Quotes About Reformation

There were no signs of the ruffian he used to be. Only his eyes, I noticed, were still full of fire.

The tide of change rose and then receded, but it left behind an altered landscape.

The Protestant reformation, in the eyes of many evangelicals, implied a social and political revolution as well.

But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate?

IRWIN: At the time of the Reformation there were fourteen foreskins of Christ preserved, but it was thought that the church of St John Lateran in Rome had the authentic prepuce. DAKIN: Don't think we're shocked by your mention of the word 'foreskin', sir. CROWTHER: No, sir. Some of us even have them. LOCKWOOD: Not Posner, though, sir. Posner's like, you know, Jewish. It's one of several things Posner doesn't have. (Posner mouths 'fuck off.')

and it was the Church after 1559 which established 'Communion' as the norm. There's a nice little doctoral project awaiting someone to trace out how 'Communion' won the battle against 'Lord's Supper'; I would make a preliminary guess that it was not until 1662.

Yet so much of the story so far has not been about unbelief at all, but sincere and troubled belief. When children of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the children of the Jewish Diaspora turned on the religions which had bred them, they mostly sought not to abolish God but to see him in a clearer light. ( p698)

The Catholic struggle to hold the line against Protestantism brought thirty years of misery to millions of Europeans: opinions vary, but within the German lands one modern estimate is that 40 per cent of the population met an early death through the fighting or the accompanying famine and disease, and even the most cautious reassessment of the evidence comes up with a figure of 15-20 per cent.

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[50] had radically desacralized [entgöttert] 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.[51]

Second, the entire world needs to be re-evangelized, including the vast majority of baptized Christians.

If your repentance has not changed your life, you need to repent of your repentance.

often finds a more interesting story behind the conventional one. Martin Luther's supposedly revolutionary resistance to indulgences took place in a German state where they were sold. Even more intriguing, they weren't sold because the ruling authorities there get a brisk business in holy relics – which Luther left alone.

Protestants now recognize that the Reformation itself had deeply pastoral roots. The concern was not for the reformation of doctrine and the church as such, but for the care of people in their lives before God, with the realization that thinking wrongly about God leads us to live wrongly.

If the true Church was really lost at some point, how can you know that your version of it is a true restoration? Falling back on sola scriptura does not solve this problem, since all the descendants of the Reformation, divided into hundreds of denominations and tens of thousands of independent congregations, all claim to be simply teaching the Bible.

I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.

Most people are fascinated by what I did as a teenager, but when I look back at my life, I don't think very much about those years. I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.

The Protestants were not much better than the Catholics in their treatment of dissenters.

It is in the very nature of things that torments inflicted have no tendency to bring a wicked man to repentance. Then why torment him if it will not do him good? It is simply unadulterated revenge. All the punishment in the world will not reform a man, unless he knows that he who inflicts it upon him does it for the sake of reformation, and really and truly loves him, and has his good at heart.

Peter came to understand that the roots of Western technological achievement lay in the freeing of men's minds. He grasped that it had been the Renaissance and the Reformation, neither of which had ever come to Russia, which had broken the bonds of the medieval church and created an environment where independent philosophical and scientific inquiry as well as wide-ranging commercial enterprise could flourish.

But in every church there are people who, for reasons which seem sufficient to them, do not approve of their pastor and seek to harry him and bully him into some condition pleasing to themselves. The democracy which the Reformation brought into the Christian Church rages in their bosoms like a fire; they would deny that they regard their clergyman as their spiritual hired hand, whom they boss and oversee for his own good, but that is certainly the impression they give to observers.

Although many sociologists still echo Max Weber's (1864–1920) claim that capitalism originated in the Protestant Reformation, capitalism actually originated in the "depths" of the "Dark Ages.

It is a commonplace to identify Martin Luther as the 'father of individualism'.