Some Quotes from Father Capon:
“I think good preachers should be like bad kids. They ought to be naughty enough to tiptoe up on dozing congregations, steal their bottles of religion pills, spirituality pills, and morality pills, and flush them all down the drain. The church, by and large, has drugged itself into thinking that proper human behavior is the key to its relationship with God. What preachers need to do is force it to go cold turkey with nothing by the word of the cross – and then be brave enough to stick around while it goes through the inevitable withdrawal symptoms. But preachers can’t be naughty or brave unless they’re free of their own need for the dope of acceptance. And they won’t be free of their need until they can trust the God who has already accepted them, in advance and dead as doornails, in Jesus.” (Page 11)
“Unless we who speak the Word are willing to be utterly nothing – unless we’re willing to admit we’re sinners, and welcome the annihilation of our glittering images of moral success and clerical reputability – our words will be nothing more than the words of fakers, and we’ll never come within a million miles of that astonishment at grace which alone can make those words come alive.” (Page 20)
“The church is not in the world to teach sinners to straighten up and fly right. That’s the world’s business; and on the whole it does a fairly competent – even a gleefully aggressive – job of it. The church is supposed to be in the forgiveness business. Its job in filling pulpits is to find derelict nobodies who are willing to admit that they’re sinners and mean it.” (Page 24)
- Robert Farrar Capon, The Foolishness of Preaching
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