Approaching the End Quotes

“The church is in a buyer’s market that makes any attempt to form a disciplined congregational life very difficult.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“the question of Christian participation in war turns out to be a question not restricted to “the ethics of war”; instead, it is a question of how Christians can at once say “Jesus is Lord,” the end of all sacrifices, and yet continue to participate in the sacrifice of war.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“the politics of apocalyptic simply is the existence of a people who refuse to acknowledge the claims of worldly rulers to be kings. 14 Moreover, because the one who is Lord has triumphed on the cross, his followers refuse to use the violence of earthly rulers to achieve what are allegedly good ends.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“Paul’s gospel is centered on “God’s liberating invasion of the cosmos. Christ’s love enacted in the cross has the power to change the world because it is embodied in the new community of mutual service.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“creation was, after all, God’s determinative act of peace. 53 If, therefore, the end is in the beginning, at the very least Christians who justify the Christian participation in war bear the burden of proof.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“H. Richard Niebuhr argued in Christ and Culture that the great problem with the “Christ against culture” type was how advocates of that type understood the “relation of Jesus Christ to the Creator of nature and Governor of history as well as to the Spirit immanent in creation and in the Christian community.” 49 According to Niebuhr, the over-concentration of radical Christians (Tolstoy is his primary example) on the lordship of Christ results in an ontological bifurcation of reality. Their rejection of culture is joined to a suspicion of nature and nature’s God in a manner that obscures the goodness of God’s creation.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“Barth argues that the command to keep the Sabbath is the command that explains all the other commandments. It does so because the command to observe the Sabbath is the telos for all God’s commands. For the purpose of all we do is nothing less than the glorification of God. Such an understanding of the commandment to observe the Sabbath might be understood as an expression of natural law, but one must remember that the Sabbath has been reconstituted by the resurrection.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“The omnipotent grace of God rules all world-occurrence as providence. But it does so from this starting point. It is at work here, in this particular, central sphere of history.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“Barth begins his ethics with the Sabbath command. He does so by observing that the command to keep the Sabbath makes clear that we are creatures of time.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“the Word of God makes its way not by argument but as men and women bear witness to what has happened.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“God, who has no need for us, no need for heaven and earth, who is sufficient to himself, has willed that the created order exist (pp. 53-54). 22 Creation is, therefore, grace. That there is a world is a miracle. The question, therefore, is never, “Does God exist?” Rather, what should astonish us is that we exist.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“There is no way to make the church safe from the world. When the church seeks that kind of place in the world, too often the result is an inverted Christendom. I have little use for purity, but I do pray for a more faithful church. A more faithful church, moreover, would, I suspect, make being a Christian more difficult but also more interesting.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“My oft-made claim, a claim that many find offensive, that the first task of the church is not to make the world just but to make the world the world, is rightly understood only in light of these eschatological convictions.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“When Christians begin to think we are at home in the world our sense that we live “between the times” is not only muted but close to being unintelligible. The recovery of the eschatological vision is crucial for how the church understands her relation to the world.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

“We may have already seen the end of many churches that bear the name Christian while failing to recognize that we have done so because those churches still seem to be in business. But the business they are in may have only a very accidental relation with Christianity.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life