Stanley Hauerwas Quotes

From my perspective, 'postmodernism' merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.

I am not sure how old I was when I began to worry about being saved, but it was sometime in my early teens.

A Christian marriage isn't about whether you're in love. Christian marriage is giving you the practice of fidelity over a lifetime in which you can look back upon the marriage and call it love. It is a hard discipline over many years. (Duke Magazine Article, "Faith Fires Back," 2002)

The courageous have fears that cowards never know.

Jesus is Lord' is not my personal opinion. I take it to be a determinative political claim.

Part of what my work has always been about is to show that the apocalyptic character of the gospel makes the everyday possible. It gives us the time that lets us care for one another as we are ill, helps us care for one another as we experience broken relationships, and helps us take the time to worship God in a world of such violence.

The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foretaste of the unity of the communion of the saints.

I was raised in an evangelical Methodist church. Evangelical meant that though you had been baptized and made a member of the church on Sunday morning, you still had to be 'saved' on Sunday night. I wanted to be saved, but I did not think you should fake it.

To be poor does not mean you lack the means to extend charity to another. You may lack money or food, but you have the gift of friendship to overwhelm the loneliness that grips the lives of so many.

The world does not have time to be with the poor, to learn with the poor, to listen to the poor. To listen to the poor is an exercise of great discipline, but such listening surely is what is required if charity is not to become a hatred of the poor for being poor.

When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be.

The British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are.

In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the U.S., many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.

I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

The church is not to be judged by how useful we are as a "supportive institution" and our clergy as members of a "helping profession". The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not found in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor.

The church doesn't have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.

The narratives of Scripture were not meant to describe our world ... but to change the world, including the one in which we now live.

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do.

Mary-born Lord, humble us so that we also might say, Let it be with me according to your word.

Whatever it means to be a Christian, it at least involves the discovery of friends you did not know you had.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.

Consider the problem of taking showers with Christians. They are, after all, constantly going on about the business of witnessing in the hopes of making converts to their God and church. Would you want to shower with such people? You never know when they might try to baptize you.

To live in the light of the resurrection is to refuse to use the powers that crucified Jesus in the name of achieving justice. Thus the sentence, "Christians are called to be nonviolent not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to make war less likely, but because in a world of war, as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent; it is a nonviolence, moreover, that may make the world more violent because the world will use violence rather than have the order it calls peace exposed as violence.

We, like the people of Israel, would like to think we get to name God. By naming God, we hope to get the kind of god we need; that is, a god after our own likeness.

The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

For example, when Christians discuss sex, it often sounds as if we are somehow "against sex". What we fail to make clear is that sexual passion (the good gifts of God's creation) is now subservient to the demanding business of maintaining a revolutionary community in a world that often uses sex as a means of momentarily anesthetizing or distracting people from the basic vacuity of their lives. When the only contemporary means of self-transcendence is orgasm, we Christians are going to have a tough time convincing people that it would be nicer if they were not promiscuous.

To come to terms with our beginning requires a truthful story to acquire the skills to live in gratitude rather than resentment for the gift of life.

I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.

We are opaque mysteries to ourselves and one another.

Jesus made the final sacrifice for all, and we need not make it again.

'It is finished' is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work.

God knows why God has made some of us ecclesiastically homeless, but I hope and pray that our being so may be in service to Christian unity.

Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.

Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection.

I have assumed my clear commitment to a Trinitarian orthodoxy was sufficient evidence that I have not intentionally ignored the role of the Holy Spirit. It may be true, however, that my work has been so Christ-centred, I may have given the impression that the Holy Spirit is an afterthought.

I'm a happy and productive person. I'm very fortunate; I was born with happy genes. I've got a lot of energy.

Let me be clear: I am a Methodist. By that, I mean I think John Wesley was a recovery of Catholic Christianity through disciplined congregational life.

Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end in itself. This presumption was then reinforced by an unassailable belief in the common sense of the individual.

The fundamental character of our faith means an extensive diversity is required not only within local community, but between communities.

I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.

Just as an athlete with natural gifts may fail to develop the fundamental skills necessary to play their sport after their talent fades, so people naturally disposed to faith may fail to develop the skills necessary to sustain them for a lifetime.

In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college.

War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.

[W]e must first experience the kingdom if we are even to know what kind of freedom and what kind of equality we should desire. Christian freedom lies in service, Christian equality is equality before God, and neither can be achieved through the coercive efforts of liberal idealists who would transform the world into their image.

It's hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather to make us disciples, citizens of God's new age, a kingdom of surprise.

I am not sure I can make clear what it means to say I come from the Catholic side of Protestantism, but at the very least, it means that I do not think Christianity began with the Reformation.

I cannot imagine a more realistic faith than the Christian faith. At every turn, we are told we are death-determined creatures and that our lives, our all too brief lives, at the very least will be complex if not difficult.

I have no doubt that for some to become a Christian may involve an experience of ecstasy. Yet I do not think such an experience is necessary for someone to be a Christian.

Jesus is the parable of the Father's love given to transform us so that we might be drawn into the new creation called the kingdom of God.

