Top 80 Robert Farrar Capon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

3. “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

4. “Christianity is not a religion; it is the announcement of the end of religion.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

5. “Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

6. “The wickedness of the church can be one thing and one only: turning the Good News ofJesus into the bad news ofreligion.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

7. “Salvation is a gift given, not a bargain struck.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

8. “We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

9. “However much we hate the law, we are more afraid of grace.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

10. “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

11. “Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth:.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

12. “Even to this day, grace remains hard to swallow. Religiosity and moralism go down easier than free forgiveness.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

13. “Man was made to lead with his chin; he is worth knowing only with his guard down, his head up and his heart rampant on his sleeve.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

14. “People converted by fear-mongering are people converted from evil, not to the truth.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

15. “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

16. “An eye for an eye” won’t work because all it does is double the number of eyeless people.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

17. “We are supposed to represent a Lord who came not to judge the world but to save it. Our business should be simply to keep everybody in the net of his kingdom until we reach the farther shore. Sorting is strictly his department, not ours.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

18. “It’s just misery to try to keep count of what God is no longer counting.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

19. “Only miracle is plain; it is in the ordinary that groans with the weight of glory.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

20. “The truth that makes us free is always ticking away like a time-bomb in the basement of everybody’s church.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

21. “The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

22. “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

23. “There is only one unpardonable sin, and that is to withhold pardon from others.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

24. “Jesus didn’t shy away from sinners, so why should the church? And don’t tell me the church welcomes sinners. I know better. It welcomes only sinners who repent and then never seriously need forgiveness again.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

25. “Everybody, even the worst stinker on earth, is somebody for whom Christ died.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

26. “What saves us is Jesus, and the way we lay hold of that salvation is by faith. And faith is something that, throughout this book, I shall resolutely refuse to let mean anything other than trusting Jesus. It is simply saying yes to him rather than no. It is, at its root, a mere “uh-huh” to him personally.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

27. “I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work. Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Always remember, you don’t need bad people to get bad deeds done. All you need is somebody clever enough to convince good people that a nefarious policy is actually the greatest thing since the pop-up toaster. As I have frequently observed, most of the serious evils in the world have been done in the name of good.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

34. “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

35. “God’s program is grace, not scorekeeping; free gift, not reward and punishment in this world.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

36. “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

37. “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

38. “God does not punish people for being nonpacifists; war alone is punishment enough.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

39. “For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself-and it is our glory to see it so and to thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “A good time occurs precisely when we lose track of what time it is.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

44. “A silent lover is one who doesn’t know his job.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

45. “Women are like cheese strudels. When first baked, they are crisp and fresh on the outside, but the filling is unsettled and indigestible; in age, the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling comes at last into its own.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

46. “The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

47. “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. The world of winners will buy case lots of moral advice, grosses of guilt-edged prohibitions, skids of self-improvement techniques, and whole truckloads of transcendental hot air. But it will not buy free forgiveness because that threatens to let the riffraff into the Supper of the Lamb.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

48. “The reason for not going out and sinning all you like is the same as the reason for not going out and putting your nose in a slicing machine: it’s dumb, stupid, and no fun.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

49. “One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world.”

— Robert Farrar Capon

50. “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