Robert Farrar Capon Quotes About Creation

Quotes about: Creation

• 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.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Pain, Dirty, Hands

  Robert Farrar Capon (1967). “The Romance of the Word: One Man's Love Affair with Theology : Three Books”, p.170, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• Salvation is not some felicitous state to which we can lift ourselves by our own bootstraps after the contemplation of sufficiently good examples. It is an utterly new creation into which we are brought by our death in Jesus' death and our resurrection in his. It comes not out of our own best efforts, however well-inspired or successfully pursued, but out of the shipwreck of all human efforts whatsoever.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Jesus, Best Effort, Example

  Robert Farrar Capon (2002). “Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus”, p.213, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms, wine is in order to be wine: things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. To be sure, God remains the greatest good; but, for all that, the world is still good in itself. Indeed, since He does not need it, its whole reason for being must lie in its own natural goodness; He has no use for it, only delight.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Lying, Wine, Mean

• 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

  Lying, Simple, Cities

• ... 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

  Father, Thinking, Hair

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