Quotes from Robert Farrar Capon

So what if God made a "mistake"; if the Someone who set up the world so that evil is possible is willing to commit suicide over that mistake rather than blame you for it, then trusting such a person doesn't seem like an altogether bad idea.

God may work in a Mystery, but luckily for us, he's incapable of keeping a secret.

It's fascinating how often theological throwaway comes back to haunt you.

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 unique being. The stones on the beach, the grass in the field, the rabbits in the woods, and the stars in the sky all move toward him by the most dependable of all motions: their own desire to know and love themselves.

If our Fall was our re-cognition, our re-knowing of the good as evil, then our Reconciliation is our re-cognition in Christ - our re-knowing in the risen humanity of the Word - of evil as the good he has made it once more.

Straight theologizing about grace is more, not less, outrageous than parabolic theologizing. The more clearly you make grace sovereign over human life, the more unacceptable become your efforts to harmonize it with life as we know it. The farther you go in expounding grace as the ultimate goodness of God, the deeper you find yourself mired in the manifest badness of God.

The poor man may envy the rich their houses, their lands, and their cars; but given a good wife, he rarely envies them their table.

I think that anyone who reaches the age of three or four has more than likely already had all the misery he or she needs.

The theological function of hell … is to be a sacrament to the ultimate and real element of risk by which alone we can recognize a world ruled by love. Universalism, as an overriding theological principle, is a false start. On the other hand, if you ask whether there is in fact a hell - whether specific persons will actually go so far as to insist on a second death in the face of their resurrection by the supreme Lover himself - that's another matter altogether.

The paradox of hell, as the most contradiction-filled one of all, will in all likelihood be patient of no exposition but the most contradictory.

Let us fast, then—whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat. Festally, first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored. But both ways let us eat with a glad good will, and with a conscience formed by considerations of excellence, not by fear of Ghosts.

Heaven] is not something other than this world; it is this world as it is perfectly offered now in the land of the Trinity. It is all the moments of time and all the conjunctions of space as Christ holds them reconciled for the praise of the glory of the Father's grace. And it is all of them held for our endless exploration of their depths - depths which we, even at our best, even at the moment of seeing the beloved's eyes, have only just begun to suspect.

For the second one, put down that I like food. As a child, I disliked fish, eggs, and oatmeal, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. My tastes are now more catholic, if not omnivorous. My children call me the walking garbage pail. (On my own terms, of course, I refuse the epithet: All that I take is stored lovingly in an ample home--it becomes not waste, but waist.

The kingdom grows, he says, because the kingdom is already planted. It grows of itself and in its own good time. Above all, it grows we know not how.

Admittedly, spending an hour in the society of an onion may be something you have never done before. You feel, perhaps, a certain resistance to the project. Please don't. As I shall show later, a number of highly profitable members of the race have undertaken it before you. Onions are excellent company.

the only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody.

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.

Lamb was the worst-cooked meat in America. Some culinary know-nothing had sold the entire country on 175 degrees as the correct internal temperature for a done leg. Done-in would have been a better word.

the world is going down the drain; only a Savior who is willing to work at the bottom of the drain can redeem it.

The skeptic is never for real. There he stands, cocktail in hand, left arm draped languorously on one end of the mantelpiece, telling you that he can't be sure of anything, not even of his own existence. I'll give you my secret method of demolishing universal skepticism in four words. Whisper to him: 'Your fly is open.' If he thinks knowledge is so all-fired impossible, why does he always look?

He does not come to see if we are good: he comes to disturb the caked conventions by which we pretend to be good. He does not come to see if we are sorry: he knows our repentance isn't worth the hot air we put into it. He does not come to count anything. Unlike the lord in the parable, he cares not even a fig for any part of our record, good or bad. He comes only to forgive. For free. For nothing. On no basis, because like the fig tree, we are too far gone to have a basis.

The wickedness of the church can be one thing and one only: turning the Good News of Jesus into the bad news of religion.

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.

On the last day, Jesus will not do anything new; he will simply make manifest what he has been doing all along - what, in fact, he has long since done by preparing for us a kingdom from the foundation of the world. It will be in seeing him, as he is, that it will finally dawn on us what, in him, we have always been.