Stanley Hauerwas quotes

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)
Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
[W]e 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. View quote
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. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
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. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
The Gospel of John makes explicit what all the Gospels assume - that is, the cross is not a defeat, but the victory of our God. View quote
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.”. View quote
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." View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
I do think, in spite of the considerable evidence to the contrary, that theology can and should be, in some of its modes, funny. Theology done right should make you laugh. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend. View quote
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)
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. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
Our hope in life beyond death is a hope made possible, not by some general sentimental belief in life after death, but by our participation in the life of Christ. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen. View quote
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. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Stanley Hauerwas
I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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." View quote
Stanley Hauerwas