Performing the Faith Quotes

“I think Bonhoeffer rightly saw that the Christian acceptance that truth does not matter in such small matters prepared the ground for the terrible lie that was Hitler.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence

“All these lies, whether their authors know it or not, harbor an element of violence; organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate, although only totalitarian governments have consciously adopted lying as a first step to murder.[42]”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence

“The threat to truth for Christians comes not from the difficulty of developing an unproblematic correspondence theory of truth, but rather from the lies that speak us disguised as truth.[37] Those are the lies Bonhoeffer rightly feared made possible the rise of Hitler, and the ongoing lies necessary to sustain Hitler in power. The failure of the church to oppose Hitler was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world. 3.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence

“Such “godlessness” he finds particularly present in the American church, which begins by seeking to faithfully build the world with Christian principles and ends with the total capitulation of the church to the world. Such societies and the churches have no confidence in truth with the result that the place of truth is usurped by sophistic propaganda.[76]”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence