Stanley Hauerwas Quotes

Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.

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.

Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.

The courageous have fears that cowards never know.

The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.

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.

As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option, we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.

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.

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

Peace is a deeper reality than violence." p. 231

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.

The problem is that many people treat morality as a list of rules. But in reality, every moral system rests on a worldview. In every decision we make, we are not just deciding what we want to do. We are expressing our view of the purpose of human life. In the words of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, a moral act “cannot be seen as just an isolated act, but involves fundamental options about the nature and significance of life itself.

A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities. They will ask questions like “why does a good God let bad things happen to good people ” such people cannot imagine that a people once existed who produced and sang the psalms. If we learn to say “God ” we will do so with the prayer “My God my God why have you forsaken me?

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

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.

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.

The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do.

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.

The church occupies the space he has made so that the world may see what a people look like who are not determined by the destructive fantasy that we can secure our lives through violence.

A Christian marriage isn’t about whether you’re in love. Christian marriage is giving you the practice of fidelity over a lifetime in which you can look back upon the marriage and call it love. It is a hard discipline over many years. (Duke Magazine Article, "Faith Fires Back," 2002)

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

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

When you are trying to change the questions, you have to realize that many people are quite resistant to such a change. They like the answers they have.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues that to truly learn a story, we can’t just hear it. We must also act it out. In our worship—and Hauerwas specifically cites the practices of baptism and communion—we act out the story of the gospel with and through our bodies.

The Christian answer to this is that no two people are compatible. Duke University ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas has famously made this point:   Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is . . . learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.40

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, named “America’s best theologian” by Time magazine, summed up the problem: “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.

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.

The church… stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.

North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation.

Luther would have agreed with Stanley Hauerwas’s observation, that “to be able to confess one’s sin is a theological achievement.

Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.

We believe that many Christians do not fully appreciate the odd way in which the church, when it is most faithful, goes about its business. We want to claim the church's "oddness" as essential to its faithfulness.

The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.

I need to be clear. I am not suggesting that the individual wealthy person is dull. Rather I am suggesting that a social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid producing people whose souls are superficial and whose daily lives are captured by sentimentalities. They ask questions like, “Why does a good god let bad things happen to good people?” Such a people cannot imagine what kind of people would write and sing the Psalms.

Transformation has to do with the way the walls separating us from others and from our deepest self begin to disappear. Between all of us fragile human beings stand walls built on loneliness and the absence of God, walls built on fear fear that becomes depression or a compulsion to prove that we are special.

Stanley Hauerwas explains his love for praying “other people’s prayers”: “Evangelicalism,” he says, “is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired.” He calls himself an advocate for practicing prayer offices because, We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join in reading of the psalm. We’re going to have these Scripture readings. . . . There’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition and I think evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.

Jesus is the parable of the Father's love given to transform us so that we might be drawn into the new creation called the kingdom of God.

We are, quite rightly, not interested in the theoretical issue of suffering and evil; rather, we are torn apart by what is happening to real people, to those we know and love.

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

God knows why God has made some of us ecclesiastically homeless, but I hope and pray that our being so may be in service to Christian unity.

Jesus is Lord' is not my personal opinion. I take it to be a determinative political claim.

The church is in a buyer’s market that makes any attempt to form a disciplined congregational life very difficult.

Stanley Hauerwas, named “America’s best theologian” by Time magazine, summed up the problem: “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.” When a poll of college students asked,

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.

When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be.

There are three activities that are absolutely vital in the creation of community. The first is eating together around the same table. The second is praying together. And the third is celebrating together.

From time to time it may find it useful to send out missionaries, but its first missionary task is to be a witness in and to the worlds in which it finds itself. All missionary tasks are in that sense local.

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.

The rules of grammar come later, if at all, as a way of enabling you to nourish and sustain the art of speaking well. Ethics, as an academic discipline, is simply the task of assembling reminders that enable us to remember how to speak and to live the language of the gospel. Ethics can never take the place of community any more than rules of grammar can replace the act of speaking the language. Ethics is always a secondary enterprise and is parasitic to the way people live together in a community.

Our joy is the simple willingness to live with the assurance of God’s redemption. … joy is the disposition that comes from our readiness always to be surprised; or put even more strongly, joy is the disposition that comes from our realization that we can trust in surprises for the sustaining of our lives.

Free is not how many of our citizens feel—with our overstocked medicine cabinets, burglar alarms, vast ghettos, and drug culture. Eighteen hundred New Yorkers are murdered every year by their fellow citizens in a city whose police department is larger than the standing army of many nations. The adventure went sour.

