Robert Farrar Capon Quotes & Sayings

If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe - all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary - evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe - just maybe - if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover. — Robert Farrar Capon

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

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

We spend our lives invoking upon ourselves imagined necessities, creating God in the image of our own fears - and all the while, he is beating us over the head with the balloon of grace and the styrofoam baseball bat of a vindicating judgment. The history of salvation is slapstick all the way, right up to and including the end. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth: — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

What is good is difficult, and what is difficult is rare. — Robert Farrar Capon

Everybody, even the worst stinker on earth, is somebody for whom Christ died. — Robert Farrar Capon

I myself, however, could never resist the temptation to read raisin paste for wine in the story of the Miracle of Cana. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made raisin paste ... he said unto the bridegroom, 'Every man doth at the beginning doth set forth good raisin paste, and when men have well drunk [eaten? the text is no doubt corrupt], then that which is worse, but thou hast kept the good raisin paste until now. — Robert Farrar Capon

O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. 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, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron's beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men - to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve Thee as Thou hast blessed us - with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Amen. — Robert Farrar Capon

A good time occurs precisely when we lose track of what time it is. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory. — Robert Farrar Capon

Christianity is NOT a religion; it is the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The Gospel, however - the Good News of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance. It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over - period. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

We are saved by Christ alone who raises us from the dead - from the absolution of our death. We come before him at the judgement with no handwriting whatsoever against us. It's simply cheating to say you believe that and then renege on it by postulating some list of extra-rotten crimes for which Christ has to send you to hell. He, the universal Redeemer, is the only judge; as far as he's concerned, the only mandatory sentence is to life and life abundant. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being -- a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner...the true convivium -- the long Session that brings us nearly home. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

In Jesus, God has put up a "Gone Fishing" sign on the religion shop. He has done the whole job in Jesus once and for all and simply invited us to believe it - to trust the bizarre, unprovable proposition that in him, every last person on earth is already home free without a single religious exertion: no fasting till your knees fold, no prayers you have to get right or else, no standing on your head with your right thumb in your left ear and reciting the correct creed - no nothing ... The entire show has been set to rights in the Mystery of Christ - even though nobody can see a single improvement. Yes, it's crazy. And yes, it's wild, and outrageous, and vulgar. And any God who would do such a thing is a God who has no taste. And worst of all, it doesn't sell worth beans. But it is good news - the only permanently good news there is - and therefore I find it absolutely captivating.
- as quoted in All Is Grace, by Brennan Manning. — Robert Farrar Capon

It is precisely our sins, and not our goodnesses, that most commend us to the grace of God. — Robert Farrar Capon

As I observed earlier, the greatest evils are, with alarming regularity, done in the name of goodness. When we finally fry this planet in a nuclear holocaust, it will not have been done by a bunch of naughty little boys and girls; it will have been done by grave, respectable types who loved their high ideals too much to lay them down for the mere preservation of life
on earth. And lesser evils follow the same rule. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

The world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formula leaves the responsibility for cooking up salvation firmly in human hands. The world is drowning in religion. But it is scared out of its wits by any mention of the grace that takes the world home gratis. — Robert Farrar Capon

Judgment falls not on the unacceptable but only on those who will not accept acceptance — Robert Farrar Capon

An eye for an eye won't work because all it does is double the number of eyeless people. — Robert Farrar Capon

The gluing together of a clutch of human beings into some semblance of a city has never been more than remotely possible. We are all sinners, and it's the people closest to us that see us at our worst. The family gets the lion's share of life's provocations, aggravations, and enervations. Nowhere is there so much fur quite so ready to be rubbed the wrong way. — Robert Farrar Capon

We are so impressed by scientific clank that we feel we ought not to say that the sunflower turns because it knows where the sun is. It is almost second nature to us to prefer explanations ... with a large vocabulary. We are much more comfortable when we are assured that the sunflower turns because it is heliotropic. The trouble with that kind of talk is that it tempts us to think that we know what the sunflower is up to. But we don't. The sunflower is a mystery, just as every single thing in the universe is. — Robert Farrar Capon

