The Outrage of Grace

I've been wrestling through some Robert Farrar Capon recently.  His writing makes me feel as if I've walked into my grandfather's study.  Only now instead of off-white carpet and cheap furniture, the study is full of classic books on shelves of teak, the obligatory green-glass library lamps lighting up antique desks.  And in one of the overstuffed, leather chairs that would obviously be in this upgraded study, he's sitting. But instead of my staunchly fundamentalist-Baptist grandfather waiting to talk to me about music choices and maintaining a good witness with my hairstyle, it's Capon, smoking a pipe with another lit for me.  He hands it to me with a glass of rather good scotch, and I'm disarmed by his stories of grace.

But every few minutes I come to my sense.  I'm a pretty traditional evangelical guy.  A pastoral intern at a PCA church.  I can't be consorting with potential universalists who place so much emphasis on an outrageous grace that I'm no longer aloud to be upset at anyone, except maybe those few that are trying too hard to look alive.  I just can't be hob-nobbing with someone who would say, for example, this:

"I don't know why God insisted on allowing us to run our own history in the first place; and I don't know why he insists on leaving us free enough to botch it in the second; and I don't know why he insists on saving it in the third.  Maybe he really is a jerk.  But if those three insistences are the facts of the case (and if you're a Christian, you believe they are), then there's no way around the outrage of grace.  By and by I shall give you something on judgment and hell, just because they're part of the imagery too.  But don't hold your breath waiting for the other, score-evening shoe to drop, because it's not going to.  Ever since Noah, God has had trouble keeping track of that shoe; and he finally lost it for good in Jesus.  He simply doesn't keep score.  History does, and we do; but as you just proved, keeping score simply ends the game.  And therefore he refuses to do it.  Instead, he erases all our records by death and raises us by grace with nothing but his record left.  Maybe it was just the best he could do; I don't know.  But I do know that's what he says he does.  Your objection to it was voiced perfectly --if less vehemently-- by the Elder Brother; and God's only answer to you was given equally perfectly by the Father: 'It is meet that we should make merry and be glad: for this your brother was dead and is alive again.  Even your rotten kid brother.  Even Hitler. End of Subject.'" (Between Noon and Three p. 252)

I may just need another glass of scotch.