Stanley Hauerwas Quotes

The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is. Cheek-turning is not advocated as what works (it usually does not), but advocated because this is the way God is - God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. This is not a stratagem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not because we feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is doing in the world through Christ.

It’s hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather to make us disciples, citizens of God’s new age, a kingdom of surprise.

Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.

We don't fall in love and then get married; instead we get married and then learn what love requires.

Christianity is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian, but rather Christianity is to have one's body shaped, one's habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.

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.

Only the one true God can take the risk of ruling by relying on the power of humility and love.

Another hallmark of Christianity is that salvation is not individualistic-it's not something one person receives for himself or herself. Salvation is the reign of God. It is a political alternative to the way the world is constituted. That's a very important part of the story that has been lost to accounts of salvation that are centered in the individual. But without an understanding that salvation is the reign of God, the need for the church to mediate salvation makes no sense at all.

The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.

Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.

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.

The courageous have fears that cowards never know.

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.

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.

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.

Whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with 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 basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.

The narratives of Scripture were not meant to describe our world ... but to change the world, including the one in which we now live.

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?

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

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.

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

Advent is patience it's how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience.