Stanley Hauerwas

"I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods."

"The church is not to be judged by how useful we are as a 'supportive institution' and our clergy as members of a 'helping profession'. The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not found in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor."