18 Quotes by Alec Ryrie

The simple justification for the elders and their work was Christ’s detailed prescription in Matthew’s Gospel for how Christians should deal with sinners among the faithful: first private admonition, then progressively more formal reprimands, and finally, if repentance was not forthcoming, expulsion from the community.

The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left.

Luther’s fire caught because fuel had been quietly building up for some time. The principal fuel was desire for reform of the church.

Luther’s revolution had, like all great revolutions, failed. But like all great revolutions, it had created a new world.

That we should all have a say in choosing our own rulers and that those rulers ‘powers over us should be limited—these principles are in obvious tension, as every society that has tried to combine liberty and democracy has discovered. Without Protestantism and its peculiar preoccupations, that strange and marvelous synthesis could never have come into being as it has.

Martin Luther was the Reformation’s indispensable firestarter. Would there have been a Reformation if young Martin had followed his father’s wishes and become a lawyer? Who knows, but the Reformation as it actually happened is unimaginable without him.

Luther was horrified. Partly this was because, for all his spiritual radicalism, he was deeply socially conservative. His instinct was to obey rightful authorities, to respect social hierarchies, and to preserve good order. For him, Christian freedom meant inner liberation, not political upheaval.

Martin Luther was a friar as well as a professor. When a man in his position accused the church of moneygrubbing, people were ready to listen.

The kind of sociopolitical structure that Protestantism engenders—based on free inquiry, participatory politics, and limited government—tends to favor market economics.