Stanley Hauerwas Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

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

Stanley Hauerwas
Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.

Stanley Hauerwas
John Howard Yoder makes the striking observation that after the Constantinian shift the meaning of the word "Christian" changes. Prior to Constantine it took exceptional courage to be a Christian. After Constantine it takes exceptional courage not to be counted as a Christian.... After the Constantinian establishment, Christians knew that God was governing the world in Constantine, but they had to take it on faith that within the nominally Christian mass there was a community of true believers. No longer could being a Christian be identified with church membership, since many "Christians" in the church had not chosen to follow Christ. Now to be a Christian is transmuted to "inwardness."

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
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
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
I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.

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
The disciples... are capable of peacemaking because they are sustained by the purity derived from having no other telos but to enact the kingdom embodied in Jesus. Yet such a people may well be persecuted, as Jesus was persecuted, because they are an alternative to the violence of the world that is too often called "peace."

Stanley Hauerwas
Only the one true God can take the risk of ruling by relying on the power of humility and love.

Stanley Hauerwas
I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, though that can be a problem, but that what we say we believe does not seem to make any difference for either the church or the world.

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
We are willing to worship a God only if God makes us safe. Thus you get the silly question, How does a good God let bad things happen to good people? Of course, it was a rabbi who raised that question, but Christians took it up as their own. Have you read the Psalms lately? We're seeing a much more complex God than that question gives credit for.

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

Stanley Hauerwas
For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope... that God has not abandoned this world.

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

Stanley Hauerwas
We 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
Ralph Wood argues quite persuasively that the Christian vision of the world is fundamentally comic. Drawing on the insights of Karl Löwith, Wood observes that because Christians do not, as the ancients did, regard the universe as eternal or divine but as created, comedy is made possible by the acknowledgment of the sheer contingency of all that is.

Stanley Hauerwas
Huebner observes that my use of laugher is my attempt to practice theology in a manner that refuses the attempt to manage the world. In short, my use of laughter is an appropriate theological antidote to the Constantinian desire for control.

Stanley Hauerwas