Regarding his theology, I warmed to it immediately. He has this jokey, old-fashioned tone, making him at times sound like your smart-but-prone-to-punning great uncle (using adjectives like “rockem-sockem,” for instance, while talking about the judgment of the Almighty also very fond of the form "Yes, Virginia," when answering a eschatological question). Capon tells it straight but always with a liberal dose of wit. Here, there is no pandering, no ideological oversimplification, no fussy stories meant to force tears. On the purely stylistic level, Capon writes with immense intelligence, literary skill, and pitch-perfect humor, setting him light years ahead of the popular Christian authors I’ve read. My church’s clergy are constantly raving about and quoting Capon (namely for his perpetual message of the enduring grace of God), and at a recent conference, I decided it was time to give him a whirl, and I bought this large, dense book, in which Capon unpacks the parables of Jesus. But I am now pleased to announce that I have found the swaggering antidote to stuffy, badly written theology for laypeople: Robert Farrar Capon. The modern, popular Christian theology books were always either too moralistic or too simpering for my taste. In the past few years, I have lost interest in reading more Christian theology than I already have.
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