Only miracle is plain; it is in the ordinary that groans with the weight of glory. — Robert Farrar Capon

It cannot be said too often that in the New Testament, the opposite of sin is not virtue, it is faith. — Robert Farrar Capon

Let a woman learn only a handful of basic finishes for her meat, and she will become a cook instead of a housewife. Butter and cream, for example. What chicken is there - what veal, what pork - indeed, what shrimp, scallops, oysters, or clams, that will not come to a glorious end if, five minutes before they leave the stove, they are graced with a lump of butter and as many tablespoons of cream as can be spared? — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The human race is positively addicted to keeping records and remembering scores. What we call our "life" is, for the most part, simply the juggling of accounts in our heads. And yet, if God has announced anything in Jesus, it is that he, for one, has pensioned off the bookkeeping department permanently. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set ourselves. It is a continually renewed attempt simply to believe that someone else has done all the achieving that is needed and to live in relationship with that person, whether we achieve or not. If that doesn't seem like much to you, you're right: it isn't. And, as a matter of fact, the life of grace is even less than that. It's not even our life at all, but the life of that Someone Else rising like a tide in the ruins of our death. — Robert Farrar Capon

The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. She has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes, that she has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our songs, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music to avoid some flub that will get us in dutch. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

That, you know, is why the world exists at all. It remains outside the cosmic garbage can of nothingness, not because it is such a solemn necessity that nobody can get rid of it, but because it is the orange peel hung on God's chandelier, the wishbone in His kitchen closet. He likes it; therefore, it stays. The whole marvelous collection of stones, skins, feathers, and string exists because at least one lover has never quite taken His eye off it, because the Dominus vivificans has his delight with the sons of men. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

Salvation is a gift given, not a bargain struck. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

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

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

The Gospel of grace must not be turned into a bait-and-switch offer. It is not one of those airline supersavers in which you read of a $59.00 fare to Orlando only to find, when you try to buy a ticket, that the six seats per flight at that price are all taken and that the trip will now cost you $199.95. Jesus must not be read as having baited us with grace only to clobber us in the end with law. For as the death and resurrection of Jesus were accomplished once and for all, so the grace that reigns by those mysteries reigns eternally - even in the thick of judgment. — Robert Farrar Capon

It's just misery to try to keep count of what God is no longer counting. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

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

The divine knowing - what the Father knows, and what the Word says in response to that knowing, and what the Spirit broods upon under the speaking of the Word - all that eternal intellectual activity isn't just daydreaming. It's the cause of everything that is. God doesn't find out about creation; he knows it into being. His knowing has hair on it. It is an effective act. What he knows, is. What he thinks, by the very fact of his thinking, jumps from no-thing into thing. He never thought of anything that wasn't. — Robert Farrar Capon

However grand our sacramental downsittings and updressings may be, they remain only and precisely sacraments: real presences, under particular signs, of the happier order that faith can discover under any and all signs. They're a bit like the church. As long as we see them as an earnest of the kingdom, they're all right; when we put on airs and act as if they were the kingdom itself, they look just silly. — Robert Farrar Capon

All salt and no finesse makes Jack a dull cook. — Robert Farrar Capon

Judgment, as it is portrayed in the parables of Jesus (not to mention the rest of the New Testament) never comes until after acceptance: grace remains forever the sovereign consideration. The difference between the blessed and the cursed is one thing and one thing only: the blessed accept their acceptance and the cursed reject it; but the acceptance is already in place for both groups before either does anything about it. — Robert Farrar Capon

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world — Robert Farrar Capon

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

Every dish in the ferial cuisine, however, provides a double or treble delight: Not only is the body nourished and the palate pleased, the mind is intrigued by the triumph of ingenuity over scarcity - by the making of slight materials into a considerable matter. A man can do worse than to be poor. He can miss altogether the sight of the greatness of small things. — Robert Farrar Capon

