Between Noon & Three Quotes

“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“Trust him. And when you have done that, you are living the life of grace. No matter what happens to you in the course of that trusting - no matter how many waverings you may have, no matter how many suspicions that you have bought a poke with no pig in it, no matter how much heaviness and sadness your lapses, vices, indispositions, and bratty whining may cause you - you believe simply that Somebody Else, by his death and resurrection, has made it all right, and you just say thank you and shut up. The whole slop-closet full of mildewed performances (which is all you have to offer) is simply your death; it is Jesus who is your life. If he refused to condemn you because your works were rotten, he certainly isn't going to flunk you because your faith isn't so hot. You can fail utterly, therefore, and still live the life of grace. You can fold up spiritually, morally, or intellectually and still be safe. Because at the very worst, all you can be is dead - and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“...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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“...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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“... 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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“Keep a spirited Christian horse and a useful ethical donkey. But don't try to breed a mule.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“... 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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“At the very worst, all you can be is dead - and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“Any authentically Christian system is going to have to keep off the kick of human merit and demerit and stick resolutely to a universalism of grace that overrides the subject of human works.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“If, while we hold our times here in our own hands, all we have to do to be reconciled is believe he has them in his, how much less will we have to do there when we shall see they are in Christ's hand alone - that is, see them held for our eternal enjoyment as all right?”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“What God effects in the reconciliation does the work of forgetting without the danger of forgetting. He does better than forget: he remembers our evil in grace as the only read thing it ever could have been. He takes away the flaming sword between us and our self-knowledge, and brings us home to ourselves.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“...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, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“[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.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“Whatever we say about hell must be said under the rubric of a universal and effective reconciliation of all things in Christ. If we choose to say where hell is, it must somehow be inside Jesus' reconciliation. If we choose to explain how hell can be, we must somehow say that Jesus accepts our choosing of it without willing us into it in any deterministic way. If we want to say what hell does, we must somehow leave it with no detrimental effect on the universal picnic. And if we are so bold as to attempt to say what hell is like, we must somehow make it even more of a nothing than our first death, which is its master image.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“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.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“It's fascinating how often theological throwaway comes back to haunt you.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“God may work in a Mystery, but luckily for us, he's incapable of keeping a secret.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace