“Witham has managed the impossible: to tell a coherent story about the diverse and often eccentric Gifford Lectures from their beginning in 1888 to the present. Telling this story involves not only reading the lectures, but also knowing the social, political and intellectual background of the various lecturers”
“Parish clergy and seminarians today seem content to have ministry numbered among the “helping professions. ” After all, most professing Christians, from the liberals to the fundamentalists, remain practical atheists. They think the church is sustained by the services it provides or the amount of fellowship and good feeling in the congregation. This form of sentimentality has become the most detrimental corruption of the church and the ministry”.
“I did not become an ethicist because my primary interest was social change or particular moral “issues.” Rather, I became an ethicist because I was (and am) interested in the intellectual issues associated with the truthfulness of Christian discourse.”
“Rather, it is a mistake to follow the way the report invites us to think about human sexuality because it, like a great deal of Protestant and secular thought, assumes that the basis for any ethics of sex involves an interpretation of “wholesome interpersonal relations.” The dominant assumption has been that the evaluation of different kinds of sexual expressions should center on whether they are or are not expressive of love. On the contrary, the ethics of sex must begin with political considerations, because ethically the issue of the proper form of sexual activity raises the most profound issues about the nature and form of political community. I am not denying that sex obviously has to do with interpersonal matters, but I am asserting that we do not even know what we need to say about the personal level until we have some sense of the political context necessary for the ordering of sexual activity”.
“I am genuinely unsure how my mind has changed over the 22 years I have been teaching and writing.”
“The church seems caught in an irresolvable tension today. Insofar as we are able to maintain any presence in modern society we do so by being communities of care. Any attempt to be a disciplined and disciplining community seems antithetical to being a community of care. As a result the care the church gives, while often quite impressive and compassionate, lacks the rationale to build the church as a community capable of standing against the powers we confront”.
“Yoder may well help us to use the remaining resources of that tradition to help Christians rediscover ways to serve our non-Christian brothers and sisters by being unwavering in our commitment to the politics of Jesus”.
“Abortion is not some little mistake. Abortion is a reflection of who Americans are: People in the United States are supposed to concentrate on themselves and pursue happiness; thus, they ask themselves, “Why should we bother having children?””
“His admonishing voice may grate, and we may wish he would clean up his language, but in this age we need to listen to whatever voice is available to us telling the truth that needs to be heard, particularly if we want to resolutely avoid hearing it.”
“I wanted to read that sermon because I suspect that most of you ministers have not preached about abortion. You have not preached about abortion because you have not had the slightest idea about how to do it in a way that would not make everyone in your congregation mad. And the reason that you have not known how to preach a sermon on abortion is that you thought that you would have to take up the terms that are given by the wider society.”
![Ministry As More Than A Helping Profession [with Will Willimon]. (Hauerwas, 1989)](https://www.theologyethics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/hauerwasbw1.jpg)