Top 100 Hauerwas Quotes
#1. He doesn't agree with the conventional wisdom that says, "The world changed on September 11." Hauerwas says, "No, the world changed in 33 A.D. The question is how to narrate what happened on September 11 in light of what happened in 33 A.D.
Jim Wallis
#2. Stanley Hauerwas is correct that Judaism insists on the bearing of children because it is essential to Jewish continuity. But to end the matter there is to miss an essential point: if we are to learn to love others, Judaism says, we must begin by loving those who are closest to us.
Meir Soloveichik
#3. 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
#4. Mary-born Lord, humble us so that we also might say, Let it be with me according to your word.
Stanley Hauerwas
#5. All these lies, whether their authors know it or not, harbor an element of violence; organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate, although only totalitarian governments have consciously adopted lying as a first step to murder.[42]
Stanley Hauerwas
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#11. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#12. When love becomes what Christianity is all about, we can make no sense of Jesus's death and resurrection.
Stanley Hauerwas
#13. 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
#14. Ask yourself: if that is what Jesus is all about - that is, getting us to love one another - then why did everyone reject him?
Stanley Hauerwas
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The 'Cold War' impinged on the daily lives of Americans. The wars after 11 September 2001 have been fought without the general American population having to make any sacrifices. It goes on, and so do we.
Stanley Hauerwas
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#26. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#28. 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
#29. It turns out that the God whose word will stand forever does not exist to insure our fantasies that we will not have to die as individuals or as a species. Such a God, moreover, does not invite us to presume we can comprehend God's creation.
Stanley Hauerwas
#30. I do not want to convince Christians to work for the abolition of war, but rather I want us to live recognizing that in the cross of Christ, war has been abolished.
Stanley Hauerwas
#31. 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
#32. Advent is patience it's how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience.
Stanley Hauerwas
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism.
Stanley Hauerwas
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. There is no God but this God.
Stanley Hauerwas
#39. 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
#40. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#41. Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world's violence.
Stanley Hauerwas
#42. 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
#43. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#44. I was named Stanley because the week before I was born, my mother and father saw a movie - 'Stanley and Livingstone.'
Stanley Hauerwas
#45. The church occupies the space he has made so that the world may see what a people look like who are not determined by the destructive fantasy that we can secure our lives through violence.
Stanley Hauerwas
#46. 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
#47. As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option, we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.
Stanley Hauerwas
#48. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#49. Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.
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. 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
#52. I simply cannot get over what a surprising and wonderful life God has given me,
Stanley Hauerwas
#53. We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.
Stanley Hauerwas
#54. 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
#55. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#56. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#57. No powers determine our lives more completely than those we think we have under our control. I
Stanley Hauerwas
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about.
Stanley Hauerwas
#61. 'It is finished' is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work.
Stanley Hauerwas
#62. The heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.
Stanley Hauerwas
#63. War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.
Stanley Hauerwas
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. From time to time it may find it useful to send out missionaries, but its first missionary task is to be a witness in and to the worlds in which it finds itself. All missionary tasks are in that sense local.
Stanley Hauerwas
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#77. 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
Stanley Hauerwas
#78. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#79. I must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually, I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday, period.
Stanley Hauerwas
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.
Stanley Hauerwas
#84. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Many who become theologians in our time think their task is to try to determine how much of what has passed for Christianity they still need to believe and yet still be able to think of themselves as Christians.
Stanley Hauerwas
#89. Let us wait in patience for the Christ-child whose own life depended on the lives of Mary and Joseph. The Word of God was made flesh. He came so that we might experience the fullness of time.
Stanley Hauerwas
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Whatever it means for us to exist, we do so as creatures created, as the universe has been created, to glorify God.
Stanley Hauerwas
#97. Israel knew that there was no greater gift than to be given God's name, but that gift was a frightening reality that threatened to consume her. Israel, who would be tempted by the idolatrous presumption she possessed God's name, rightly never forgot she could not say God's name.
Stanley Hauerwas
#98. 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.
Stanley Hauerwas
#99. 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
#100. 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
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