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.
— Stanley Hauerwas
Jesus is the politics of the new age; He is about the establishment of a kingdom; He is the one who has created a new time that gives us the time not only to care for the poor but to be poor. Jesus is the one who makes it possible to be nonviolent in a violent world.
One of the problems with the identification of Christianity with love is how such a view turns out to be both anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. The Jews and Catholics become identified with the law or dogma, in contrast to Protestant Christians, who are about love.
Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.
War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.
I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.
I am an enthusiastic participant in a church, but I have never been particularly concerned with denominational identity.
The British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are.
I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame.
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 named Stanley because the week before I was born, my mother and father saw a movie - 'Stanley and Livingstone.'
I am not sure how old I was when I began to worry about being saved, but it was sometime in my early teens.
Jesus made the final sacrifice for all, and we need not make it again.
The problem with the U.S. foreign policy is that we're just so unbelievably powerful. And when you've got that kind of power, it's very hard not to use it.
I'm a happy and productive person. I'm very fortunate; I was born with happy genes. I've got a lot of energy.
When I started to write 'Hannah's Child,' I realized that this had to be a book of passion, to have a certain kind of vulnerability. I think that people respond to that.
'It is finished' will not be, as we know from the tradition of the ordering of these words from the cross, the last words of Jesus. 'It is finished' is a cry of victory.
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.
Ask yourself: if that is what Jesus is all about - that is, getting us to love one another - then why did everyone reject him?
I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.
Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.
Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone's enemies - sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian.
I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.
In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the U.S., many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.
America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity.
I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.
There is nothing wrong with making money, but it was just not in my family's habits to know how to do that. All we knew how to do was work, and we usually liked the work we did.
The very idea that you could have separation between mosque and state from Islam's perspective is the imposition on them of Christian practice. Islam doesn't really have a place for state. They are a universalistic faith like Christianity, but they think there is no country that bounds Islam.
In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.
I think no one knows what humanitarian intervention means. If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.
The fact that I spent my life in universities in a manner that I no longer have close identification with bricklayers is a pain to me.
'It is finished' is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work.
Let me be clear: I am a Methodist. By that, I mean I think John Wesley was a recovery of Catholic Christianity through disciplined congregational life.
The 'Cold War' impinged on the daily lives of Americans. The wars after 11 September 2001 have been fought without the general American population having to make any sacrifices. It goes on, and so do we.
When love becomes what Christianity is all about, we can make no sense of Jesus's death and resurrection.
I should like to think how we write as theologians would reflect our confidence in the One who makes that writing possible. That is one of the reasons, moreover, that the scriptures remain paradigmatic for how we are to write.
Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism.
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.
I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.
I am not convinced that the U.S. is more religious than Britain. Even if more people go to church in America, I think the U.S. is a much more secular country than Britain.
I am not sure I can make clear what it means to say I come from the Catholic side of Protestantism, but at the very least, it means that I do not think Christianity began with the Reformation.
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.
I must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually, I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday, period.
My mother desperately wanted children. She had a child that was stillborn - something I learned when I was looking through her 'effects' after she had died. It was then that I discovered my original birth certificate, which indicated the previous birth.
To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don't understand Islam to be a church.
One of the problems we currently have is there hasn't been in the population any serious engagement with the ethics of war because we have an all-volunteer army. I would think the return to the draft would be an intervention that would require discussion that might be more helpful in terms of our ability to limit war.
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.
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.
The Gospel of John makes explicit what all the Gospels assume - that is, the cross is not a defeat, but the victory of our God.
