Martin Luther Quotes

“is theologian."4"Both a men seemed agreed that to follow the letter of scripture did not lead to makes what is that letter; the from spirit the discern to best God. They disagreed on what the Spirit taught when it led. Erasmus judged the spirit that interpreted scripture according to the morality produced by this enlightened reading; Luther judged the reading of scripture on whether it assured triumph over death through Christ. It appears that both men worked backward from their deepest concerns about life and faith to declare that they had been led by God's spirit to a result that in fact was dictated to each by experience.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“is theologian."4"Both a men seemed agreed that to follow the letter of scripture did not lead to makes what is that letter; the from spirit the discern to best God. They disagreed on what the Spirit taught when it led. Erasmus judged the spirit that interpreted scripture according to the morality produced by this enlightened reading; Luther judged the reading of scripture on whether it assured triumph over death through Christ.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther called his tractate An Admonition to Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry in The manuscript survives, and the editors of the Weimar edition note with some asperity that its punctuation conforms to no rules-perhaps an indication that Luther wrote in white-hot temper. The tone of the opening is surprisingly mild given Luther's penchant for fury when things did not go his way. He was obviously trying to be diplomatic. In their twelfth article the peasants expressed a desire to be instructed if their interpretations of scripture and fairness were incorrect. Luther was happy to
give them the instruction they sought. The mildest of peasants could not have been pleased with his detailed response to their grievances.
Luther began at the heart of the matter. Without doubt, he said, some among the peasants expressed their fine Christian sentiments only for "paint and show," since "it is not possible in such a great host that all should be true Christians and have good intentions."30 His abiding conviction that true Christians formed a tiny minority among those who professed faith would seemingly force him to conclude that even among his own disciples, most were damned. If true Christians were always an unknown few, no political order was possible that assumed all nominal Christians to be equal. The majority of professing Christians would always live by selfish principles, and any program with specific details that claimed to be Christian could be only be "color and shine," pretense and appearance.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Some social thinkers have argued that a class is most likely to become revolutionary when its living conditions have been improving and it encounters some blockade that threatens to stop its progress.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther said images were tolerable if they were not worshipped. A cobbler undertook to engage Luther in debate, quoting as "scripture" the sentence "I wish my bride to be naked and do not wish for her to be wearing her gown." Apparently he meant that one should approach God directly without the gown of images, but the absurdity of the "quotation" made Luther put his face in his
He quickly changed his mind about the wisdom of a literary debate. When he got back to Wittenberg, he advised the princes to expel Karlstadt from Saxony without delay, and by September 18 Karlstadt was ordered out of the elector's territories. Ronald Sider has summarized the differences between the styles of Luther and Karlstadt. Luther wanted to go slowly; Karlstadt was in a hurry and maintained the activist faith that (in my view) resonates in the great works published by Luther in 1520, that if right doctrines were clearly proclaimed and argued from scripture, preachers could be hold, God would do the rest, and the gospel would take care of itself." In a letter of October 1520 to a friend about the uproar caused by publication of the Babylonian Captivity, Luther wrote confidently of the tumults that must come when the gospel was truly preached.34 That continued to be his opinion at Worms. His attitude in that heady time was clearly to let justice be done though the world fall. But by 1524 Luther was thinking as a tactician; Karlstadt was booming ahead, in expectation not that God would open the skies and do miracles to vindicate him but that God would act through the common folk to make right doctrine prevail. Luther's passion for order was such that he could brook no threat of tumult, and Karlstadt's reliance on the common people was alarming, especially when armed rebellion shouldered its way into German society. Luther could argue for Christian equality in a somewhat abstract form in 1520 when he wrote The Freedom of a Christian and the Babylonian Captivity. In 1524, when it came to flesh-and-blood peasants and other commoners, he changed his mind.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther said images were tolerable if they were not worshipped. A cobbler undertook to engage Luther in debate, quoting as "scripture" the sentence "I wish my bride to be naked and do not wish for her to be wearing her gown." Apparently he meant that one should approach God directly without the gown of images, but the absurdity of the "quotation" made Luther put his face in his
He quickly changed his mind about the wisdom of a literary debate.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther said images were tolerable if they were not worshipped. A cobbler undertook to engage Luther in debate, quoting as "scripture" the sentence "I wish my bride to be naked and do not wish for her to be wearing her gown." Apparently he meant that one should approach God directly without the gown of images, but the absurdity of the "quotation" made Luther put his face in his”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“More dangerous than anything else in the minds of sober authorities was Miintzer's vision of a level society where emperor, king, pope, bishops, and other officials in a social and economic hierarchy gave way to pure democracy
where all Christians were equal in the sight of God and one another, a universal society of love and kinship. Those who refused to lower themselves from their commanding heights would be pulled down by force of arms.'"
