198 Quotes by Stanley Hauerwas

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

America is Rome, by which I mean we are a country that is so powerful that we can do what we want to do to other people and not fear the consequences. Americans are extremely frightened to live in a world in which we are so powerful, which is why we’ll go to any length to make ourselves feel safe. So America has gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I fear your generation will harvest the result.

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.