cover image The Romance of the Word: One Man's Love Affair with Theology

The Romance of the Word: One Man's Love Affair with Theology

Robert Farrar Capon. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, $30 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-8028-4084-4

This volume incorporates three previously published books (An Offering of Uncles, The Third Peacock and Hunting the Divine Fox) with an important and sizable new introduction in which Capon provides us with a rare, candid self-assessment. Looking over his life and two careers, one as an Episcopal priest/pastor and the other as an author, Capon offers us a summary--a kind of Capon 101--of his theology and its twin insistences that ``Christianity is not a religion'' and that ``Grace is not a transaction.'' Here, as always, Capon's writing will be a terror to those who insist that humanity has to earn salvation and that some get it, but most don't. Others will find Capon's iconoclasm refreshing. In sum, Romance does indeed justify its subtitle. It is one man's love affair with theology, and what a man he turns out to be! (Mar.)