Stanley Hauerwas

From Wikiquote

Stanley Hauerwas (born July 24, 1940) is a Christian theologian and ethicist. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame and is currently the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law.

[edit] Sourced

• "We are willing to worship a God only if God makes us safe. Thus you get the silly question, How does a good God let bad things happen to good people? Of course, it was a rabbi who raised that question, but Christians took it up as their own. Have you read the Psalms lately? We're seeing a much more complex God than that question gives credit for."
  • From the Chronicle for Higher Education, The Chronicle Review, "A Complex God" September 28, 2001 The Chronicle Review Page: B6

• "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."
  • From "Why Gays (as a Group) are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)" in The Hauerwas Reader (2001) eds. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright

• "[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."
  • From "The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics" (1983) in The Hauerwas Reader (2001) eds. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright

• "Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about."
  • From "Abortion, Critically Understood" (1990) at lifewatch.org [1]

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• "One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend."

• "Sentimentality, not atheism, is the greatest enemy of the Church."

• "Nonviolence is a way of life for Christians. If that community produces people whose stories it remembers, it calls them martyrs, not heroes"

• "I had a colleague at the University of Notre Dame who taught Judaica. He was Jewish and always said that any religion that does not tell you what to do with your genitals and pots and pans cannot be interesting. That is exactly true. In the church we tell you what you can and cannot do with your genitals. They are not your own. They are not private. That means that you cannot commit adultery. If you do, you are no longer a member of "us." Of course pots and pans are equally important…"

• "I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better--a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill."

[edit] External links

• Hauerwas Reading Room Online Resources on and by Stanley Hauerwas. Maintained by Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, PhD, Tyndale Seminary