Stanley Hauerwas Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they're not trying to escape.”

“I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.”

“To be a Christian means you become a part of the most significant story the world has ever heard. You don't become part of that without an ongoing questioning of what it means to become part of that.”

“'It is finished' is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work.”

“At least one reason for trying to live lives that make a difference is that by so living, we hope we will not be forgotten by those who benefit from our trying to make a difference. Yet to try to insure we will not be forgotten too often results in desperate manipulative strategies that are doomed to fail.”

“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 very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology.”

“There's an inclination to get on the inside of Jesus' psyche, and I think that's a deep mistake because it assumes that what you have here is someone analogous to us.”

“Our sin is exactly the presumption that we can know God or ourselves through our own capacities.”