Beyond virtue Book

Don't write this book off by its summary. Capon explores the totality of grace between lover and beloved and uses the affair as a way to draw the reader out of their comfort zone with grace and the law: God's grace does not destroy or overwrite the law, but the law is also not our reconciliation: "The law," he says, "shows me only that I am unreconciled." We needed reconciliation before the law came down. And blessedly, reconciliation requires nothing of you, not even your faith because it already is. Faith just lets you accept it, enter it with joy. Hell is the rejection of grace, maybe the terror and fear of grace, but there grace still resides.

Capon takes the title from W. H. Auden's Horae Canonicae, which takes the canon hours of Good Friday, which remember the hours Christ hung on the cross. Between noon and three, Christ hangs, a couple falls in love, a mafioso is assassinated (Capon's second parable), and grace flows through all of it.

The book is set in three parts, first the parable, then a coffee hour dialogue between preacher and parishioners, then a treatise on sin and judgment and why and how God dares to forgive the pettiest to the most egregious. His treatise is the most moving part for me: we fall because since hanging on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we have tried to know ourselves by a knowledge external to ourselves and God. Once we can finally know the way God knows, the way Christ knew as he hung on his own tree, universal grace will make more sense, but probably in the eschaton.

If you have caused hurt, read the parable. If you have been hurt, read the treatise. If you can't quite get over a robust morality to accept the outrage of total and universal grace, read the coffee hour dialogue.

Capon's theology seems orthodox, if his methods less so. You can be disgusted by or wary of his parable (he expects you to be), but those with ears to hear will hear.