We think it is really very simple: Jesus had to die because we needed and need to be forgiven. But, ironically, such a focus shifts attention from Jesus to us. This is a fatal turn, I fear, because as soon as we begin to think this is all about us, about our need for forgiveness, bathos drapes the cross, hiding from us the reality that here we first and foremost see God. Moreover,

America is Rome, by which I mean we are a country that is so powerful that we can do what we want to do to other people and not fear the consequences. Americans are extremely frightened to live in a world in which we are so powerful, which is why we’ll go to any length to make ourselves feel safe. So America has gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I fear your generation will harvest the result.

Rather than helping us to judge our needs, to have the right needs which we exercise in right ways, our society becomes a vast supermarket of desire under the assumption that if we are free enough to assert and to choose whatever we want we can defer eternally the question of what needs are worth having and on what basis right choices are made. What we call “freedom” becomes the tyranny of our own desires.

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.

Ministers should be the most political of animals because, in contrast to much of what passes as politics in our time, those in the ministry cannot help but be about the formation of a people who can know they need one another to survive. To ask those in the ministry to take seriously your political responsibilities may well entail a radical reorientation of what those in the ministry do. That is particularly true if you believe as I do that we are living at the end of Christendom. Recovering

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.

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.

Theology is best done in the context of the Church at worship and as reflection on Scripture.

Stanley Hauerwas has observed that the most basic job of the church is just to be the church—to embody a different way of being that arises from following the radical Rabbi from Nazareth who managed to get himself executed on a cross outside the city walls.[32] The twin temptations to either shortcut the process by too heavily relying on legislation or to withdraw into sectarianism should not be underestimated. Maintaining a position that allows the church primarily to be the church while still offering a critique to the political institutions is difficult. It is, however, critical for our best serving a kingdom agenda at all levels of human interaction—public and private. The role of the church is to just be the church, but in so doing the church should both embody and speak critique to the powers that have been corrupted and no longer serve a kingdom agenda.

It is the church’s responsibility as a whole to engage in biblical interpretation. Despite people believing they have a right to do this and that, individuals do not interpret scripture for themselves. The Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, combined with the powers and principalities’ ability to affect translation and the Western secular frame, and our insistent deferral to the common person’s common sense is challenged by God’s narrative as understood by the church. Following Stanley Hauerwas, I believe in a community that is under authority; such authorities within the ecclesiastical tradition must be listened to, if we are to mine the depths of scripture and invoke God’s social imaginary and engage the powers and principalities of this world.5 It

First, we are not starting from nowhere, reading the New Testament as though it had just been found sealed in a cave; we are the heirs of a community that has been reading and performing these texts for nineteen hundred years already. Our interpretation will be our own, just as a new performance of King Lear (Lash’s example) will be a fresh product of the skills and sensibilities of the actors, but our interpretation will also stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. We can point to prior performances that illuminate the meaning of the text. As Stanley Hauerwas is fond of saying, “The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.

To live in the light of the resurrection is to refuse to use the powers that crucified Jesus in the name of achieving justice. Thus the sentence, “Christians are called to be nonviolent not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to make war less likely, but because in a world of war, as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent; it is a nonviolence, moreover, that may make the world more violent because the world will use violence rather than have the order it calls peace exposed as violence.

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.

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.

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.

In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists.

The understanding of time and place that L'Arche represents, which is a challenge to the speed and placelessness of modernity, helps us understand part of the problem we face as the church today. Having lost the power and status we had in societies we thought we had Christianized, we Christians now find ourselves most often on the wrong side of the "progressive" forces of human history. In response, many Christians want to identify with the alleged humanisms produced by speed and placelessness. So the church finds herself saying constantly, "Oh, yes, we support that too! Oh, yes, we think these developments are wonderful." Who can be against knowing more and more about the genome in order to help us become well before we become sick? It's a deep temptation for the church to say, "Hey, we're on the side of historical progress, too!" Of course, if you say that L'Arche knows it cannot welcome everyone who has a mental handicap and seeks to offer not a solution but a sign, that doesn't sound like good news in a world built on speed and placelessness. The question then becomes, "Well, does that mean you are against trying to cure cancer?" After all, "progress" we assume means eliminating what threatens to kill us or at least slow us down. But you can cure cancer without eliminating the patient. You cannot "cure" the mentally handicapped without eliminating the patient. L'Arche stands as a reminder that "progress" should not mean eliminating all that threatens us. After all, even if you cure cancer, you are going to die of some other ailment. L'Arche dares in the face of death and by so doing transforms what we mean by "progress.

The problem with most pastors and theologians was that the way they went about their business did not require the existence of God.

To be a Christian means you do not have to marry or have a child. The church is constituted by a people who grow through witness and conversion, not through biological ascription. A church in which the single rather than the married bear the burden of proof is one that inexorably legitimates violence in the name of protecting "our" children from those who think they need to kill to protect "their" children. The problem is not children, but the possessive pronouns

We are opaque mysteries to ourselves and one another.