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

There is only one unpardonable sin, and that is to withhold pardon from others. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

A lost sheep is, for all practical purposes a dead sheep. It is the admission that we are dead in our sins
that we have no power of ourselves either to save ourselves or to convince anyone else that we are worth saving. It is the recognition that our whole life is out of our hands and that if we ever live again, our life will be entirely the gift of some gracious shepherd. God finds us the desert of death (not in the garden of improvement) and in the power of Jesus' resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home. — Robert Farrar Capon

The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls. — Robert Farrar Capon

Christianity is not a religion. Christianity is the proclamation of the end of religion, not of a new religion, or even of the best of all religions. If the cross is the sign of anything, it's the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all of the world's problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing. What the cross is actually a sign of is the fact that religion can't do a thing about the world's problems - that it never did work and it never will — Robert Farrar Capon

Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that there is at least something we can do. Tell us that at the end of the day there will at least be one redeeming card of our very own. Lord, if it is not too much to ask, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can congratulate ourselves. But whatever you do, do not preach grace. Give us something to do, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance. — Robert Farrar Capon

Even to this day, grace remains hard to swallow. Religiosity and moralism go down easier than free forgiveness. — Robert Farrar Capon

Parables are told only because they are true, not because the actions of the characters in them can be recommended for imitation. Good Samaritans are regularly sued. Fathers who give parties for wayward sons are rightly rebuked, Employers who pay equal wages for unequal work have labor-relations problems. And any Shepherd who makes a practice of leaving ninety-nine sheep to chase after a lost one quickly goes out of the sheep-ranching business.
The parables are true only because they are like what God is like, not because they are models for us to copy. It is simply a fact that the one thing we dare not under any circumstances imitate is the only thing that can save us. The parables are, one and all, about the foolishness by which Grace raises the dead. They apply to no sensible process at all - only to the divine insanity that brings everything out of nothing. — Robert Farrar Capon

The only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody. — Robert Farrar Capon

God does not punish people for being nonpacifists; war alone is punishment enough. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits - witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling. — Robert Farrar Capon

People converted by fear-mongering are people converted from evil, not to the truth. — Robert Farrar Capon

Does it not whet your appetite for the critical opera omnia of such an author, where he will freely have at the lenth and breath of Scripture? Can you not see his promised land flowing with peanut butter and jelly; his apocalypse, in which the great whore of Babylon is given the cup of ginger ale of the fierceness of the wrath of God? — Robert Farrar Capon

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

The truth that makes us free is always ticking away like a time-bomb in the basement of everybody's church. — Robert Farrar Capon

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

Jesus not only revealed himself, he hid himself at the same time. — Robert Farrar Capon

Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners — Robert Farrar Capon

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

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

To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste. — Robert Farrar Capon

However much we hate the law, we are more afraid of grace — Robert Farrar Capon

prepackaged slices or the Supermarket swiss (which has the texture but no where near the flavor, of rubber gloves) — Robert Farrar Capon

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

There is therefore now no condemnation for two reasons: you are dead now; and God, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, has been dead all along. The blame game was over before it started. It really was. All Jesus did was announce that truth and tell you it would make you free. It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. You are a menace. Be he did it; and therefore, menace or not, here you stand: uncondemned, forever, now. What are you going to do with your freedom? — Robert Farrar Capon

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

...as long as her grace remains grace, she remains the only life he has - even while he is whoring around in some Babylonian dive. Whether he behaves or misbehaves, he is dead from start to finish but for her. Unchanging, unswerving, she goes on being his resurrection, the one center at which his sins are always forgiven. All he has to do the seventh time, or the seventy-times-seventh time, is the same thing he did the first time: confess, admit once more the truth of his abiding death, and trust once again the life that never left him for a second. — Robert Farrar Capon