Muntzer's appeal to the poor brought an immediate and enthusiastic response-and fear and hatred from many who saw in him a harbinger of revolution, although, as in the French Revolution much later, some of the wealthy heard him gladly and were ready to throw in their lot with him. Mentzer seemed to go from peak to peak of certainty and fanaticism. He began organizing recruits for the great apocalyptic war that would inaugurate the thousand-year kingdom of Christ. In March 1524 he preached a fierce sermon, using as a text Deuteronomy 7:5, "Ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire." His followers rushed out to set fire to the Mallerbach Chapel near Allstedt, where a picture of the Virgin was said to have miraculous powers to cure the sick.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“In 1523 Luther was still arguing that a Christian congregation had the authority to judge all doctrines and to call its own In effect he called upon Christian parishes to expel Catholic priests who taught doctrines contrary to the word of God and to install in their place preachers of the gospel. But when peasants demanded the right to choose their pastors and installed preachers whose doctrines differed radically from Luther's, he quickly and with characteristic vehemence retreated from this dangerous democratic impulse. The puritans who followed the teachings of John Calvin continued to insist on the right of congregations to choose their pastors-and so contributed mightily to the ideals of democracy in Scotland, England, and the United States. Germany was to go in another direction, and although Luther cannot be blamed for this authoritarian German bent, his growing distrust of the common people was so great that his Reformation did not oppose a broader national evolution to rule from the top.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther never organized any campaign against the Jews, and, as Heiko Oberman has said, despite the ferocity of his tirades against them he never truly renounced the notion of coexistence between Jews and Christians."' But the fact that Luther's hostility to Jews was not the same as modern anti-Semitism does not excuse it. It was as bad as Luther could make it, and that was bad enough to leave a legacy that had hateful consequences for centuries.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Oberman relates this fury of Luther's as part of an apocalyptic expectation that became more and more pronounced as Luther drew near the end of his life.27 I would add that the increasing ferocity of these apocalyptic hopes represents the nadir of Luther's expectations for his movement in time and history. It had been done in by the forces of darkness represented by Jews, papists, defectors from within his own ranks, and the Turks, whose threats both to the empire and to Christian faith seemed near and overwhelming. In such dire times, only the direct intervention of God himself by the return of Christ could redeem both the world and Luther's gospel. Here Luther became a railing prophet akin to those in all ages who believe that if they speak in wild boldness, they will force God to act.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Roland Bainton in his effort to make the best of Luther declared that Luther's view of the Jews "was entirely religious and by no means racial."'`' True; the crackpot version of social Darwinism that gave rise to "racial" anti-Semitism was a creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luther hated the Jews because they rejected Christ. But his fury was no less cruel and vicious because its underlying motives were different or because his suggestions for carrying his cruelty to some final solution were less comprehensive and efficient.
