Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 18, 2019 - January 22, 2022
OVER the Churches of Switzerland, as over those of the rest of Europe, the Pope had established a tyranny.
#reformedtheology
and in these respects very ulike the ordinary pedagogues of the sixteenth century, who studied by a stiff demeanor, a severe countenance, and the terrors of discipline to compel the obedience of their pupils, and inspire them with the love of learning.
Zwingli. "The Scriptures," said he, "come from God, not from man, and even that God who enlightens will give thee to understand that the speech comes from God. The Word of God. .. cannot fail; it is bright, it teaches itself, it discloses itself, it illumines the soul with all salvation and grace, comforts it in God, humbles it, so that it loses and even forfeits itself, and embraces God in itself."
#reformedtheology
Luther began his Reformation in the way of declaring war against the self-righteous principle: Zwingli, on the other hand, began his by throwing down the gage of battle to the scholastic divinity.
#reformedtheology #reformation
Luther's hygemonic or dominating principle was justification by faith alone, by which he overthrew the monkish fabric of human merit. Zwingli's dominating principle was the sole authority of the Word of God, by which he dethroned reason from the supremacy which the schoolmen had assigned her, and brought back the understanding and the conscience to Divine revelation.
#reformedtheology #reformation
Zwingli's first object, which he ever kept clearly in view, was not the overthrow of the Papacy, but the restoration of Christianity.
#reformedtheology #reformation
he did not disdain to lecture to his townsmen on the Acts of the Apostles, that he might exhibit to them the model of the primitive Church – in simplicity and uncorruptedness, how different from the pattern of their own day!
#reformedtheology
beginning with the smaller matters. In expounding the fourth chapter of the first Epistle to Timothy, Zwingli took occasion to maintain that fasts appointed by the Church, in which certain meats were forbidden to be eaten at certain times, had no foundation in the Bible.
#reformedtheology
The Reformer quickly replied that error was not less error because the belief of it had lasted fourteen hundred years, and that in the worship of God antiquity of usage was nothing, unless ground or warrant for it could be found in the Sacred Scriptures.
#reformedtheology
He was not able to see that the worship of the Church of Rome had any foundation in Scripture.
This is why Rome burns those who translate the Scriptures into the vernacular.
As the images, instead of remounting to their niches, lay broken and shivered, they lost credit with their votaries, and so many were cured of their superstition.
Idolatry cast down in Zurich. #reformedtheology
Protestantism was a breath of healing – a stream of cleansing in all countries to which it came.
#reformedtheology
Stork was joined by Mark Thomas, another weaver of Zwickau; by Mark Stubner, formerly a student at Wittenberg; and by Thomas Munzer, who was the preacher of the "new Gospel." That Gospel comprehended whatever Stork was pleased to say had been revealed to him by the angel Gabriel. He especially denounced infant baptism as an invention of the devil, and called on all disciples to be re-baptised, hence their name "Anabaptists."
#reformedtheology
He began by stating, in simple and unpretending style, what he said were the two cardinal doctrines of revelation — the ruin of man, and the redemption in Christ. "He who believes on the Savior," he remarked, "is freed from sin."
#ReformedTheology
The Word of God had created heaven and earth, and all things, and that Word must be the operating power, and "not we poor sinners."
#reformedtheology
The mass was forsaken; the images were turned out of doors; the Scriptures were explained according to the early Fathers; and scarce could the Papal legate go or return from the imperial hall, where the Diet held its meetings, without being jostled in the street by the crowds hurrying to the Protestant sermon.
#reformedtheology #protestant
"We will serve Rome no longer." Franconia, Brandenburg, Henneburg, Windsheim, Wertheim, and Nuremberg declared against the abuses of the mass, against the seven Popish Sacraments, against the adoration of images, and, reserving the unkindliest cut for the last, against the Papal supremacy.
#reformedtheology
Besides, what good will a Reformation do us that removes only the smaller abuses, and leaves the great altogether untouched?
#reformedtheology #reformed
At Buda, in Hungary, a Protestant bookseller was burned with his books piled up around him. He was heard amid the flames proclaiming the joy with which he suffered for the sake of Christ.
#reformedtheology #reformed
It was a doctrine of Paganism that there was a magical or necromantic influence in all its observances, in virtue of which a purifying change was effected upon the soul of the worshipper. This idea was the essence of Paganism. In the sacrifice, in the lustral water, in every ceremony of its ritual, there resided an invisible but potent power, which of itself renewed or transformed the man who did the rite, or in whose behalf it was done. This doctrine descended to Romanism.
#reformed #reformedtheology #Catholicism
The Popedom mixed itself up with the politics of Europe; Protestantism, on the other hand, stood apart, and refused to ally itself with earthly confederacies.
#reformedtheology #Protestantism #Catholicism
With Catherine Bora there entered a new light into the dwelling of Luther. To sweetness and modesty, she added a more than ordinary share of good sense. A genuine disciple of the Gospel, she became the faithful companion and help-meet of the Reformer in all the labors and trials of his subsequent life.
#reformedtheology #Lutherans
Wherever the Word is faithfully preached, and the Sacraments purely administered, there is the Church, said the Reformation.
#reformed #reformedtheology
"All that is deformed ought to be reformed." So ran the first Paradox.
#reformed #reformedtheology
"The Church is the congregation of those who are united by the same spirit, the same faith, the same God, the same Mediator, the same Word, by which alone they are governed."
