How to Get Creamed

There is nothing intrinsically contrary to the church's mission, of course, in the suggestion that an upright life might be a good thing for Christians to attempt. But when that suggestion reaches the point at which it becomes a test of membership in the church, it comes smack up against he radical peculiarity of the Gospel: Jesus was not a teacher of ethics. The Sermon on the Mount, for instance, is not a string of sensible lessons in morality: it's a paradoxical presentation, in the form of ethical advice, of recipes for getting yourself creamed. And the radical Gospel of grace and forgiveness that is the church's deepest message isn't ethics, either. It's an outrageously unethical offer not to count anybody's sins at all, because the Lamb of God simply stopped counting when he drew everybody to himself on the cross. At its root, therefore, the Gospel is immoral, not moral: it lets scoundrels in free for nothing. __From The Astonished Heart by Robert Farrar Capon__