His fury culminated in his vicious book of 1543, On the Jews and Their Lies. In late 1542 Pope Paul III had issued a call for the great reforming council to assemble at Trent beginning in 1545. It was to become a Catholic and papal triumph. What Trent would become was unclear in 1542, but Luther could see clearly enough that it represented a defeat for the evangelical cause. Through these years his attacks on foes of all kinds became even more vulgar and inflammatory because, as Heiko Oberman has said, he felt his work threatened on every
Personal issues may also have been an influence. His beloved daughter
Magdalena died in his arms on September 20, 1542. Afterward his grief was intense, and he spoke feelingly of the terror before death while affirming his trust in Christ.-'' This combination of woes may have driven him to lash out at someone, and the Jews were there, testifying to his worst fear, that Jesus had not risen from the dead, and that Chrisitians would enjoy no victory over the grave. Whatever the cause, his outrageous attack in On the Jews and Their Lies represents one of those rhetorical horrors that may be explained in the various ways that we explain the cruelties that human beings inflict on others when the tormentors feel their own place in the universe threatened with annihilation. Yet explanation cannot finally excuse the horror.
After raging against the Jews for dozens of pages of tedious vehemence, Luther recommended what should be done with them: Their synagogues should be burned down; their books should be taken from them, "not leaving them one leaf"; they should be "forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country"; and they should "be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing."22 Christians were guilty for not taking vengeance against the Jews for having killed Christ and for having killed innocent Christians for three hundred years after the Crucifixion, for not "striking them to death."23”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“People with escatalogical impulses will read anything that confirms their obsessions, the more dramatic and filled with numbers and calculations, the better.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther never saw himself as the leader of a rebellion that might organize itself politically to force a government to accede to its wishes. The Christian minister should speak out and be willing to suffer for his opinions, trusting that God was sovereign. Always Luther remained fixed on the admonition of Jesus in John 18:36, "My kingdom is not of this world.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Whoever set out to rule a people by law, he said, must treat them like asses, for law was a matter of compulsion. To live under the law was to recognize a sickness, and the experience of Israel under the law helped prepare for the grace that would come in Christ.
That finally was the main purpose of the law, to make the people of God recognize that it does not suffice. Quoting Paul, he declared that by law can no one please God. Moses could do no more than to show us what we ought to do. But in the law is no strength to do what we ought. The law leaves us in sin, and death then comes on us as revenge and punishment for sin. And as Paul said, sin is the sting of death.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther found himself making a revolutionary shift in his evaluation of scripture. The books of the Bible were not all of the same worth. The divine was not found equally in all its parts. Therefore a translation could not be a mere release of the bare text upon the world. Luther's translation came with many helps to ensure that readers understood it as he did. The most important of these helps were prefaces and sidenotes. He affixed to the front of his New Testament a general preface in which he explained how the work was to be read.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“God in the Hebrew Bible, as it emerged from its editing process, is almighty; he creates heaven and earth with a word, and he is above all other gods-but he creates a serpent who undoes all his creative work. Often he acts like a large and powerful and somewhat bad-tempered human being. Like any landlord, he walks in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. He gets angry. He bargains with his people. He changes his mind. He falls into vindictive rages, as in the case of Noah's flood or the Tower of Babel or the unfortunate cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he plays atrocious games, as in the case of his command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. He has a somewhat bizarre preoccupation with the length of Samson's hair. He performs prodigious wonders, such as slaughtering the first-born sons of Egypt and leading the Israelites to safety through the parted waters of the Red Sea-only to discover that those who have witnessed those stupendous miracles quickly forget them and turn to complaint and the worship of other gods. Like all of us, the God of the Hebrew Bible is a mess of contradictions.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Thomas Aquinas had delivered the medieval judgment on the Bible in his emphatic sentence: "The author of the Bible is God." This notion of inspiration naturally led to the opinion that God had hidden in the sacred text all sorts of esoteric truths about various subjects. In a paradoxical way, the belief that God had dictated the various books of the Bible to inspired writers contributed to the medieval habit of not reading the Bible as a book-or as the collection of books that it is. It became rather a treasury of proof texts to be used as needed for the support of this or that doctrine propounded by theologians and preachers. God was everywhere equally in it. With the allegorical interpretation, anything could be found in all of it.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Thomas Aquinas had delivered the medieval judgment on the Bible in his emphatic sentence: "The author of the Bible is God." This notion of inspiration naturally led to the opinion that God had hidden in the sacred text all sorts of esoteric truths about various subjects. In a paradoxical way, the belief that God had dictated the various books of the Bible to inspired writers contributed to the medieval habit of not reading the Bible as a book-or as the collection of books that it is. It became rather a treasury of proof texts to be used as needed for the support of this or that doctrine propounded by theologians and preachers. God was everywhere equally in it. With the allegorical interpretation,”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther accused Henry and the papists of begging the question, of claiming that the traditions of the church should be observed merely because they were traditions, without considering whether they came from God or from human invention. "I cry gospel, gospel, Christ, Christ; they respond fathers fathers, custom, custom, laws, laws, where as I say truly that the fathers, custom, and law have often erred ... Christ cannot err."-'" Perhaps Luther's greatest insult was to say that no one imagined that Henry had written his book by himself.''
