Anybody out there ever read Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell? He quotes another author on page 32, Robert Farrar Capon. In his Endnotes, Bell says of Capon: ‘Go out and buy all of his books and read them immediately.’

I’ve got a stack of books I am going to re-read this Spring. One I began perusing is called The Astonished Heart, by Robert Farrar Capon. The sub-title is ‘reclaiming the good news from the lost-and-found of church history.’

Here is how he opens things up:

To put a finer point on it, its an argument drawn from church history designed to demonstrate what I consider the egregious mistakes the church has made as a result of turning itself into a religious institution and thus losing its grip on its catholicity (he doesn’t mean Catholicism, he means its all-inclusive scope of application to humanity). ….The problem is not that we need to get back to the truth of our religion or to get on to some better version of the ecclesiastical institution; rather, it’s that we need nothing as much as to stop acting as if we are a religion or institution at all. To begin with, Christianity is not a religion; it is the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The Gospel, however – the Good News of our Lord and Savior Jesus – is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance. It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over, period. All the efforts of the human race to straighten up the mess of history by plausible religious devices – all the chicken sacrifices, all the fasts, all the mysticism, all the moral exhortations, all the threats – have been canceled by God for lack of saving interest. More astonishingly still, their purpose has been fulfilled, once for all and free for nothing, by the totally non-religious death and resurrection of a Galilean nobody.