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. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. There is no God but this God. – Stanley Hauerwas
Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism. – Stanley Hauerwas
Let us wait in patience for the Christ-child whose own life depended on the lives of Mary and Joseph. The Word of God was made flesh. He came so that we might experience the fullness of time. – Stanley Hauerwas
Ask yourself: if that is what Jesus is all about – that is, getting us to love one another – then why did everyone reject him? – Stanley Hauerwas
I was named Stanley because the week before I was born, my mother and father saw a movie – ‘Stanley and Livingstone.’ – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church. – Stanley Hauerwas
Whatever it means for us to exist, we do so as creatures created, as the universe has been created, to glorify God. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
By the time I had got to college, I had begun to read and had decided that most of what Christians believed could not be credible. So I became a philosophy major at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. – Stanley Hauerwas
I am an enthusiastic participant in a church, but I have never been particularly concerned with denominational identity. – Stanley Hauerwas
The problem with the U.S. foreign policy is that we’re just so unbelievably powerful. And when you’ve got that kind of power, it’s very hard not to use it. – Stanley Hauerwas
Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic. – Stanley Hauerwas
I really have lived in books. Books are friends. They are some of the friends that make you who you are. – Stanley Hauerwas
Part of what my work has always been about is to show that the apocalyptic character of the gospel makes the everyday possible. It gives us the time that lets us care for one another as we are ill, helps us care for one another as we experience broken relationships, and helps us take the time to worship God in a world of such violence. – Stanley Hauerwas
‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war. – 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. – 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. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
One of the problems we currently have is there hasn’t been in the population any serious engagement with the ethics of war because we have an all-volunteer army. I would think the return to the draft would be an intervention that would require discussion that might be more helpful in terms of our ability to limit war. – Stanley Hauerwas
The British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are. – Stanley Hauerwas
‘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. – Stanley Hauerwas
I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism. – Stanley Hauerwas
Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone’s enemies – sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian. – Stanley Hauerwas
The heart of the gospel is that you don’t know Jesus without the witness of the church. It’s always mediated. – Stanley Hauerwas
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. – Stanley Hauerwas
