Quotes About Reformation

The version of Christianity that is dying today is rooted in the grossly misunderstood concept of atonement

My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior -- BEFORE the Reformation.

Before there could be any permanent reformation the people must be led to feel their utter inability in themselves to render obedience to God.

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation

Taking responsibility is a step toward redemption.

Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority.

You have to be a little contrite to get redemption.

We came into a broken world. And we're the cleanup crew.

A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.

The essence of Lenin's speeches during this period was "They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet." And it was.

Those who, for whatever combination of reasons, encourage the opposite of reformation, become the unwitting allies of the far political right. Parts of the far left have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right.

Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear the most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.

The church belongs to you, Jesus; she's your beloved bride. Yet, as with everything else, we often take the church into the idol factory of our hearts and retool her to be an ingrown club for our own satisfaction.

The atmosphere of our time is fast being cleared of the fumes and deadly gases that arose during the carboniferous age of theology.

It's now time to organize and move forward. It's time for deep thinking, reformation of the Democratic Party.

It's time to tear up the canvas and start over. It's time for the overhaul of humanity.

Information gives reformation and reformation brings transformation.

however you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, and may be strict in it), you are thus in the hands of an angry God; 'tis nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However

I soon discovered that the great Christian doctrines connected more pictorially and "asiatically" when I used the classical biblical stories than when I used contemporary (and mainly Western) systematic theologies. Matthew, the most systematic of the Gospels, proved to be the ideal vehicle for teaching the major, Orthodox, Catholic, and Reformation convictions. . . . I found the earthy Gospels to be much closer to my Asian students than the profound yet more abstract Paul.

The struggle within Turkey that continues to this day is the legacy of Kemal Ataturk's radical reformation

Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

For Luther, any appeal to Mary and the saints instead of to Jesus himself became a satanic

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.