Luther Quotes

Luther Quotes

1. R. W Southern 'Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages'

   • "Articulate lay opinion about religion, often crude and generally subversive, began in towns".
   • "the pressures of business...wages, and interest rates,....the misery of intermittent over-employment...made the institutions of religion seem less important, and if not wrong, perhaps irrelevant".
     • I do not agree with this, I think the Reformation makes clear how important religion is for people. Reform must not be confused with secularisation during this period. Southern conflates the two issues.

2. Owen Chadwick 'The Early Reformation on the Continent'

   • "The invention of the printing press in fifteenth-century Germany...transformed the religious and intellectual history of Christendom".
   • "Although censorship could be fierce, it was also difficult".

3. Christoph Schwobel 'Justice and Freedom: The Continuing Promise of the Reformation'

   • "The most promising approach for interpreting the Reformation historically by taking the theology of the Reformation seriously [is to] understand it as a reconfiguration of the traditional ways of understanding the doctrinal system and social organisation of Western Christianity".
   • "We should be careful not to project what we like about modernity back to its alleged roots in the Reformation" [ideas such as justice and freedom].
   • "The most common pattern consists in understanding the Enlightenment and its call for autonomy as a consequence of the Reformation...[but] the core element of Luther's theology would have been called something like...the promise made by another, by God in Christ".
   • "The legacy of the Lutheran reformation, based on the reconfiguration of, consists not least in the art of making distinctions and of suggesting the right relationship of...".
     • "the work and power of God, between law and gospel, between faith and works, between sin and faith etc".
   • "Just as creatures contribute nothing to their coming into existence, so sinners contribute nothing to their justification".

4. Diarmaid MacCulloch 'Europe's House Divided'

   • "he may or may not have publicly advertised his intention of setting up an academic disputation on the subject of indulgences"
   • "probably Luther did not see what he was doing as particularly important, since he had spoken on indulgences before".
   • "Luther went to the extent of enclosing his theses about indulgences in a protest letter...to local Archbishop...Albrecht Brandenberg. By doing so, Luther made his challenge a public matter".
   • "The printing press which fuelled it could not be controlled by the existing hierarchies in Church and Commonwealth".
   • "Accordingly, papal reaction was to instruct the German Augustinians to sort out this annoying matter themselves in their three-yearly meeting in Heidelberg in 1518".

5. Alister McGrath 'The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation'

   • Humanism was an "essential element in the flux of late medieval religious life and thought, being particularly influential among the intellectual elite, and inevitably possessing a significant potential influence upon late medieval piety, religion and theology".

6. E. Cameron 'The European Reformation'

   • "The Reformation was a cousin to the councilliar movement rather than a direct descendent".
   • Disputes "revived by rulers at odds with the papacy".

7. Robert Kolb 'The Blackwell Companion to the Reformation World'

   • The press "multiplied by the effect of preaching and conversation, can be said be a major factor in spreading...a relatively coherent message".
   • Money collected by indulgences being used to "build St Peter's Basilica in Rome".
   • "Pastor Johannes Bugenhagen described Luther as a 'great teacher and prophet, a reformer sent by God to the church...a holy apostle and prophet of Christ, the one who came to preach to us and be the evangelist for the German lands'".

8. Bernard Lohse 'Martin Luther: An Introduction to his Life and Works'

   • Charles V intention was to "strengthen the central administration and reduce the autonomy of the churchly and princely estates".
   • Christian warfare is a symbolic one: "Christendom itself can fight on its own behalf only with the sword of the spirit, namely with God's word and spirit".
   • "In response to questions of war against the Turks, Luther gave unlimited affirmation of the justice and necessity of efforts to defend the West aganinst attack".
   • "The Turks threatening Europe were also heathens threatening Christianity".