Stanley Hauerwas Quotes

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

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

The Church really does not know what [peace and justice] mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Pilate permitted the killing of Jesus in order to secure both peace and justice (Roman style) in Judea.

~ Stanley Hauerwas

For example, when Christians discuss sex, it often sounds as if we are somehow against sex. What we fail to make clear is that sexual passion (the good gifts of God's creation) is now subservient to the demanding business of maintaining a revolutionary community in a world that often uses sex as a means of momentarily anesthetizing or distracting people from the basic vacuity of their lives. When the only contemporary means of self-transcendence is orgasm, we Christians are going to have a tough time convincing people that it would be nicer if they were not promiscuous.

~ 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 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

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

~ 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

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

~ Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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

Peace is a deeper reality than violence.p. 231

~ Stanley Hauerwas

The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.

~ 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

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

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

~ Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

~ Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

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

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