Imperfect Bootstraps

I just love these words of Robert Farrar Capon:

"The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof grace--bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us singlehandedly. The word of the Gospel--after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps--suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home free before they started...Grace was to be drunk neat: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale..."

HT:Buzzard Blog