Quotes About Luther

For Luther the religious was the thing of greatest importance on earth; for Erasmus it was the human.

The first book printed in Lithuanian was an edition of Luther's Short Catechism, published in (Polish) Ducal Prussia at Königsberg in 1547; the Luther Catechism was the second published work in the related language of Lettic, at Königsberg in 1586.

Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word. But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation to discipleship...The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship.

Luther's return from the cloister to the world was the worst blow the world had suffered since the days of early Christianity.

Luther made a distinction between the inner and outer word: the latter is the Scripture and the former the revelation of Christ. Thus the Bible is the cradle wherein Christ is laid and the swaddling clothes in which Christ is wrapped. Or the Word of God is the water that comes to us through the pipes (the written witness).

While the blustery Luther, with his categorical denials of any ambiguity in the Bible, stands as the champion of the humble reader, the reasoning Luther stands within the stream of creeds and scholarship that defines more soberly and narrowly the scope and nature of the Bible's clarity.

The promise of a social gospel was for Luther an irrelevant and ultimately irrelevant and ultimately cruel delusion.

Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not.

As however the ancients say that in case of necessity any Christian lay person can administer the sacrament of Baptism, so Luther says the same thing about absolution in case of necessity, where no priest is present.

We have a fabulous civil rights history here in Birmingham.

As for doctrine, Luther asserted the absolute authority of Holy Scripture and that each human must discover the meaning of scripture and establish his or her own, personal relationship with God.

In his magisterial The Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch was quite correct that 'Luther's writing of 1543 is a blueprint for the Nazi's Kristallnacht of 1938'

From the start, the German princes who supported Luther were not going to allow themselves to be exploited or commanded by religious leaders again. Henceforth, they would rule both Church and state. In this they were vigorously supported by Martin Luther, whose 'advice to the German princes who embraced Protestantism was that they compel their subjects to submit to religious instruction and allow them to hear only authorized preachers'.

Cranach was one of Martin Luther's close allies and, in the mid-sixteenth century, he produced altarpieces for Lutheran churches in Wittenburg, Weimar, Schneeburg, Kemberg, Regensburg, and Dessau. Unlike other reformers, Luther never forbade images, especially of the crucifixion, and many of Cranach's paintings and altarpieces functioned as didactic exercises, almost schematic diagrams of Lutheran soteriology.

He adopts a silver-muzzled sixty-five-pound brindle dog named Luther, walks him through the front door of the house, dumps a can of beef and barley stew into a bowl, and watches Luther engulf it. Then the dog sniffs around his surroundings as though in disbelief at his reversal of fortune.

As a songwriter, there's nothing better than winning Song Of The Year. But I couldn't really celebrate, because it wasn't right. Luther wasn't standing next to me, to receive the award.

Marty took the key out of his pocket, pushed the green button, and tore an opening in the side of the Orb. "Now look what you've done!" Luther said. "You've wrecked Ted's Orb." "How clumsy of me," Marty said.

You know the deal," Marty said. "If I cook the food, you do the dishes." "I didn't ask you to cook," Luther said. "I wasn't even hungry." "That's odd. You ate most of the food." "I was just being polite.

Luther's point was that, according to Scripture, salvation is not a bake sale:

Saint Paul (whom I had thought of as the first Luther) taught in Romans, Galatians and elsewhere that justification was more than a legal decree; it established us in Christ as God's children by grace alone. In fact, I discovered that nowhere did Saint Paul ever teach that we were justified by faith alone! Sola fide was unscriptural!

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

that every time the Lord's Supper is celebrated, Christ is actually resacrificed. For Luther, this was the most abominable bondage of all. The mass was a gift of God to man, not a gift of man to God. "They [the Roman Church] make God no longer the bestower of good gifts to us, but the receiver of ours. Such impiety!" So that everyone could better understand this gift of God, Luther stressed that the mass should be in the vernacular.

Conditions for God.-1' God himself cannot subsist without wise men, said Luther, and with good reason ; but God can still less subsist without unwise men,-good Luther did not say that!

In his imaginative response to Luther's text, Bach makes us aware that music can do much more than merely mirror the words from start to finish: he shows that it can hold our attention and captivate us by metaphors that strike like lightning. As long as we are willing to let go and allow him to describe the world to us as he sees it, we are soon provided with a first point of entry.