Quotes About Reformation

The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38

The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them

The greatest reformation should be among those who have been the greatest sinners.

When Belloc said that the Protestant Reformation was the shipwreck of Christendom, he was simply stating a historical fact, but it was controversial because history is political.

Up to the time of the so-called Reformation no one ever questioned the power of the Church to forgive sins. The ancient Montanists merely attempted to limit it un duly, 1 while the Cathari and the Waldensians erred with regard to those who exercise it. 2 It was reserved for the self-styled Protestant Reformers to deny that power in principle. This explains the thoroughness with which the Tridentine Council defined and explained the teaching of the Church on the subject of Penance. 3

To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.

My official field was Tudor-Stuart England; I also considered myself reasonably competent when it came to Renaissance and Reformation Europe.

Bad men are full of repentance.

All Europe, including Erasmus, has followed Luther.

Murderers don't get forgiven just because we promise to be good from now on. We have to earn our way back. One hundred is the price. One hundred lives for each we took. That seems fair. That's how we get whole again and that's our work, from now until as long as it takes.

In Mencken's view, "religion belongs to a very early stage of human development, and... its rapid decay in the world since the Reformation is evidence of genuine progress" ("The Ascent of Man").

If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it's now. For the love of God, what are we doing about it?

newly powerful nations, with the exception of Spain, showed themselves as capable of great achievement as the Italians had been. From the sixteenth century onward, the history of European thought is dominated by the Reformation. The Reformation was a complex many-sided movement, and owed its success to a variety of causes. In the main, it was a revolt

The Catholic Church was derived from three sources. Its sacred history was Jewish, its theology was Greek, its government and canon law were, at least indirectly, Roman. The Reformation rejected the Roman elements, softened the Greek elements, and greatly strengthened the Judaic elements.

The Western world, from the Reformation until 1848, was undergoing a continuous upheaval which may be called the Rights-of-Man Revolution. In 1848, this movement began to transform itself into nationalism east of the Rhine. In France, the association had existed since 1792, and in England from the beginning; in America, it had existed since 1776. The nationalist aspect of the movement has gradually overpowered the Rights-of-Man aspect, but this latter was at first the more important.

Even Martin Luther and John Calvin believed that the Roman Catholic church, up to the Council of Trent, was basically orthodox - a true church with sound fundamental doctrines as well as significant error.

He knows that kind of love. It is what he feels for Gallicina. It is the world reformed, made new, each time the lover sees the beloved's face. It is the miracle which makes the cosmos dance, which keeps the planets in their courses, which fuels the fire of the stars. It is salvation.

In the 1520s, dozens of free imperial cities are the sites of an aggressive, disruptive Reformation movement as unexpected as an Augustinian friar becoming a publishing sensation and celebrity papal critic.7

To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation appears in August, a scathing manifesto in German by a man now convinced of his role in a cosmic battle between God and Satan.

A majority of political representatives that convene at the Diet of Speyer in 1529 vote to undo the changes in religion and enforce the Edict of Worms. A minority of five evangelical princes and fourteen cities protest this vote—the origin of the term Protestants.

When a burdened Augustinian friar in Wittenberg in October 1516 lamented in a letter how busy he was, no Reformation was in sight. Only Luther's religious anxiety and his pastoral concern for Christian souls were present. By the summer of 1521, Martin Luther is Europe's most famous man and its all-time bestselling author.

The first hint of what is to come occurs near the end of Luther's obscurity. In September 1517 the dutiful Johann Rhau-Grunenberg publishes a one-page broadsheet by Luther with a boring title: A Disputation against Scholastic Theology. In his broadsheet, Luther ironically lists concise propositions to be argued over—a central practice of scholasticism—in order to criticize scholasticism itself, sort of like a poet writing a poem to criticize poetry.

Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.

It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.