Quotes about Luther

The problem with Luther's account of the Christian faith and of theology is that he distinguishes too sharply between the "inner person" and the "outer person

The sixteenth-century parallel: (1) medieval scholasticism as a synthesis between the Bible, Plato, and Aristotle; (2) the heresy of works-salvation, perhaps with Tetzel as an extreme case; (3) Luther the Reformer, who like Athanasius pushes hard for the fundamental principle of justification by faith alone; and (4) Calvin the consolidator, who rethinks the whole of theology in the light of the knowledge gained in the Reformation.

In one of his letters to Erasmus, Luther said, "YOUR thoughts of God are too human."

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

In fact, Luther says the "great idol Mammon" has anointed "three trustees—rust, moths, and thieves"—that ought to remind us of the temporality of possessions.12

The brilliant balance of the gospel that Luther so persistently expounded—"We are saved by faith alone, but not by faith which is alone".

It had been Luther's idea that Christians should confess to one another instead of to a priest. Most Lutherans had thrown that baby out with the bathwater and didn't confess to anyone. Confession of any kind was considered overly Catholic, just as extemporaneous prayer was criticized as too pietistic. But Bonhoeffer successfully instituted the practice of confessing one to another.

Luther was trying to call the church back to its true roots, to a biblical idea of a merciful God who did not demand that we obey but who first loved us and first made us righteous before he expected us to live righteously.

What followed ended up scrambling the landscape of Western culture so dramatically that it's hardly recognizable from what it was before. Luther was the unwitting harbinger of a new world in which the well-established boundaries of what was acceptable were exploded, never to be restored. Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

Luther always maintained that he was probably born in 1484, but neither Luther nor even his own mother could be sure, and current reckoning puts it more likely at either 1482 or 1483, with the preponderance of evidence favoring the latter, so that in the course of this book we shall use that year.

Luther used this as an illustration of how even when God reached out to us in love and grace, we are often so suffused with the idea of him as a stern judge bent on punishing us that we tragically shrink from his loving grasp, thus to our own sad detriment denying ourselves the very thing for which we long.

Indeed, not just the problems but the loud cry "Reform!" had been heard here and there for centuries before Luther.