with guilt and holy terror is a bit overblown.
Robert Farrar Capon
#70. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with Give us pasta with a hundred fillings.
Robert Farrar Capon
#72. For the church to act as if it dare not have any dealings with sinners is as much a betrayal of its mission as it would be for a hospital to turn away sick people or for a carpenter to refuse to touch rough-cut wood.
Robert Farrar Capon
#73. Jesus obviously does not answer many questions from you or me. Which is why apologetics is always such a questionable enterprise. Jesus just doesn't argue.
Robert Farrar Capon
#75. Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than useful.
Robert Farrar Capon
#76. What role have I left for religion? None. And I have left none because the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ leaves none. Christianity is not a religion; it is the announcement of the end of religion.
Robert Farrar Capon
#77. Both heaven and hell are populated entirely and only by forgiven sinners. Hell is just a courtesy for those who insist they want no part of forgiveness.
Robert Farrar Capon
#78. The reason for not going out and sinning all you like is the same as the reason for not going out and putting your nose in a slicing machine: it's dumb, stupid, and no fun.
Robert Farrar Capon
#79. Adultery can indeed be pleasant, and tying one on can amuse. But betrayal, jealousy, love grown cold, and the gray dawn of the morning after are nobody's idea of a good time.
Robert Farrar Capon
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