Stanley Hauerwas

Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs.

My way of putting it is that Christians are called to live nonviolently not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but in a world of war as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent.

Advent is patience it's how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience.

War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.

To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.

The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

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.

Christian salvation consists in works. To be saved is to be made holy. To be saved requires our being made part of a people separated from the world so that we can be united in spite of - or perhaps better, because of - the world's fragmentation and divisions.

Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection.

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.

I have no doubt that for some to become a Christian may involve an experience of ecstasy. Yet I do not think such an experience is necessary for someone to be a Christian.

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.

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.

The courageous have fears that cowards never know.

Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.

One of the challenges Christians confront is how the politics we helped create has made it difficult to sustain the material practices constitutive of an ecclesial culture to produce Christians.

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

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.

To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.