MARRIAGE & FAMILY

'Christians do not believe marriage and family exist for themselves, but rather serve the ends of the more determinative community called church. The assumption that the family is an end in itself can only make the family and marriage more personally destructive. When families exist for no reason other than their own existence, they become quasi-churches, which ask sacrifices far too great for insufficient reasons.' 

Stanley Hauerwas in Christine O Colon and Bonnie E Field, Singled Out, p.221. 

SINGLENESS

'The early church's legitimation of singleness as a form of life symbolized the necessity of the church to grow through witness and conversion. Singleness was legitimate, not because sex was thought to be a particularly questionable activty, but becuase the mission of the church was such that "between the times" the church required those who were very capable of complete service to the kingdom. And we must remember that the "sacrifice" made by the single is not that of "giving up sex", but the much more significant sacrifice of giving up heirs. There can be no more radical act than this, as it is the clearest institutional expression that one's future is not guaranteed by the family, but by the church. The church, the harbinger of the kingdom of God, is now the source of our primary loyalty.'

Stanley Hauerwas, 'Sex in Public: How Adventurous Christains Are Doing It' in Bretherton & Rook (Eds.), Living Out Loud, p.182. 

MARRIAGE & FRIENDSHIP

'...the strength of any narriage is partly judged by the ability of each partner to rejoice in the friendships of the other. Indeed, such friendships can be seen as necessary for the enrichment of any marriage.'

Stanley Hauerwas, 'Sex in Public: How Adventurous Christains Are Doing It' in Bretherton & Rook (Eds.), Living Out Loud, p.171.

DISCIPLESHIP

'I can think of not more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themsleves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well trained enough to think - period. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that they do not yet have minds worth making up. Thus training is so important, because training involves the formation of the self through submission to authority that will, if done well, provide people with the virtues necessary to be able to make reasoned judgement.

I cannot think of a more conformist and suicidal message in modernity than that we should encourage students to make up their own minds. This is simply to ensure that they will be good conformist consumers in a capitalist economy by assuming now that ideas are but another produce that you get to choose on the basis of your arbitary likes and dislikes. To encourage students to think for themselves is therefore a sure way to avoid any meaningful disagreement. That is the reason that I tell my students that my first object is to help them think just like me.'

Stanley Hauerwas, 'How We Lay Bricks and Make Disciples' in Bretherton & Rook (Eds.), Living Out Loud, p.43.  

EVANGELICALISM

'For Evangelicalism to survive, it has to put people at risk to need one another, to make them vulnerable. That means they've got to risk their children. But to survive, we need to want to produce people that are as dysfunctional as the world in which we find ourselves. People have got to give their children to that process as well. They've got to be willing to let them engage in the kind of work that doesn't look as though it's going to be safe. This is just a kind of bottom line for reclaiming basic habits of vulnerability through which we discover our need for one another. Evangelicalism puts far too much emphasis upon belief rather than creating communities of vulnerability.'

Stanley Hauerwas in Luke Bretherton and Russell Rook, Living Out Loud: Conversations about virtue, ethics, and evangelicalism, p.8.

DEPENDENCE

'Perhaps this is why the retarded scare us so much - namley, they remind us that for all our pretension we are as helpless as they are when all is said and done. Like them, we depend on others for our lives and for the simple things that make life liveable. We prefer to keep our dependence hidden, however, as we are under the illusion that, unlike the retarded, we are in control of our existence. Thus we label those who are so clearly dependent as "retarded" in order to mark them off from us. To Christians, such a distinction must be particularly anathema, for the very content of revelation is to teach us precisely that we are indeed a dependent people.' 

Stanley Hauerwas in Michael S Beates, Disability & The Gospel, p.150.

MARRIAGE

'Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become "whole" and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that it we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is...learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.' 

Stanley Haurwas in Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, p.37.