No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd drive this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It's just one damn thing after another.

To know God's name is to know God.

'The Chronicles of Narnia' are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war.

God knows we are subtle creatures who are more than able to use candour to avoid acknowledging our deceptions of others and ourselves.

Most of us believe that we possess some aspect of eternity that will insure some kind of survival beyond death. The only problem with those strategies is they forget that only God is eternal. We are finite.

We think it is really very simple: Jesus had to die because we needed and need to be forgiven. But, ironically, such a focus shifts attention from Jesus to us. This is a fatal turn, I fear, because as soon as we begin to think this is all about us, about our need for forgiveness, bathos drapes the cross, hiding from us the reality that here we first and foremost see God. Moreover,

Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about.

By the time I had got to college, I had begun to read and had decided that most of what Christians believed could not be credible. So I became a philosophy major at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

The very idea that you could have separation between mosque and state from Islam's perspective is the imposition on them of Christian practice. Islam doesn't really have a place for state. They are a universalistic faith like Christianity, but they think there is no country that bounds Islam.

Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism.

We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God's free grace.

Another hallmark of Christianity is that salvation is not individualistic-it's not something one person receives for himself or herself. Salvation is the reign of God. It is a political alternative to the way the world is constituted. That's a very important part of the story that has been lost to accounts of salvation that are centered in the individual. But without an understanding that salvation is the reign of God, the need for the church to mediate salvation makes no sense at all.

I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.

The rules of grammar come later, if at all, as a way of enabling you to nourish and sustain the art of speaking well. Ethics, as an academic discipline, is simply the task of assembling reminders that enable us to remember how to speak and to live the language of the gospel. Ethics can never take the place of community any more than rules of grammar can replace the act of speaking the language. Ethics is always a secondary enterprise and is parasitic to the way people live together in a community.

Christianity is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian, but rather Christianity is to have one's body shaped, one's habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.

Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone's enemies - sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian.

The problem with the U.S. foreign policy is that we're just so unbelievably powerful. And when you've got that kind of power, it's very hard not to use it.

Whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world.

One of the problems with the identification of Christianity with love is how such a view turns out to be both anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. The Jews and Catholics become identified with the law or dogma, in contrast to Protestant Christians, who are about love.

Free is not how many of our citizens feel - with our overstocked medicine cabinets, burglar alarms, vast ghettos, and drug culture. Eighteen hundred New Yorkers are murdered every year by their fellow citizens in a city whose police department is larger than the standing army of many nations. The adventure went sour.

Peace is a deeper reality than violence."
p. 231

I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame.

The very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology.

It is often observed that the first casualty of war is truth, but how do you tell the truth without betraying the sacrifice of those who accepted the terms of battle? War is a sacrificial system that creates its own justification.

To be a Christian means you become a part of the most significant story the world has ever heard. You don't become part of that without an ongoing questioning of what it means to become part of that.

The Gospel of John makes explicit what all the Gospels assume - that is, the cross is not a defeat, but the victory of our God.

Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.

To be a Christian means you do not have to marry or have a child. The church is constituted by a people who grow through witness and conversion, not through biological ascription. A church in which the single rather than the married bear the burden of proof is one that inexorably legitimates violence in the name of protecting "our" children from those who think they need to kill to protect "their" children. The problem is not children, but the possessive pronouns

My mother desperately wanted children. She had a child that was stillborn - something I learned when I was looking through her 'effects' after she had died. It was then that I discovered my original birth certificate, which indicated the previous birth.

To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.

Being a Christian has not and does not come naturally or easy for me. I take that to be a good thing because I am sure that to be a Christian requires training that lasts a lifetime.

Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.

Ask yourself: if that is what Jesus is all about - that is, getting us to love one another - then why did everyone reject him?

To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don't understand Islam to be a church.

We believe that many Christians do not fully appreciate the odd way in which the church, when it is most faithful, goes about its business. We want to claim the church's "oddness" as essential to its faithfulness.

As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option, we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.

The mentally ill may have shattered lives, but how that is different than the way sin distorts our ability to comprehend who we are as God's creatures is not clear.

America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity.

For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope ... that God has not abandoned this world.

The fact that monasticism preceded the identification of greed as a primal sin is an important reminder that our very ability to name sin is a theological achievement.

The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.

I should like to think how we write as theologians would reflect our confidence in the One who makes that writing possible. That is one of the reasons, moreover, that the scriptures remain paradigmatic for how we are to write.

Hear these words, "My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?" and know that the Son of God has taken our place, become for us the abandonment our sin produces, so that we may live confident that the world has been redeemed by this cross. So

I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.

The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God's patience, to challenge the world's impatient violence by cross and resurrection.

I really have lived in books. Books are friends. They are some of the friends that make you who you are.

Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world's violence.

A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities. They will ask questions like "why does a good God let bad things happen to good people " such people cannot imagine that a people once existed who produced and sang the psalms. If we learn to say "God " we will do so with the prayer "My God my God why have you forsaken me?

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.

The heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.

The desire for money may be an indication of greed, but I want to argue that greed is a much more subtle vice than simply the desire to be rich.