Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwasis an American theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual. Hauerwas is 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 coming to Duke, Hauerwas taught at the University of Notre Dame. Hauerwas is considered by many to be one...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTheologian
Date of Birth24 July 1940
CountryUnited States of America
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 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.
The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.
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.
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.