Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs.
We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God's free grace.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the tendency to label others as self-righteous while recognizing one's own need for grace.
In this quote, Stanley Hauerwas contrasts the perception of Pharisees and tax collectors within the Christian context. He suggests that many Protestants view Catholics as the self-righteous Pharisees who adhere to a legalistic interpretation of faith, while positioning themselves as the humble tax collectors who acknowledge their sinfulness and reliance on God's grace. This highlights a deeper reflection on the nature of faith, grace, and humility in religious belief.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a church discussion on grace, one might use this quote to illustrate the danger of self-righteousness.
More from Stanley Hauerwas
All quotes →My way of putting it is that Christians are called to live nonviolently not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but in a world of war as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent.
Advent is patience it's how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience.
War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.
To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.
The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.
Similar quotes
In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.
Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.
To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.
May we live like the lotus, at home in muddy water.
On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.