Stanley Hauerwas

Some of the best friends you'll ever have are some of the people you just haven't met yet.

Stanley Hauerwas says, if I can't say it, I can't see it.

That's right.

So I think one of the vocational callings of pastors is to give us a spiritual vocabulary so that we then can recognize the work of the Spirit in our lives.

You've said in your book too, you talked about revival and that revival can sound more that me repenting of my sin can sound more interesting than God can.

In fact, you said this, I just want to get this thing right because...

You're not going to be happy about this because that's a Stanley Hauerwas quote.

Darrell Bock All my good stuff is someone else's stuff and

So it's entirely contingent on your experience.

There was an excellent essay by Stanley Hauerwas came out in the 1980s.

His son was the inspiration because he has a son with mental disabilities.

And the title of the essay is Suffering the Retarded, a term that was PC in the 80s.

We naturally, all of us, associate authenticity with spontaneity.

So the crafting and composing and writing down of a sermon surely undermines the possibility of the sermons ever being free in Stanley Hauerwas's words, and honest and authentic.

Do away with spontaneity and you do away with authenticity.

We might not express it quite as boldly or bluntly as that, but my guess is you know what I mean.

Hmm.

So I think sometimes, um, Stanley Hauerwas is a, um, I don't know, an expert of some kind.

I don't know exactly his degree, but he writes that the challenge in marriage is learning to care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

Hmm.

I think there's a lot to that about parsing things done right, things done wrong, things done in small measure where you can get out of it.

I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who talked about a doctor playing in a softball league and how you can be all in in the softball league until you're sliding into second base and you end up breaking the shortstop's leg coming across and Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, that's right.

Spiritual practices become spiritual habits so that over the years and decades of the life of an apprentice, practicing the way of Jesus becomes increasingly automatic.

Stanley Hauerwas says, Christianity is to have one's body shaped, one's habits determined in such a manner that the worship of God is unavoidable.

But of course, as we all know from experience, habits are really hard to form and they're more than just a matter of deciding.

Otherwise, you'd still be intermittent fasting and waking up a half hour earlier and reading instead of watching a screen before you doze off at night or whatever, insert last January's New Year's resolution here, happens to be for you.

Bible commentaries that has been really helpful.

They have one on every book of the Bible, and I'll include the link in the show notes below for these commentaries so you can look at them yourself.

But I've also benefited greatly from numerous Bible commentaries written by Walter Brueggemann and Stanley Hauerwasz.

Um, and they have written, uh, prolifically on the old Testament and new Testament.

Um, Samuel Wells is another one.

For instance, in 1972, the Mennonite ethicist John Howard Yoder published The Politics of Jesus, inspiring many evangelicals to get involved in the public square.

This shift influenced theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, who argued that the spiritual and political spheres should remain separate nonetheless.

But the influence of these theologians was eventually drowned out by evangelical political movements like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.

Conclusion.

The church is a story-formed people.

Post-liberal theology emphasizes that communities are constituted by the narrative they inhabit.

Building on the works of Hans Frey, who argued that Scripture provides the primary lens through which Christians learn and interpret the world, Stanley Hauerwas contends that the church is a people whose identity, character, and ethics are formed by the biblical story.

But just as the church is shaped by God's redemptive narrative, it must also be attentive to rival narratives that define reality and human flourishing on other terms.