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)

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

We are opaque mysteries to ourselves and one another.

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

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.

If what you know no longer matters, the ministry cannot help but be another “helping profession” whose task is to attract people to church because of the appealing personality of the minister and the friendliness of the congregation.

the politics of apocalyptic simply is the existence of a people who refuse to acknowledge the claims of worldly rulers to be kings. 14 Moreover, because the one who is Lord has triumphed on the cross, his followers refuse to use the violence of earthly rulers to achieve what are allegedly good ends.

the question of Christian participation in war turns out to be a question not restricted to “the ethics of war”; instead, it is a question of how Christians can at once say “Jesus is Lord,” the end of all sacrifices, and yet continue to participate in the sacrifice of war.

Barth argues that the command to keep the Sabbath is the command that explains all the other commandments. It does so because the command to observe the Sabbath is the telos for all God’s commands. For the purpose of all we do is nothing less than the glorification of God. Such an understanding of the commandment to observe the Sabbath might be understood as an expression of natural law, but one must remember that the Sabbath has been reconstituted by the resurrection.

Paul’s gospel is centered on “God’s liberating invasion of the cosmos. Christ’s love enacted in the cross has the power to change the world because it is embodied in the new community of mutual service.

There is no way to make the church safe from the world. When the church seeks that kind of place in the world, too often the result is an inverted Christendom. I have little use for purity, but I do pray for a more faithful church. A more faithful church, moreover, would, I suspect, make being a Christian more difficult but also more interesting.

Barth begins his ethics with the Sabbath command. He does so by observing that the command to keep the Sabbath makes clear that we are creatures of time.

H. Richard Niebuhr argued in Christ and Culture that the great problem with the “Christ against culture” type was how advocates of that type understood the “relation of Jesus Christ to the Creator of nature and Governor of history as well as to the Spirit immanent in creation and in the Christian community.” 49 According to Niebuhr, the over-concentration of radical Christians (Tolstoy is his primary example) on the lordship of Christ results in an ontological bifurcation of reality. Their rejection of culture is joined to a suspicion of nature and nature’s God in a manner that obscures the goodness of God’s creation.

God, who has no need for us, no need for heaven and earth, who is sufficient to himself, has willed that the created order exist (pp. 53-54). 22 Creation is, therefore, grace. That there is a world is a miracle. The question, therefore, is never, “Does God exist?” Rather, what should astonish us is that we exist.

The omnipotent grace of God rules all world-occurrence as providence. But it does so from this starting point. It is at work here, in this particular, central sphere of history.

creation was, after all, God’s determinative act of peace. 53 If, therefore, the end is in the beginning, at the very least Christians who justify the Christian participation in war bear the burden of proof.

the Word of God makes its way not by argument but as men and women bear witness to what has happened.

The problem with our society is not that democracy has not worked, but that it has, and the results are less than good.13 We have been freed to pursue happiness and “every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings

we American Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.

the gradual decline of the notion that the church needs some sort of surrounding “Christian” culture to prop it up and mold its young, is not a death to lament. It is an opportunity to celebrate.

Modern interpreters of the faith have tended to let the “modern world” determine the questions and therefore limit the answers. Is it true that the church’s modern problem is the intellectual dilemma posed by Tillich: how to relate the ancient world of the faith to a modern world of disbelief?

Apologetics is based on the political assumption that Christians somehow have a stake in transforming our ecclesial claims into intellectual assumptions that will enable us to be faithful to Christ while still participating in the political structures of a world that does not yet know Christ.

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.

The individual is given a status that makes incomprehensible the Christian notion of salvation as a political, social phenomenon in the family of God.

both the conservative and liberal church, the so-called private and public church, are basically accommodationist (that is, Constantinian) in their social ethic. Both assume wrongly that the American church’s primary social task is to underwrite American democracy.

You know, you have a point,” I said. “What would be a Christian response to this?” Then I answered, right off the top of my head, “A Christian response might be that tomorrow morning The United Methodist Church announces that it is sending a thousand missionaries to Libya. We have discovered that it is fertile field for the gospel. We know how to send missionaries. Here is at least a traditional Christian response.” “You can’t do that,” said my adversary. “Why?” I asked. “You tell me why.” “Because it’s illegal to travel in Libya. President Reagan will not give you a visa to go there.” “No! That’s not right,” I said. “I’ll admit that we can’t go to Libya, but not because of President Reagan. We can’t go there because we no longer have a church that produces people who can do something this bold. But we once did.” 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 confessing church is not a synthesis of the other two approaches, a helpful middle ground. Rather, it is a radical alternative. Rejecting both the individualism of the conversionists and the secularism of the activists and their common equation of what works with what is faithful, the confessing church finds its main political task to lie, not in the personal transformation of individual hearts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation’s determination to worship Christ in all things.

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.

a humility that expresses a more fundamental insecurity isn’t humility.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Sermon on the Mount remains the greatest moral document of all time.6 To justify this claim I want to probe Jesus’ moral vision by comparing Jesus’ Sermon to other moral theorists.7 From Moses to Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas to Luther and Calvin, and then into the modern world of thinkers like Kant and Mill all the way to contemporary moral theorists like Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, and also Oliver O’Donovan and Alasdair MacIntyre, some of the finest thinkers have applied their energies to ethics. How does Jesus fit into that history?8 In the history of discussion about ethics there have been some major proposals, and I want to sketch three of the most important, show how each can be used to explain Jesus, offer critical pushback against each, and then offer what I think is a more helpful approach to understanding the ethics of Jesus.

We may have already seen the end of many churches that bear the name Christian while failing to recognize that we have done so because those churches still seem to be in business. But the business they are in may have only a very accidental relation with Christianity.