Quotes from Timothy George

He referred to Pope Paul III as "His Hellishness." Were not the pope and his associates at least members of the church? Yes, as much as spit, snot, pus, feces, urine, stench, scab, smallpox, ulcers, and syphilis are members of the body. Luther was never one to mince words.

Let God be good," cried Erasmus the moralist. "Let God be God," replied Luther the theologian. Although

justification by faith alone frees me to love my neighbor disinterestedly, for his or her own sake, as my sister or brother, not as the calculated means to my own desired ends.

Friedrich Nietzsche: "If Luther had been burned like Hus, the dawn of the Enlightenment might perhaps have come a little earlier and more brilliantly than we can now imagine.

The law of Moses, properly understood, points beyond itself both backwards toward the Abrahamic covenant and forward toward its final fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

As the process of reform unfolded, Zwingli came increasingly to see himself as a prophet to his people. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, the "shepherd" or "watchman" (Zwingli's preferred words for pastor) needed to guard zealously the flock against attacks from the evil one and be ready to die fighting for the cause of Christ.

We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were, from death to renewed life." Peter Blois in Theology of the Reformers

Through love, Paul said, you should make yourselves slaves to one another. Thus freedom and slavery are not simply mutually exclusive terms; they stand in the closest possible relationship to one another and can only be adequately defined in terms of object and goal: what we are slave to and what we are free for.

History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.

Luther urged Christians to accept civic responsibility (so long as it did not violate the claims of Christ) for the sake of the neighbor. This mandate extended even to those manifestly violent offices of the sword: "If you see that there is a lack of hangmen, constables, judges, lords, princes, and you find that you are qualified, you should offer your services and seek the position.

Here we find a parallel to Luther's disdain of reason. In its legitimate sphere reason is the highest gift of God, but the moment it transgresses into theology it becomes the "Devil's Whore." So, too, with free will. Understood as the God-given capacity to make ordinary decisions, to carry out one's responsibilities in the world, free will remains intact. What it cannot do is effect its own salvation.

The first thing I ask is that people should not make use of my name, and should not call themselves Lutherans but Christians. What is Luther? The teaching is not mine. Nor was I crucified for anyone. . . . How did I, poor stinking bag of maggots that I am, come to the point where people call the children of Christ by my evil name?