Stanley Hauerwas Quotes
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The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.
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Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.
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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.
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Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.
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The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.
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The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.
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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.
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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.
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The narratives of Scripture were not meant to describe our world ... but to change the world, including the one in which we now live.
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Only the one true God can take the risk of ruling by relying on the power of humility and love.
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If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.
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The courageous have fears that cowards never know.
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We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.
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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.
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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.