On Luther rolled in a torrent of abuse. "Draw near to my rod, you vainglorious Thomist," he cried. "I will teach you how to argue about dogma."22 At the end he crowed that he had been victorious over the king by opposing God's word to human custom." "Here I stand," he wrote,
here I sit, here I remain, here I glory, here I triumph, here I contemn Papists, Thomists, Henricians, sophists, and all the gates of hell all the more in that they are led astray by the sayings of holy men or customs. God's word is over all. The divine majesty works with me, and I do not care if a thousand Augustines, a thousand Cyprians, a thousand
churches of Henry stand against me. God cannot err or fail; Augustine and Cyprian like all the elects can err, and they did err.-"
The issue, as any Catholic knew, was not whether the fathers could err as individuals; it was whether they had reached consensus on a core of doctrines necessary to be believed. Luther's furious language indicates a willingness to attack that ancient consensus in the name of the gospel and to elevate his own understanding above the agreements of centuries.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Christians were to love one another. In his seventh sermon Luther told his flock that they now had the gospel "clear and bright," but they were not demonstrating love for each other. If they did not learn to love, God would "send a great plague on you, for he will not have his word preached and revealed in vain, and he will not permit anyone to scorn or contemn his What would this "plague" be? literal plague? to be overcome by enemies from without? Luther does not say. His language is vague enough to allow the interpretation that would become standard in mainline Protestantism, that the judgments of God are seen as miraculous only by the real Christians, while to others they appear as part of the endless shifting of the historical process.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Within the complexities and contradictions of Luther's views lay a couple of clear and important points. One was that the heart was more important in religion than outward practice, and some hearts required longer than others for enlightenment. The other was that true Christians were a minority and could not create the kingdom of heaven by forcing conformity on the majority. This is an essential tenet, one that set a great gulf between him and Karlstadt. Karlstadt could take the priesthood of all believers to a radically democratic conclusion. Since all true Christians were equal, they could withstand the elector himself because they could, in a certain sense, vote his views down. Luther disagreed. All his days he held that the majority of professing Christians might not correspond to the scattered "true Christians" who were always a hidden minority, known only to God. The hiddenness of the true church kept him from espousing radical theories of Christian democracy. No visible crowd of revolutionaries could claim to be so pure that they could take on themselves the inauguration of the kingdom of God. No group could be taken as true Christians merely because they said they were. Luther would not make Wittenberg a theocracy that could serve Calvin as a model later on in Geneva.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“the divine logic of fanatics in all the ages: If we are certain of the truth, we should act upon it right away no matter what the consequences.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“In his letter to Melanchthon, Luther mentioned his father's comment made when young Martin, newly ordained, performed his first mass. Martin
had explained his own vow. His father had replied, "Let's hope it's not a trick of Satan." These words took root in his heart, Luther wrote, and he never heard his father speak afterward without thinking of them .31 In token of this recollection, Luther dedicated his judgment on Monastic Vows to Hans and prefaced it with a long "letter" addressed to his father.31 In it he recalled how he had entered the monastery against his father's will and how Hans had resolved to "chain me up with an honorable and opulent marriage." Again he told the story of Hans's disappointment and wrath, his own efforts to stand against his father, and Hans's crushing rejoinder, "And have you not heard that you should obey your parents ?"36
As Luther saw things, they had all worked out to the good. Satan had been the source of his vow, but God had used Satan's evil for his own purposes. By becoming a monk and living a monastic life without reproach for many years, Luther declared himself fit to denounce monasticism free from the reproach of enemies that he did not know what he was talking about. In the attention Satan gave him, Luther had, paradoxically, proof of his divine calling.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“In his letter to Melanchthon, Luther mentioned his father's comment made when young Martin, newly ordained, performed his first mass. Martin
