Top 100 Stanley Hauerwas Quotes
#2. Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.
Stanley Hauerwas
#3. The fact that I spent my life in universities in a manner that I no longer have close identification with bricklayers is a pain to me.
Stanley Hauerwas
#4. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#6. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#7. The problem with most pastors and theologians was that the way they went about their business did not require the existence of God.
Stanley Hauerwas
#8. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#10. I simply cannot get over what a surprising and wonderful life God has given me,
Stanley Hauerwas
#11. Though the world may often appear to be more charitable than the church, it is crucial to remember that, for the church, the care of the poor cannot be separated from the worship of God.
Stanley Hauerwas
#12. War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.
Stanley Hauerwas
#13. The heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.
Stanley Hauerwas
#14. 'It is finished' is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work.
Stanley Hauerwas
#15. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#16. Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.
Stanley Hauerwas
#17. No powers determine our lives more completely than those we think we have under our control. I
Stanley Hauerwas
#18. Christians need jobs just like anybody else, but the years you spend as an undergraduate are like everything else in your life. They're not yours to do with as you please. They're Christ's.
Stanley Hauerwas
#19. Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.
Stanley Hauerwas
#20. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#21. The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.
Stanley Hauerwas
#22. Whatever it means for us to exist, we do so as creatures created, as the universe has been created, to glorify God.
Stanley Hauerwas
#23. I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.
Stanley Hauerwas
#24. Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.
Stanley Hauerwas
#25. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#26. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#27. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#28. From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical "I gotcha!" It is often an attempt to kill or wound others.
Stanley Hauerwas
#29. I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Stanley Hauerwas
#30. I think Bonhoeffer rightly saw that the Christian acceptance that truth does not matter in such small matters prepared the ground for the terrible lie that was Hitler.
Stanley Hauerwas
#31. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#32. When you are trying to change the questions, you have to realize that many people are quite resistant to such a change. They like the answers they have.
Stanley Hauerwas
#34. When I started to write 'Hannah's Child,' I realized that this had to be a book of passion, to have a certain kind of vulnerability. I think that people respond to that.
Stanley Hauerwas
#35. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#36. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#37. To be a Christian is to be obligated to be charitable. This is true whether you are rich or poor, healthy or ill, old or young, male or female, oppressed or free, established or disestablished.
Stanley Hauerwas
#38. There's an inclination to get on the inside of Jesus' psyche, and I think that's a deep mistake because it assumes that what you have here is someone analogous to us.
Stanley Hauerwas
#39. Jesus is the politics of the new age; He is about the establishment of a kingdom; He is the one who has created a new time that gives us the time not only to care for the poor but to be poor. Jesus is the one who makes it possible to be nonviolent in a violent world.
Stanley Hauerwas
#40. My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.
Stanley Hauerwas
#41. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#42. To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.
Stanley Hauerwas
#43. In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.
Stanley Hauerwas
#44. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#45. I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.
Stanley Hauerwas
#46. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#47. As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression.
Stanley Hauerwas
#48. One of the challenges Christians confront is how the politics we helped create has made it difficult to sustain the material practices constitutive of an ecclesial culture to produce Christians.
Stanley Hauerwas
#49. I am not convinced that the U.S. is more religious than Britain. Even if more people go to church in America, I think the U.S. is a much more secular country than Britain.
Stanley Hauerwas
#50. Whatever it means to be a Christian, it at least involves the discovery of friends you did not know you had.
Stanley Hauerwas
#51. Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.
Stanley Hauerwas
#52. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#53. I was named Stanley because the week before I was born, my mother and father saw a movie - 'Stanley and Livingstone.'
Stanley Hauerwas
#54. Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.
Stanley Hauerwas
#55. Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world's violence.
Stanley Hauerwas
#56. I'm a happy and productive person. I'm very fortunate; I was born with happy genes. I've got a lot of energy.
Stanley Hauerwas
#57. If what you know no longer matters, the ministry cannot help but be another "helping profession" whose task is to attract people to church because of the appealing personality of the minister and the friendliness of the congregation.
Stanley Hauerwas
#58. God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. There is no God but this God.
Stanley Hauerwas
#59. The idea is that Jesus overcame death through the Resurrection. What that does is fail to appreciate the fact that the resurrected Christ is the crucified Christ. It's not like, 'Oh, that was just a mistake, now it's over.' Jesus continues to suffer from our sins.
Stanley Hauerwas
#60. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#61. Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism.
Stanley Hauerwas
#62. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#63. God knows we are subtle creatures who are more than able to use candour to avoid acknowledging our deceptions of others and ourselves.
Stanley Hauerwas
#64. Advent is patience it's how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience.
Stanley Hauerwas
#65. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#66. The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.
Stanley Hauerwas
#67. In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists.
Stanley Hauerwas
#68. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#69. The fundamental character of our faith means an extensive diversity is required not only within local community, but between communities.
Stanley Hauerwas
#70. From the beginning, Christianity has struggled to sustain the creative tension between the personal appropriation of the gospel and the gospel's universal reach.
Stanley Hauerwas
#71. I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.
Stanley Hauerwas
#72. William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity.
Stanley Hauerwas
#73. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#74. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#75. We are, quite rightly, not interested in the theoretical issue of suffering and evil; rather, we are torn apart by what is happening to real people, to those we know and love.
Stanley Hauerwas
#76. A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they're not trying to escape.
Stanley Hauerwas
#77. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#78. '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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#79. Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.
Stanley Hauerwas
#80. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#81. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#82. I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.
Stanley Hauerwas
#83. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#84. I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill.
Stanley Hauerwas
#85. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#86. The British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are.
Stanley Hauerwas
#87. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#88. I am an enthusiastic participant in a church, but I have never been particularly concerned with denominational identity.
Stanley Hauerwas
#89. We don't fall in love and then get married; instead we get married and then learn what love requires.
Stanley Hauerwas
#90. The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible.
Stanley Hauerwas
#91. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#92. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#93. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#94. I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.
Stanley Hauerwas
#95. 'It is finished' will not be, as we know from the tradition of the ordering of these words from the cross, the last words of Jesus. 'It is finished' is a cry of victory.
Stanley Hauerwas
#96. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#97. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#98. Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic.
Stanley Hauerwas
#99. Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.
Stanley Hauerwas
#100. Our sin is exactly the presumption that we can know God or ourselves through our own capacities.
Stanley Hauerwas
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