Stanley Hauerwas Quotes & Sayings

You learn who you are only by making yourself accountable to the judgment of others. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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 — Stanley Hauerwas

[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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever it means for us to exist, we do so as creatures created, as the universe has been created, to glorify God. — Stanley Hauerwas

I am an enthusiastic participant in a church, but I have never been particularly concerned with denominational identity. — Stanley Hauerwas

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

Ministers should be the most political of animals because, in contrast to much of what passes as politics in our time, those in the ministry cannot help but be about the formation of a people who can know they need one another to survive. To ask those in the ministry to take seriously your political responsibilities may well entail a radical reorientation of what those in the ministry do. That is particularly true if you believe as I do that we are living at the end of Christendom. Recovering — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs. — Stanley Hauerwas

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

The very fact that we find it hard to conceive of an alternative to limitless economic growth is an indication of our spiritual condition. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

We don't fall in love and then get married; instead we get married and then learn what love requires. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they're not trying to escape. — Stanley Hauerwas

I was named Stanley because the week before I was born, my mother and father saw a movie - 'Stanley and Livingstone.' — Stanley Hauerwas

That which makes the church "radical" and forever "new" is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. In the church's view, the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend towards solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus. — Stanley Hauerwas

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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

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

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

God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. There is no God but this God. — Stanley Hauerwas

Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess. — Stanley Hauerwas

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

When love becomes what Christianity is all about, we can make no sense of Jesus's death and resurrection. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

On the other hand, activist Christians who talk much about justice promote a notion of justice that envisions a society in which faith in God is rendered quite unnecessary, since everybody already believes in peace and justice even when everybody does not believe in God. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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? — Stanley Hauerwas

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

The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God's eternal yes to humanity, God's remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

Christian salvation consists in works. To be saved is to be made holy. To be saved requires our being made part of a people separated from the world so that we can be united in spite of - or perhaps better, because of - the world's fragmentation and divisions. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

The courageous have fears that cowards never know. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least one reason for trying to live lives that make a difference is that by so living, we hope we will not be forgotten by those who benefit from our trying to make a difference. Yet to try to insure we will not be forgotten too often results in desperate manipulative strategies that are doomed to fail. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

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, — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

First of all, it's friendship with God that makes possible friendship with one another in a manner that is not that we just like one another, but that were are joined by common judgments, by God, for the good of God's church. Such friendship occurs not by trying to be each other's friend, but by discovering you were engaged in common good work that is so determinative, you cannot live without one another. Now, if the church is that, it will talk about friendship in a way that avoids the superficiality of the language of relationship. Because relationships are meant to be spontaneous and short. Friendship, if it is the friendship of God, is to be characterized by fidelity in which you are even willing to tell the friend the truth. Which may mean you will risk the friendship. You need to be in that kind of community to survive the loneliness that threatens all of our souls. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

Advent is patience it's how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

Our sin is exactly the presumption that we can know God or ourselves through our own capacities. — Stanley Hauerwas