Top 70 Stanley Hauerwas Quotes

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

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.

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.

Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world’s violence.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

My way of putting it is that Christians are called to live nonviolently not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but in a world of war as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent.

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.

I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.

It turns out that the God whose word will stand forever does not exist to insure our fantasies that we will not have to die as individuals or as a species. Such a God, moreover, does not invite us to presume we can comprehend God’s creation.

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.

I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame.

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.

Though the world may often appear to be more charitable than the church, it is crucial to remember that, for the church, the care of the poor cannot be separated from the worship of God.

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.

I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

From my perspective, ‘postmodernism’ merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Time is a gift and a threat because we are bodily creatures. We only come into existence through the bodies of others, but that very body destines us to death. We must be born and we must die.

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.

Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection.

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.

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.

Ask yourself: if that is what Jesus is all about – that is, getting us to love one another – then why did everyone reject him?

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.

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.

I think no one knows what humanitarian intervention means. If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.

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.

Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.

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

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.

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.

‘It is finished’ is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work.

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.

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.

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.