Top 60 Stanley Hauerwas Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Advent is patience it’s how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

2. “Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

3. “Our hope in life beyond death is a hope made possible, not by some general sentimental belief in life after death, but by our participation in the life of Christ.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

4. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

5. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

6. “The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

7. “Only the one true God can take the risk of ruling by relying on the power of humility and love.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

8. “We don’t fall in love and then get married; instead we get married and then learn what love requires.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

9. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

10. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

11. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

12. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

13. “No powers determine our lives more completely than those we think we have under our control. I.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

14. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

Featured in: Loyalty Quotes

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

17. “The courageous have fears that cowards never know.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

18. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

19. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

20. “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

21. “If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

22. “The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

23. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

24. “The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

25. “Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

26. “Jesus is Lord’ is not my personal opinion. I take it to be a determinative political claim.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

27. “I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

28. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

29. “Saints cannot exist without a community.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

30. “When you are trying to change the questions, you have to realize that many people are quite resistant to such a change. They like the answers they have.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

31. “From time to time it may find it useful to send out missionaries, but its first missionary task is to be a witness in and to the worlds in which it finds itself. All missionary tasks are in that sense local.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

32. “Mary-born Lord, humble us so that we also might say, “Let it be with me according to your word.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

33. “Whatever it means to be a Christian, it at least involves the discovery of friends you did not know you had.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

34. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

35. “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

36. “We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

37. “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

38. “No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd drive this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It’s just one damn thing after another.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

39. “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.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

40. “When Christianity is assumed to be an “answer” that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

41. “As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option, we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

42. “Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

43. “As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

44. “I need to be clear. I am not suggesting that the individual wealthy person is dull. Rather I am suggesting that a social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid producing people whose souls are superficial and whose daily lives are captured by sentimentalities. They ask questions like, “Why does a good god let bad things happen to good people?” Such a people cannot imagine what kind of people would write and sing the Psalms.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

45. “Rather than helping us to judge our needs, to have the right needs which we exercise in right ways, our society becomes a vast supermarket of desire under the assumption that if we are free enough to assert and to choose whatever we want we can defer eternally the question of what needs are worth having and on what basis right choices are made. What we call “freedom” becomes the tyranny of our own desires.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

46. “I have assumed my clear commitment to a Trinitarian orthodoxy was sufficient evidence that I have not intentionally ignored the role of the Holy Spirit. It may be true, however, that my work has been so Christ-centred, I may have given the impression that the Holy Spirit is an afterthought.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

47. “Jesus is the parable of the Father’s love given to transform us so that we might be drawn into the new creation called the kingdom of God.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

48. “We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

49. “I do not put much stock in “believing in God.” The grammar of “belief” invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. “Belief” implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do.”

— Stanley Hauerwas

50. “Ministers should be the most political of animals because, in contrast to much of what passes as politics in our time, those in the ministry cannot help but be about the formation of a people who can know they need one another to survive. To ask those in the ministry to take seriously your political responsibilities may well entail a radical reorientation of what those in the ministry do. That is particularly true if you believe as I do that we are living at the end of Christendom. Recovering.”

— Stanley Hauerwas