Quotes about Luther

German culture was inescapably Christian. This was a result of the legacy of Martin Luther, the Catholic monk who invented Protestantism. Looming over the German culture and nation like both a father and a mother, Luther was to Germany something like what Moses was to Israel;

The Luther Bible was to the modern German language what the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible were to the modern English language. Before Luther's Bible, there was no unified German language.

In the years 1889 and 1890, at the Ratsschul Library in Zwickau, about seventy-five miles east of Erfurt, someone came upon what turned out to be early fifteenth-century volumes that Luther had held and studied as a young monk. It was a spectacular find. Several of these books were works by Augustine. The marginal notes and other writing were confirmed as Luther's own handwriting, so suddenly historians could know what he had underlined as he was reading.

For Luther the Bible was not a book like Aristotle's Ethics or like a volume of Livy or Cicero. It was something entirely apart from every book in the world. It was the living Word of God and therefore could not be read like any other book. It was inspired by God, and when one read it, one must do so in such a way—with such closeness and intimacy—that one fully intended to feel and smell the breezes of heaven.

We know that immediately upon entering the monastery, Luther was lent one that was bound in red leather, for he recollected this often in his later years. It seems that Luther did not receive the book lightly, for he not only read it but almost devoured it. He read it over and over until he was inordinately and perhaps even peculiarly familiar with it. This would of course have everything to do with the events of his future and the future itself.

Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word. But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation to discipleship...The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship.

Luther's return from the cloister to the world was the worst blow the world had suffered since the days of early Christianity.

I used to be very fond of thinking up and buying presents, but now that we have nothing to give, the gift God gave us in the birth of Christ will seem all the more glorious; the emptier our hands, the better we understand what Luther meant by his dying words: "We're beggars; it's true." The poorer our quarters, the more clearly we perceive that our hearts should be Christ's home on earth. (Letter to fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer, December 1, 1943)

Luther made a distinction between the inner and outer word: the latter is the Scripture and the former the revelation of Christ. Thus the Bible is the cradle wherein Christ is laid and the swaddling clothes in which Christ is wrapped. Or the Word of God is the water that comes to us through the pipes (the written witness).

Saint Paul (whom I had thought of as the first Luther) taught in Romans, Galatians and elsewhere that justification was more than a legal decree; it established us in Christ as God's children by grace alone. In fact, I discovered that nowhere did Saint Paul ever teach that we were justified by faith alone! Sola fide was unscriptural!

The law works fear and wrath; grace works hope and mercy.

Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."