Quotes About Reformation

His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive.

But in the short term, it exposed the shortcomings of those who had relied on him as the ultimate authority on everything, especially in universities. Reformation scholars not only had more books, but had their time freed up to ponder, to cross-reference, and to set texts side by side.

translation of the New Testament in 1516. By exposing many of the errors of the old Latin Vulgate, Erasmus established a new appreciation for "pure Scripture" as the final authority on all things spiritual as well as many secular.

Would Erasmus now step forward and endorse Luther as one of his own? Would he acknowledge that they were fighting on the same side and lend the tremendous weight of his reputation to the Lutheran cause?

The argument in this book is that religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform.

The Reformation may have resulted in a "Protestant work ethic," but this was not due to the pressure to prove one's election by worldly success, as certain social scientists ludicrously maintain. Rather, the work ethic emerged out of an understanding of the meaning of work and the satisfaction and fulfillment that come from ordinary human labor when seen through the light of the doctrine of vocation.

One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past--they say their deities are the masters of all universes, and yet they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become better for it.

I have a hard time picturing several aspects of the modern world without Luther.

I'm going to do the time and I am going to do it the right way

The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion.

It is important to show people ways that we can reclaim Christianity from some of the misunderstandings of our time.

Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform. Now, I may be wrong here. No such distinction occurs in Scripture. And repentance and reformation are matters of the soul which only the Lord can judge. But, in my experience, dishonor is recalcitrant.

Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform. Now, I may be wrong here. No such distinction occurs in Scripture. And repentance and reformation are matters of the soul which only the Lord can judge. But, in my experience, dishonor is recalcitrant. When I see it, my heart sinks, because I feel I have no help to offer a dishonorable person. I know the deficiency may be my own altogether.

Mennonites are so called because they followed Menno Simons, a sixteenth-century Dutch Catholic priest

The hope that every believer could walk with and serve God on equal footing with every other believer and have no mediator but Christ didn't originate with our generation. Even Martin Luther, great reformationist that he was, didn't invent this reality, though it was part of his historic posting and protest of 95 theses nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.

In fact, throughout Catholic Europe local princes were accustomed to having a say in episcopal appointments; England's status since the Reformation as a mission territory had meant that the bishops had enjoyed a particular independence.

The Reformation, which had necessitated the flight of the convents and their treasured nun–teachers from England, was a positive disadvantage to the cause of girls' education – unless the girls could go abroad.

We believed optimistically that Laurie was a reformed character. I told my husband, on the last day of Laurie's confinement, that actually one good scare like that could probably mark a child for life, and my husband pointed out that kids frequently have an instinctive desire to follow the good example rather than the bad, once they find out which is which. We agreed that a good moral background and thorough grounding in the Hardy Boys would always tell in the long run. (Arch-Criminal)

The other day I came across a book which illustrates in a rather droll way the extent to which Northern European women have taken it for granted that this peculiar North European form of the subjection of women since the Reformation was characteristic of the whole past of Europe. It was a little essay by an English writer, Virginia Woolf—I confess that it is all I have read of hers,1 but she is said to have a great reputation as a novelist.

I was a pretty bad person early in my life.

I got up to all sorts of things when I was a kid, but I've managed to take the excessive alcohol and fast vehicle combination out of my life now.

Everything changed...even the things we didn't want to.

greater stress on the sacerdotal role of the clergy was part of a larger attempt to reverse the erosion, since the Reformation, of their authority over the laity.

God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in His Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself: what does He then but reveal Himself to His servants, and as His manner is, first to His Englishmen?