Best 4 quotes of Alec Ryrie on MyQuotes

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.

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.