Quotes about Reformation

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.

The suppression of the Slave Trade and the reformation of manners.

I am not sure I can make clear what it means to say I come from the Catholic side of Protestantism, but at the very least, it means that I do not think Christianity began with the Reformation.

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

Nietzsche could have arisen only from the soil of the German Reformation. Here, the contradiction between the natural and grace is starkly opposed to the reconciliation of nature with grace in the Roman heritage.

The Reformation biblical faith in God had radically desacralized the world. Thus the ground was prepared in which rational and empirical science could blossom; and even though the natural scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were believing Christians, the disappearance of faith in God left behind only a rationalized and mechanized world.

Choosing Luther and Calvin instead of the spiritual reformers who were their contemporaries, Protestant Europe got the kind of theology it liked. But it also got, along with other unanticipated by-products, the Thirty Years' War, capitalism and the first rudiments of modern Germany. "If

If the way of spiritual childhood became general, who does not see how easily would be realized the reformation of human society...

neglected.Locke.2. Reformation of life. Our Lord and Saviour was of opinion, that they which would not be drawn to amendment of life, by the testimony which Moses and the prophets have given, concerning the miseries that follow sinners after death, were not likely to be persuaded by other means, although God from the dead should have raised them up preachers.Hooker,b. v. ¶ 22. Behold! famine and plague, tribulation and anguish, are sent as scourges for amendment.Bible2 Esdras,xvi. 19.

The church is, as Paul declares, founded on the doctrine of Apostles and Prophets [Eph 2:2]; but these men [of the Roman Catholic Church] speak as if they imagined that the mother owed her birth to the daughter.

I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist.