Quotes from 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.

Christians are nonviolent not, therefore, because we believe that nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but because nonviolence is constitutive of what it means to be a disciple to Jesus.

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.

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.

I cannot imagine a more realistic faith than the Christian faith. At every turn, we are told we are death-determined creatures and that our lives, our all too brief lives, at the very least will be complex if not difficult.

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.

Time is a gift and a threat because we are bodily creatures. We only come into existence through the bodies of others, but that very body destines us to death. We must be born and we must die.

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.

Israel knew that there was no greater gift than to be given God's name, but that gift was a frightening reality that threatened to consume her. Israel, who would be tempted by the idolatrous presumption she possessed God's name, rightly never forgot she could not say God's name.

The god most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I do not want to convince Christians to work for the abolition of war, but rather I want us to live recognizing that in the cross of Christ, war has been abolished.

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.

Ask yourself: if that is what Jesus is all about - that is, getting us to love one another - then why did everyone reject him?

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

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.

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.

Though the world may often appear to be more charitable than the church, it is crucial to remember that, for the church, the care of the poor cannot be separated from the worship of God.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fundamental character of our faith means an extensive diversity is required not only within local community, but between communities.

Being a Christian has not and does not come naturally or easy for me. I take that to be a good thing because I am sure that to be a Christian requires training that lasts a lifetime.