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Robert Farrar Capon

Robert Farrar Capon Quotes

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Famous Robert Farrar Capon Quotes

“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.”

IfsWholeHomeHandsLife IsPurposeJesusLostSinOur LivesGardenWhole LifeImprovementPracticalsShouldersSavingRecognitionDesertConvinceRejoiceResurrectionSheepGraciousShepherdsAdmissionJesus Resurrection
Author:Robert Farrar Capon
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“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.”

IfsBelievePersonsMatterDoneFactsSeemsGoalEffortGraceOur LivesAchieveNeededRuinsRisingTidesMatter Of Fact
Author:Robert Farrar Capon
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“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.”

IfsProblemHandsSeemsPainSufferingEvilCreationLoversAppreciateContraryDirtyGoing AwayTheologianCompulsionBotheredShowing UpProblem Of Evil
Book:The Romance of the Word: One Man's Love Affair with Theology : Three Books
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“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.”

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Author:Robert Farrar Capon
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“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”

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Author:Robert Farrar Capon
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