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Catholic armies at Mühlberg soundly defeated Saxony’s John Frederick and Philip of Hesse.
It was a fact that the imperial forces won the Schmalkaldic War and laid waste to much of Saxony, but by 1547 Luther’s ideas had spread too wide and sunk too deep into the lives of too many for the Reformation to be thus defeated.
the next year Charles V abdicated his throne.
In 1552, the plague again returned to Wittenberg, forcing the “Mother of the Reformation” and her youngest children to flee to Torgau. But at the very gates of that city, her wagon crashed, hurling her into a ditch filled with icy water. The fall and the cold would be the death of her. Three months later, at age fifty-three, she breathed her last and was buried at Torgau, where her remains lie today.
through the line of Luther’s surviving daughter, Margaret, who married a nobleman, the family line continues to the present day.
the German national hero President Paul von Hindenburg proudly claimed to be a direct descendant of Martin Luther.
That the people might know better than their betters is as modern an idea as any, and not until Martin Luther did it burst once and for all onto history’s stage.
I then further noticed that all but one of the hymns were written by Protestants.
most Catholics wittingly or unwittingly enjoy many of the reforms that over time have come into the church and that have mirrored the very reforms Luther was advocating.
It was a door through which Luther hoped to welcome Jesus back into Christendom, but it was this same door through which many demons would come too.
couldn’t any fool establish his own interpretation of things and create his own religion and delude millions—leading
these initial steps toward our modern world of pluralism form the principal and foundational part of Luther’s legacy.
if we do not risk losing, we cannot actually win.
Whether Luther had thought about it much or hadn’t, once he broke away from the theological lockstep of Rome, he had broken away not only from what it believed but from the deeper and larger idea that one could force another’s beliefs. This was an astounding development.
He had opened the door to what we today call conscience and dissent.
the human right to believe as one wished.
Luther had dared to say that just because the Roman church had the power to crush dissent did not mean that it represented the truth
if one must burn heretics to kill heresy, perhaps this was a clue that one feared open debate.
In 1644, in the midst of the English Civil War, John Milton published Areopagitica, his landmark defense of the freedom of expression.
During the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, George Whitefield preached the Gospel up and down the thirteen American colonies so often that by the time of his death in 1770 not less than 80 percent of all Americans had heard him preach in person
huge role in emboldening the American colonists to move toward self-government.
enshrined the idea of religious liberty in its laws, such that every citizen must be free to follow his own conscience and his own religion. This stands as another of the high-water marks of Luther’s legacy.
Around this same time in England, a group of Methodists led by John Wesley were frowned upon by the official Church of England. But they and the Quakers were nonetheless now allowed to exist, and because of the greater devotion of these dissenters to the ideals of the New Testament they led the battle for the end of the slave trade in the British Empire.
Evangelicals—led by Wilberforce—pushed forward reforms in helping the poor, in child labor laws, in animal cruelty laws, in penal reform, and much else.
He knew there was no substitute for this and that it was far better that someone try to understand God and truth with the possibility of getting some things wrong than to depend on others to understand these things.