#reformed #reformedtheology
The Roman Empire tends nearly to its ruin; the Turk has attained the summit of his power; the Papal splendor is fast becoming eclipsed; the world cracks in every direction as though about to fall in pieces."
#reformedtheology
In Bavaria, Leonard Caspar at this time sealed his testimony with his blood. He was apprehended at the instance of the Bishop of Passau, and condemned for maintaining that man is justified by faith alone; that there are but two Sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper; that the mass is not a sacrifice, and avails not for the quick and the dead; and that Christ alone hath made satisfaction for us.
#reformedtheology #reformed
done by the princes at Spires. We protest, said they, that God speaking in his Word, and not Rome speaking through her priests, is the One Supreme Law of the human race.
#reformed #reformedtheology #Protestantism
The nations that rallied round this Protest are now marching in the van of civilization; those that continued under the flag of Romanism lie benumbed in slavery and are rotting in decay.
#reformedtheology
The Reformation was a spiritual principle. From the sword it could derive no real help.
#reformedtheology
They govern by him, they rule for him, and they are accountable to him. They are the vassals of his throne, the lictors of his judgment-seat. To him appertains the power of passing sentence, to them the humble office of using the sword he has put into their hands in executing it. In this one immense monarch, the Pope namely, all authority, rights, liberties are comprehended. The State disappears as a distinct and independent society: it is absorbed in the Church as the Church is absorbed in her head — occupying the chair of St. Peter. It was against this hideous tyranny that Protestantism rose
...more
#reformedtheology
When Charles insisted that it should be so, the Margrave George exclaimed in animated tones, "Rather than let the Word of God be taken from me, and deny my God, I would kneel down and have my head struck off."
#reformedtheology
They especially attacked the mass, on which Rome had suspended the salvation of the world, making the priest, and not Christ, the savior of men; the sacrifice on the altar, and not the sacrifice on the cross, the real propitiation; thus compelling men to come to her and not to God for pardon, making merchandise of heaven, changing worship into mountebankery, and the Church into a fair.
#reformedtheology
The Confession did not create the faith; it simply confessed it. The doctrines it contained were in the Confession because they were first of all in the Bible.
All of the confessions of the Reformed Churches should be viewed this way.
The Popish members were dismayed and confounded when they reflected on what had been done. The Diet had been summoned to overthrow the Reformation; instead of this it had established it. In
#reformedtheology
Britain, the seat of law, the sanctuary of justice, the fountain of knowledge, the emporium of commerce, and the bulwark of order and liberty, proclaims not less emphatically the wisdom of her choice when she made her first requisite a conscience emancipated and guided by the Bible.
#reformedtheology
The Popish priestling, when he professes to offer the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, pours contempt upon the sacrifice of Christ, offered upon the altar of the cross. He crucifies Christ afresh. He commits the impiety denounced in the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. He not only changes the essentials of the Lord's Supper, but he does so for the basest end, even that of raking together wealth and filling his coffers, for this is the only use of his tribe of priestlings, and his everlasting masses."
#reformedtheology
Doctor Olaf in reply maintained that in all Scripture there was not so much as one proof to be found of purgatory.
#reformedtheology
In particular the Psalms of David may be said to have opened the gates of Malmoe, which was the first of all the cities of Denmark fully to receive the Gospel.
#reformedtheology
Personal contact with evil can alone give that sense of its malignity, and that burning detestation of it, which will prompt one to a life-long struggle for its overthrow. We can trace this principle in the orderings of Zwingli's lot.
#reformedtheology
The altars on which mass had been offered were overturned; the idols burned like other wood; cowls, frocks, beads, and pardons were cast away as so much rubbish; the lighted candles were blown out and men turned to the living lamp of the Word.
#reformedtheology
The spirit of ancient paganism had crept back into it, and ejecting the Holy Spirit, which acts through it in the case of all who believe, it had filled it with a magical influence.
#reformedtheology
Zwingli has more successfully extricated the spiritual from the mystical in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper than either Luther or Calvin.
#reformedtheology
The notorious Thomas Munzer, thrown upon the Swiss frontier by the storms of the peasant-war in Germany, brought with him his peculiar doctrines to sow them among the followers of Zwingli.
Zwingli's victory was complete, and the magistrates followed it up by an edict, ordering all infants to be baptized within eight days.
#reformedtheology #anabaptist
He had been compelled to study the relation in which the Old and New Testaments stand to one another, and he came to see that under two names they are one book, that under two forms they are one revelation; and that as the transplanting of trees from the nursery to the open field neither alters their nature nor changes their uses, so the transplanting of the institutions of Divine revelation from the Old Testament, in the soil of which they were first set, into the New Testament or Gospel dispensation where they are permanently to flourish, has not in the least changed their nature and design,
...more
#reformed #reformedtheology
Baptism, he argued in short, is circumcision, and circumcision was baptism, under a different outward form.
#reformedtheology #baptism
In like manner the children of professing parents under the New Testament are, by their birth, members of the Church, and entitled to have the Sacrament of baptism administered to them: that the water in baptism, like the blood in circumcision, denotes the removal of an inward impurity and the washing by the Spirit in order to salvation; and that as circumcision bound to the observance of God's ordinances, so baptism imposes an obligation to a holy life. CHAPTER 4
But Zwingli was a citizen and a patriot, as well as a pastor. His wonderfully penetrating, comprehensive, and forecasting intellect made him the first politician of his country;
#reformedtheology
But Protestantism was never meant to remain a mere principle. Its mission was to create around it a new political, social, and intellectual world.
