Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir

by Stanley Hauerwas

stonecutters and bricklayers, theologians must come to terms with the material upon which they work. In particular, they must learn to respect the simple complexity of the language of the faith, so that they might reflect the radical character of orthodoxy.

I have spent a lifetime being misunderstood by people who think they know what I think, given what they think, but in fact I am trying to change how they think.

The way things are is not the way things have to be.

You do it because you have to get it done before it rains.

But there is no substitute for learning to be a Christian by being in the presence of significant lives made significant by being Christian.

Yoder forced me to recognize that nonviolence is not a recommendation, an ideal, that Jesus suggested we might try to live up to. Rather, nonviolence is constitutive of God’s refusal to redeem coercively.

Learning what it means to be nonviolent or, as I would prefer, to live peaceably begins with coming to terms with the resistance that such a declaration elicits.

courtesy can become an extraordinarily subtle form of manipulation favoring those in power.

this assumption was simply a testimony to my ability to deny reality in the interest of a theological fantasy.

He also has less philosophical ability than anyone I have ever met. I think that is one of the reasons he is such a good preacher — he never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.

When you are trying to change the questions, you have to realize that many people are quite resistant to such a change. They like the answers they have.

I am not by nature nonviolent. It is not a natural stance. But one slow step at a time I tried to learn not to live a life determined by what I was against. Peace is a deeper reality than violence. That is an ontological claim with profound moral implications. But it takes some getting used to.

I wanted a church capable of reminding those who think they rule the world that they are in the grip of a deep

delusion.

To be baptized into Christ is to be made a citizen of a new age in this age. To so live sometimes tempts Christians to try to force God’s kingdom into existence through violence. But that is to betray the time we have been given. The great paradox is that the apocalyptic character of our faith not only makes the everyday possible but also enables us to see how extraordinary it is.

God knows why God has made some of us ecclesiastically homeless, but I hope and pray that our being so may be in service to Christian unity.

Yoder desired a world free of war. But he also saw quite clearly that Christians are committed to nonviolence not because nonviolence is a strategy to free the world of war. Rather, in a world of war, faithful followers of Christ cannot be anything other than nonviolent. An appeal to abolish war might suggest that nonviolence can be translated into public policy based on grounds that do not require the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

I am a pacifist. But pacifism is just one piece of a complex web of interconnected philosophical and theological convictions that makes no sense if nonviolence is isolated from what it means to worship Jesus.

Patience does not mean “doing nothing.” Rather, patience is “sticking to” what you are doing because you believe that it is worthy and worthwhile.

We often remember what we hope we did rather than what we did in fact do.