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, Hannah’s Child

Jonathan Tran, in the traditions of Paul Ricoeur and Stanley Hauerwas, has written about how God’s forgiveness and restoration of the world within salvation history changes the way we understand our own narratives. He writes that “we tell our stories within the story of God’s self-giving forgiveness,” for God’s forgiveness is in fact a renarration, a putting of our stories within God’s story: and “when God forgives, he re-narrates our stories . . . for restoration” with an eschatological goal in mind.[

Hear these words, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” and know that the Son of God has taken our place, become for us the abandonment our sin produces, so that we may live confident that the world has been redeemed by this cross. So

The new Christian is engrafted into a family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant fifteen-yearold, “Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.” Rather, it is our problem. We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be.

While we may be able to pray without being prostrate, I think prayer as an institution of the church could not longer be sustained without a people who have first learned to kneel. If one wants to learn to pray, one had better know how to bend the body. Learning the gesture and posture of prayer is inseparable from learning to pray. Indeed, the gestures are prayer.

America is Rome, by which I mean we are a country that is so powerful that we can do what we want to do to other people and not fear the consequences.

When the trust that truth makes possible is lost, our lives cannot help but be captured by forms of violence—violence often disguised as order and, for that reason, not recognized for the lie that is at its heart. That’s why any peace that isn’t truthful is cursed.

For what is friendship but the discovery that I don’t want to tell my story—can’t tell my story—without your story?

That baseball is the great American sport indicates that there is hope even for America. Americans pride themselves on speed, but speed is often just another name for violence.

Even when you’re critical of the use of American power, it’s still hard to learn to resist identifying with such a powerful country. One can’t help but be tempted to believe that the problem is not having so much power but the uses to which that power is put. You may find it almost impossible to resist the thought that your task is to make the power of America serve the good.

in order to know and worship God rightly we must have our desires transformed. They must be transformed—we must be trained to desire rightly—because, bent by sin, we have little sense of what it is that we should rightly want.

Christians worship at the church of martyrs; they seek fellowship with the crucified Lord. Being a Christian is not about being safe, but about challenging the status quo in ways that cannot help but put you in danger. Thinking it possible to be safe in a world where Christians are sent out like sheep among wolves is about as unfortunate an idea as thinking that war is necessary to secure peace.

This is to say that while voting and lobbying and marching and sheltering are all political, more basically political is the gathered body of Christ.

At its inception and in its best moments, the church as Christ’s body offered the world communion where there was previously animosity, ploughshares and pruning hooks from swords and spears, the peaceable kingdom come alive. The church not only welcomes the stranger, but is the stranger, constituted as she is entirely by migrants, herself a migrant through the world.

Why? Because Jesus doesn’t “do” ethics the way many want him to do them. You can squeeze some texts all you want, but Jesus doesn’t say, “First grace, then obedience.” He dives right in. There may be—indeed is—a reason Jesus simply dove in. Stanley Hauerwas recognizes that Jesus’ new wine doesn’t fit into the ethical-theory wineskins: “Virtue may be its own reward, but for Christians the virtues, the kind of virtues suggested by the Beatitudes, are names for the shared life made possible through Christ.”18 Or later, “Yet Christians are not called to be virtuous. We are called to be disciples.”19

We often lie because as prideful beings we don’t want our limits exposed.

To treat everyone “the same,” for example, can result in deep injustice. Justice requires an ability to see differences for the difference they should make.

Aristotle even suggests that those who go to excessive lengths trying to raise laughs are acting like “vulgar buffoon[s].

Simplicity is best understood as the virtue characteristic of those who don’t have to try to be what they are.

The virtues are, so to speak, pulled out of us by our loves. That’s why it’s natural for us to be kind—because we were created to be so.

Virtue names the ways good habits become inscribed on our character by steering between excess and defect.

Sentimentality is the greater enemy of the life of virtue just to the extent that sentimentality names the assumption that we can be kind without being truthful.

In our opinion, such solutions only waltz around the symptoms rather than get to the source of the problem. The pastoral ministry is too adventuresome and demanding to be sustained by trivial, psychological self-improvement advice. What pastors, as well as the laity they serve, need is a theological rationale for ministry which is so cosmic, so eschatological and therefore countercultural, that they are enabled to keep at Christian ministry in a world determined to live as if God were dead. Anything less misreads both the scandal of the gospel and the corruption of our culture.

The church is the visible, political enactment of our language of God by a people who can name their sin and accept God’s forgiveness and are thereby enabled to speak the truth in love.

Any kingdom that defines glory in terms of a bloody cross is obviously peculiar. — Stanley Hauerwas

Stanley Hauerwas once quipped, “Friday night high school football is the most significant liturgical event in Texas.

For the Christian seeks neither autonomy nor independence, but rather to be faithful to the way that manifests the conviction that we belong to another. Thus Christians learn to describe their lives as a gift rather than an achievement.