142 Quotes by Robert Farrar Capon

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

Well, if you find yourself living by something that can't forgive ... then you die to it and look around for something that can.