Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Stanley Hauerwas

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American theologian Stanley Hauerwas.

Last updated on November 27, 2024.

Stanley Martin Hauerwas is an American theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual. Hauerwas was a longtime professor at Duke University, serving as the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law. In the fall of 2014, he also assumed a chair in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Before moving to Duke and the University of Aberdeen, Hauerwas taught at the University of Notre Dame. Hauerwas is considered by many to be one of the world's most influential living theologians and was named "America's Best Theologian" by Time magazine in 2001. He was also the first American theologian to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in over forty years. His work is frequently read and debated by scholars in fields outside of religion or ethics, such as political philosophy, sociology, history, and literary theory. Hauerwas has achieved notability outside of academia as a public intellectual, even appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

American - Theologian | Born: July 24, 1940

Source: Wikipedia

In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.

Stanley Hauerwas

Many who become theologians in our time think their task is to try to determine how much of what has passed for Christianity they still need to believe and yet still be able to think of themselves as Christians.

Stanley Hauerwas

One of the problems with the identification of Christianity with love is how such a view turns out to be both anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. The Jews and Catholics become identified with the law or dogma, in contrast to Protestant Christians, who are about love.

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

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

I am not sure how old I was when I began to worry about being saved, but it was sometime in my early teens.

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

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

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

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

Stanley Hauerwas

Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.

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

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

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

Stanley Hauerwas

Christians need jobs just like anybody else, but the years you spend as an undergraduate are like everything else in your life. They're not yours to do with as you please. They're Christ's.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

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

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

Stanley Hauerwas

We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God's free grace.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

Stanley Hauerwas

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

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

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

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

Stanley Hauerwas

To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don't understand Islam to be a church.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

Stanley Hauerwas

My mother desperately wanted children. She had a child that was stillborn - something I learned when I was looking through her 'effects' after she had died. It was then that I discovered my original birth certificate, which indicated the previous birth.

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

My mother had heard the story of Hannah and Samuel, so she prayed that if God would give her a son, she would give that son to God. That was a perfectly appropriate thing for her to do, but as I observe, she did not have to tell me she had made such a promise. In particular, she did not have to tell me when I was six.

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

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

My way of putting it is that Christians are called to live nonviolently not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but in a world of war as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent.

Stanley Hauerwas

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.

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

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.

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

Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Stanley Hauerwas

Related Authors