Stanley Hauerwas
Jesus made the final sacrifice for all, and we need not make it again.
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.
I am not sure how old I was when I began to worry about being saved, but it was sometime in my early teens.
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.
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.
Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.
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.
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.
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.
I am not convinced that the U.S. is more religious than Britain. Even if more people go to church in America, I think the U.S. is a much more secular country than Britain.
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.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Creative
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.Collection: Jesus
Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.Collection: Jesus
We don't fall in love and then get married; instead we get married and then learn what love requires.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Thinking
Only the one true God can take the risk of ruling by relying on the power of humility and love.Collection: Humility
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.Collection: Political
The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.Collection: Religion
The courageous have fears that cowards never know.Collection: Coward
Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.Collection: Church Growth
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Loyalty
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Triumph
The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.Collection: 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.Collection: Our World
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?Collection: Prayer
The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.Collection: Keys
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.Collection: People
I simply cannot get over what a surprising and wonderful life God has given me.Collection: Wonderful
No powers determine our lives more completely than those we think we have under our control. ICollection: Thinking
[W]e must first experience the kingdom if we are even to know what kind of freedom and what kind of equality we should desire. Christian freedom lies in service, Christian equality is equality before God, and neither can be achieved through the coercive efforts of liberal idealists who would transform the world into their image.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Jesus
Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about.Collection: Christian
If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.Collection: Thinking
Saints cannot exist without a communityCollection: Community
The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Jobs
From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical "I gotcha!" It is often an attempt to kill or wound others.Collection: Suicide
Consider the problem of taking showers with Christians. They are, after all, constantly going on about the business of witnessing in the hopes of making converts to their God and church. Would you want to shower with such people? You never know when they might try to baptize you.Collection: Christian