But what of the unfaithful servant, the bad church?… The wickedness of the church can be one thing and one only: turning the Good News of Jesus into the bad news of religion. Christianity is not a religion; it is the announcement, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, of the end of religion-of the end of any and all requirements for the salvation of the world. And therefore, when the church preaches anything but faith alone in Jesus, it is an unfaithful church and deserves only to be put with the rest of the world’s hypocrites who think they can be saved by passing tests. It is a church that has stopped being funny and happy in the freedom of faith, and has gone dead in its own earnestness.
Robert Farrar Capon
The Parables of Judgment (1989), Eerdmans, 153
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