I also think Capon's entire work rests on a false dichotomy. It is still good, when I study the parables I will return to this book, but its just long and drawn out. Capon tends to tell the parables in his own words which is less interesting each time he does it.

The other two are also great, but after a while got tedious. This book contains three books within it The first one, The Parables of the Kingdom, a study of the parables in Matthew 13, is worth five stars. This book brightened my own weak conception of my faith and what matters about it in the end. To a skeptical, literate, doubt-filled Christian, the pleasures of reading Capon are vast. Capon divides and conquers the parables in three books (stories about kingdom, grace, and judgment), which are here joined in one large volume.

Grace is at the heart of the Christian movement and yet we have failed to grasp it for centuries. In Capon’s conception, the mystery is at the heart of the Kingdom of God, and it is this never-ending mystery that Jesus alludes to, again and again, in his parables. For me, this perspective of grace, this radical, one-way love, is the only thing that has kept me a Christian. Grace is the only thing that really matters, in Capon’s conception of the Gospel. It is a life-giving breath of air to me, to read and to know that there are (or, were Capon died in 2013) Christians out there, like Capon, who are simultaneously full of faith and empty of bullshit. 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.

Kingdom grace judgment