Stanley M Hauerwas Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

To know God's name is to know God. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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