Church History in Plain Language Quotes

“Christianity is the only major religion to have at its central event the humiliation of its God.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“In a sense the rise of Anabaptism was no surprise. Most revolutionary movements produce a wing of radicals who feel called of God to reform the reformation. And that is what Anabaptism was, a voice calling the moderate reformers to strike even more deeply at the foundations of the old order. Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously. Actually, the Anabaptists rejected all thoughts of rebaptism because they never considered the ceremonial sprinkling they received in infancy as valid baptism. They much preferred Baptists as a designation. To most of them, however, the fundamental issue was not baptism. It was the nature of the church and its relation to civil governments. They had come to their convictions like most other Protestants: through Scripture. Luther had taught that common people have a right to search the Bible for themselves. It had been his guide to salvation; why not theirs? As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea. In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were established churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society. The true church, the radicals insisted, is always a community of saints, dedicated disciples in a wicked world. Like the missionary monks of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists wanted to shape society by their example of radical discipleship—if necessary, even by death. They steadfastly refused to be a part of worldly power including bearing arms, holding political office, and taking oaths. In the sixteenth century this independence from social and civic society was seen as inflammatory, revolutionary, or even treasonous.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“The democratic gospel of the French Revolution rested upon the glorification of man rather than God. The Church of Rome recognized this and struck back at the heresy as she had always done. She saw more clearly than did most Protestant churches that the devil, when it is to his advantage, is democratic. Ten thousand people telling a lie do not turn the lie into truth. That is an important lesson from the Age of Progress for Christians of every generation. The freedom to vote and a chance to learn do not guarantee the arrival of utopia. The Christian faith has always insisted that the flaw in human nature is more basic than any fault in man’s political or social institutions. Alexis de Tocqueville, a visitor in the United States during the nineteenth century, issued a warning in his classic study, Democracy in America. In the United States, he said, neither aristocracy nor princely tyranny exist. Yet, asked de Tocqueville, does not this unprecedented “equality of conditions” itself pose a fateful threat: the “tyranny of the majority”? In the processes of government, de Tocqueville warned, rule of the majority can mean oppression of the minority, control by erratic public moods rather than reasoned leadership.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“Stephen, of course, never lived to see it. Yet he grasped first of all the special meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and outpouring of the Spirit for biblical history. He sensed deeply that Christianity could never be confined to the rigid boundaries of the Pharisees’ laws. Jesus himself had hinted that a breach would open. Once, when asked why his disciples did not fast like the Pharisees, he said, “Men [do not] pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved” (Matt. 9:17, NIV). The most important development in first-century Christianity was the rip in”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“The idea of developing Christian doctrine may seem strange to those who believe firmly in God’s revelation of himself through Christ, given once and for all. But theology, don’t forget, is not synonymous with God’s revelation itself; rather, theology is our human understanding of God’s revelation and our effort to express it clearly in teaching and preaching.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“In as early as the second century, Irenaeus offered theological reflection on Mary as the “second Eve” who, through her radical submission and obedience to God, reversed the deadly consequences of Eve’s rebellion.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“If we see some admirable work of human art, we are at once eager to investigate the nature, the manner, the end of its production; and the contemplation of the works of God stirs us with an incomparably greater longing to learn the principles, the method, the purpose of creation. This desire, this passion, has without doubt been implanted in us by God. And as the eye seeks light, as our body craves food, so our mind is impressed with the . . . natural desire to know the truth of God and the causes of what we observe." --Origen(185-254)”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“Church historians often ask, ‘Is the church a movement or an institution?' . . . I think it is both. . . . I believe the people of God in history live in a tension between an ideal--the universal communion of saints--and the specific--the particular people in a definite time and place. The church’s mission in time calls for institutions: special rules, special leaders, special places. But when institutions themselves obstruct the spread of the gospel rather than advancing it, then movements of renewal arise to return to the church’s basic mission in the world.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“Dear dying Lamb,” believers sing, “thy precious Blood Shall never lose its power, Till all the ransomed Church of God Be saved to sin no more.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“Reason, said Butler, provides no complete system of knowledge, and in ordinary life it can offer us only probabilities.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“Jesus was a Jew. He came from a Jewish family; he studied the Jewish Scriptures; he observed the Jewish religion. Any serious study of his life makes this so clear that many people have asked if Jesus ever intended to create that company of followers we call “the church.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, Fifth Edition: The Story of the Church for Today's Readers

“Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central event the humiliation of its God.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, Fifth Edition: The Story of the Church for Today's Readers

“Those who live most devoutly for the world to come are often in the best position to change the present.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“Pride, which we have called the root of vices, far from being satisfied with the extinction of one virtue, raises itself up against all the members of the soul, and as a universal and deadly disease corrupts the whole body.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“Leo’s use of the gospel texts to support Peter’s primacy flew in the face of several difficulties, however: first, the Gospels make clear that preeminence among the followers of Christ was not to be according to the pattern of the princes of the world who exercise lordship and authority. Christ’s disciples must lead by humble service. Second, Peter continued to be notoriously unstable. Even in the Matthew 16:23 passage Jesus rebuked him and called him “Satan” for not understanding “the things that be of God.” Later he denied his Lord in the moment of crisis, and Paul criticized him as an unreliable disciple. Third, the theory assumes that the grant of authority was not to Peter personally but to his office as bishop of Rome, but this identification of authority with a particular office is nowhere evident in the text.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“The mystery of the God-man was central to Christian worship long before it became central to Christian thinking. “A deep instinct,” J. S. Whale once told the undergraduates at Cambridge University, “has always told the Church that our safest eloquence concerning the mystery of Christ is in our praise. A living Church is a worshiping, singing Church; not a school of people holding all the correct doctrines.” Whale meant that the most treasured hymns of the church have always treated Christ as an object of worship. We find the beating heart of Christian experience not in the church’s creed but in its music.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“The mystery of the God-man was central to Christian worship long before it became central to Christian thinking. “A deep instinct,” J. S. Whale once told the undergraduates at Cambridge University, “has always told the Church that our safest eloquence concerning the mystery of Christ is in our praise. A living Church is a worshiping, singing Church; not a school of people holding all the correct doctrines.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“The church, said Calvin, is not subject to secular government except in obviously secular matters. On the other hand, the church has the obligation under the sovereign God, to guide the secular authorities in spiritual matters. Such a vision sent Calvin’s followers throughout Europe as a spiritual conspiracy seeking the overthrow of false religion and restrictive governments.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“yardstick by which to judge who might be saved: participation in the two sacraments, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; an upright moral life; and a public profession of the faith. These were adequate for a disciplined church on earth.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“During boomer years the ethic of self-denial, including concepts of duty, postponed gratification, and self-restraint, which earlier Americans considered virtues, were no longer advertised or considered valuable. Only rights and opportunities. By stressing the liberation of the self, expressive Americans came to treat every commitment—from marriage and work to politics and religion—not as moral obligations but as mere instruments of personal happiness. And millions “caught the spirit.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“Calvin saw the old doctrine of predestination—taught by Paul, Augustine, and Luther—as a source of religious devotion. More than a problem of the mind, Calvin considered divine election to eternal life the deepest source of confidence, humility, and moral power.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language

“On the contrary, said Paul, if they really have accepted Christ by faith, they have accepted the way of Christ and the mind of Christ. The man who really loves God can do as he chooses, for if he really loves God he will choose to do the will of God.”
― Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language