Hauerwas Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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. — 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

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

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

I need to be clear. I am not suggesting that the individual wealthy person is dull. Rather I am suggesting that a social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid producing people whose souls are superficial and whose daily lives are captured by sentimentalities. They ask questions like, "Why does a good god let bad things happen to good people?" Such a people cannot imagine what kind of people would write and sing the Psalms. — Stanley Hauerwas

William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity. — 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

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 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

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

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

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

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 world has already been saved from war. The question is how Christians can and should live in a world of war as a people who believe that war has been abolished. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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

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

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

I simply cannot get over what a surprising and wonderful life God has given me, — 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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

No powers determine our lives more completely than those we think we have under our control. I — 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

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

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

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

Such "godlessness" he finds particularly present in the American church, which begins by seeking to faithfully build the world with Christian principles and ends with the total capitulation of the church to the world. Such societies and the churches have no confidence in truth with the result that the place of truth is usurped by sophistic propaganda.[76] — Stanley Hauerwas

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

Christians are nonviolent not, therefore, because we believe that nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but because nonviolence is constitutive of what it means to be a disciple to Jesus. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

My mother had heard the story of Hannah and Samuel, so she prayed that if God would give her a son, she would give that son to God. That was a perfectly appropriate thing for her to do, but as I observe, she did not have to tell me she had made such a promise. In particular, she did not have to tell me when I was six. — 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

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

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

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

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way. — Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

The threat to truth for Christians comes not from the difficulty of developing an unproblematic correspondence theory of truth, but rather from the lies that speak us disguised as truth.[37] Those are the lies Bonhoeffer rightly feared made possible the rise of Hitler, and the ongoing lies necessary to sustain Hitler in power. The failure of the church to oppose Hitler was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world. 3. — Stanley Hauerwas

To know God's name is to know God. — 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

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