Top 75 Stanley Hauerwas Quotes

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

The fundamental character of our faith means an extensive diversity is required not only within local community, but between communities.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Christians are nonviolent not, therefore, because we believe that nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but because nonviolence is constitutive of what it means to be a disciple to Jesus.

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.

I was named Stanley because the week before I was born, my mother and father saw a movie – ‘Stanley and Livingstone.’

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.

The fact that monasticism preceded the identification of greed as a primal sin is an important reminder that our very ability to name sin is a theological achievement.

America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity.

To be a Christian means you become a part of the most significant story the world has ever heard. You don’t become part of that without an ongoing questioning of what it means to become part of that.

I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.

Let me be clear: I am a Methodist. By that, I mean I think John Wesley was a recovery of Catholic Christianity through disciplined congregational life.

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

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.

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.

I think it is a mistake to focus – as we most often do – only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill.

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.

Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.

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.

I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs.

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 Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible.

To be a Christian is to be obligated to be charitable. This is true whether you are rich or poor, healthy or ill, old or young, male or female, oppressed or free, established or disestablished.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

There is nothing wrong with making money, but it was just not in my family‘s habits to know how to do that. All we knew how to do was work, and we usually liked the work we did.

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

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

I should like to think how we write as theologians would reflect our confidence in the One who makes that writing possible. That is one of the reasons, moreover, that the scriptures remain paradigmatic for how we are to write.

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.

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

The very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology.

‘It is finished’ will not be, as we know from the tradition of the ordering of these words from the cross, the last words of Jesus. ‘It is finished’ is a cry of victory.

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.

There’s an inclination to get on the inside of Jesus’ psyche, and I think that’s a deep mistake because it assumes that what you have here is someone analogous to us.

The very fact that we find it hard to conceive of an alternative to limitless economic growth is an indication of our spiritual condition.

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.

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

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.

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 world has already been saved from war. The question is how Christians can and should live in a world of war as a people who believe that war has been abolished.

War is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.

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.

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 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.

To know God’s name is to know God.

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

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.

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.

Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 sure how old I was when I began to worry about being saved, but it was sometime in my early teens.

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

I’m a happy and productive person. I’m very fortunate; I was born with happy genes. I’ve got a lot of energy.

We, like the people of Israel, would like to think we get to name God. By naming God, we hope to get the kind of god we need; that is, a god after our own likeness.

The British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are.

The mentally ill may have shattered lives, but how that is different than the way sin distorts our ability to comprehend who we are as God’s creatures is not clear.