had explained his own vow. His father had replied, "Let's hope it's not a trick of Satan." These words took root in his heart, Luther wrote, and he never heard his father speak afterward without thinking of them .31 In token of this recollection, Luther dedicated his judgment on Monastic Vows to Hans and prefaced it with a long "letter" addressed to his father.31 In it he recalled how he had entered the monastery against his father's will and how Hans had resolved to "chain me up with an honorable and opulent marriage." Again he told the story of Hans's disappointment and wrath, his own efforts to stand against his father, and Hans's crushing rejoinder, "And have you not heard that you should obey your parents ?"36”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“It does not require daring psychological insight to see that the almighty necessity of Christ in the definition of virtue and the all-powerful God who thunders out of this treatise against Latomus met deep personal needs in Luther. He was riddled with an existential torment-fear that was part of his being so that for him life and suffering were one. He was afraid of death; he was afraid of his fear of death. He was afraid of that which he could not
understand-including the stubborn refusal of so many people, among them the young emperor, to see in scripture the clear truth of God that he found there. Luther's loneliness at the Wartburg was a living metaphor for the loneliness he felt within Christendom.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Before Luther's vehemence many humanists and others desirous of reform in the church now began to lose confidence that he was the prophet for whom they so earnestly waited. Erasmus had committed himself firmly to neutrality. Now his hostility to Luther hardened. A Louvain theologian, Peter Barbirius, tried to coax him into an alliance against Luther. Erasmus replied bitterly on August 13, 1521. He said he had read less than a dozen pages of Luther, and he reproached those who had attacked Luther as a seditious person inciting the common people to revolt-as Latomus had done, although
Erasmus did not mention him by name. His bitterness and hostility extended to the Lutheran camp and to those Lutherans who "by odious means" had tried to seduce him to their side. Yet, said he to Barbirius, "I fear that they are very numerous who with mighty invective attack secondary propositions among Luther such as, Although one may do good works, they are sinful,' although they themselves do not believe in that which creates the foundation of our faith, that the soul survives the death of the body."''
Erasmus called such a paradoxical statement a "secondary proposition," and we may be tempted to follow his lead. On one level Luther's declaration that all good works are tainted with sin sounds like modern questions based on sociobiology and psychological inquiry. Is selfless human action possible, or is there in the very performance of an unselfish act a superior sense of generosity and magnanimity that are desirable emotional rewards for benevolence? At a certain point such questions may seem to lead only to sophomoric squabbles over meaningless issues.
For Luther something grand and fundamental was at stake. That was that morality could not become a substitute for intimate involvement in the drama of redemption. To those satisfied with their conduct in the world (as most of us usually are) Luther's message was one of radical introspection, intended to drive us not to the enumeration of our sinful acts but to the examination of the spirit that motivated them. In the complexity of that infinite rejection of our own power of disinterested benevolence, we were to be driven to a saving despair about ourselves and into the arms of Christ, who alone could save us. Morality without Christ might have value in the world in helping people get along with one another, and Luther never denied the role of reason in helping human beings create orderly societies. By his assertion that we sin when we do good works, he made a frontal assault on Renaissance intellectuals enamored not only with classical literature but with the proud sense of culture that was part of it. He implicitly attacked the pride not only of those who found virtue in giving alms, going on pilgrimage, and the like but also of those who claimed to be good because they imitated virtuous men of classical times. Luther made Christ the only virtue and made it impossible to speak of goodness in any way without calling Christ into the argument.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“Luther had outfoxed his enemies; he had made the speech he was to have been prevented from making, and by his account at least von der Ecken was furious and shouted at him. He had not answered the question. The imperial officer attacked with a litany of names, heresies already condemned in the past that Luther was now resurrecting as if they were new discoveries. Heretics had always claimed the support of scripture against the church, he said. The worst heresies were those in which a little error was mixed with a lot of true doctrine-perhaps a slap against those in the room like Glapion who had said that Luther's books contained much good. Luther was a man who could stumble and err, and scripture could not be interpreted by one fallible man.
