“Yet like it or not John changed my life, and I think he ought to be held accountable for that. Reading Yoder made me a pacifist. It did so because John taught me that nonviolence was not just another “moral issue” but constitutes the heart of our worship of a crucified messiah.”
“Barth understood that recovering Christian speech is work and it is a work that the world literally cannot live without. The heart of Barth’s theology is the presumption that if we get God wrong, we get everything wrong: our politics, our science, our art, our very lives”.
“I find it almost beyond belief that the Editors resort to the Niebuhrian distinction between nonviolent resistance and non-resistance in order to silence the pacifist voice.”
“We must bring to an end the disciplinary divisions that invite theologians to say, “I cannot comment on St. Paul’s understanding of the gospel because scripture is not my field.” Indeed the attempt to make theology “objective” through the transformation of theology into a historical discipline must be seen for what it is: a way to separate theology from its source, which is the praise of God. Of course, none of us are capable of knowing all we need to know to do the work of theology, but we must not forget that we know all we need to know to make the work of theology compelling: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.”
“It is rightfully our task to “never forget,” but I think we cannot discharge that task if we never forgive. For without forgiveness our memories are clouded by hate, vengeance, and/or denial. Therefore my call for Christians to learn how to be forgiven – forgiven even for a reality as horrible as the Holocaust – was meant to insure that we do not forget what happened there”
Video of “Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana: Schooling the Heart in the Heart of Texas”-Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University. Keynote address at the 2003 Pruit Memorial Symposium, “The Schooled Heart: Moral Formation in American Higher Education.” (01:38:52)
“The God that is called forward to God Bless America is not the God of Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t think our sexual ethics need to be reworked; I think we need to live them”.
“I say I’m a pacifist because I’m a violent son of a bitch. I’m a Texan. I can feel it in every bone I’ve got. And I hate the language of pacifism because it’s too passive,” he says. “But by avowing it, I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what I know is true but that I have no confidence in my own ability to live it at all”.