We cannot draw things into doubt and dispute that the Catholic Church has judged already, things that have passed into usage, rite, and observance, things that our fathers held onto with firm faith, for which they suffered pain and torture, for which even thousands suffered death rather than reject one of them! And now you want to seduce us from the way to which our fathers were true! And what would the Jews and Turks and Saracens and the other enemies of our faith say when they heard about it? Why, they would burst into scornful laughter! Here are we Christians beginning to argue whether we have believed correctly until now! Do not deceive yourself, Martin. You are not the only one who knows the scripture, not the only one who has struggled to convey the true meaning of holy scripture-not after so many holy doctors have worked day and night to explain holy writ! Do not set your judgment over that of so many famous men. Do not imagine you know more than all of them. Do not throw the most sacred orthodox faith into doubt, the faith that Christ the most perfect lawgiver ordained, the faith that the apostles spread over the world, the faith confirmed by miracles, the faith that martyrs strengthened with their red blood ... You wait in vain, Martin, for a disputation over things that you are obligated to believe with certain and professing
Von der Ecken's assumption was one of the great medieval myths, a myth taken for granted for so long that only when it was sternly questioned did those who accepted it see how fragile it was. The myth was that history was a positive and progressive force, shaped by divinity, and that revelation became more certain and more detailed with the passage of time. It seems clear from this speech that von der Ecken recognized the fragility of the assumptions
that give faith plausibility and how Luther's attack threatened to bring them all down. In a room now filling with darkness, the voice of the imperial orator must have been a cry against a greater darkness that von der Ecken saw creeping over the world. If Luther was right, was anything certain? How could one man set himself against history?”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“This treatise on the church would seem to make the "true church" an article of faith that could be neither proved nor disproved, safe from refutation, in a realm beyond the range of reason's dreadful artillery. It represents a tour de force not only against the Catholic Church but also against the notion that history, tradition, or custom could be proof of the validity of any
institution. In this direction lay perhaps Luther's most truly revolutionary impulse. The medieval mentality had been to say that anything long sanctioned by tradition was valid because tradition or custom represented the working out of the will of an almighty and invisible God. The Middle Ages much more than the age of Enlightenment might sing in almost unanimous chorus, "Whatever is, is right." This willingness to dismiss the authority of custom in favor of a scriptural text that might radically contradict custom-or tradition-could lead to the notion that all the institutions of society might be made over anew. These might include positive law-law as announced in statutes and royal decrees. They might include even the political order itself.
Yet this thundering treatise against Catharinus with its hidden church known only to God ran against a stronger impulse of Luther's that was soon to assert itself once it became clear that he would have no reconciliation with the Catholic Church. He was by temperament conservative in his political views, and like other educated people of his time he feared the common people.
Moreover, despite the apocalyptic fervor of this tractate, Luther was far from being one of those souls who look skyward every day expecting to hear the last trumpet and to see the heavens split with the return of Christ in judgment. The end times had begun; but he did not make predictions about how long they would last, nor did he claim that Christians might help things along by revolting against Catholic princes.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

“even when Luther wrote the truth, said Erasmus, he did so in such a way as to rob truth of its power. But those who had written against him by the clumsiness of their attacks would have done harm had they defended the best of causes. In his opinion, Erasmus said, the only success in this affair lay in seeking the glory of Christ. One might strike out right and left against foes, but nothing could move the stone where was engraved this "mystic sentence: The Lord knows who belongs to him." Nothing that came from the spirit of Christ could be repressed by human force, no matter how much one might try; nothing strictly human could endure, no matter with how much zeal it might be carried forward.”
― Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death