Ninety Five Theses Quotes

Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me. Amen!

Let the Law, sin, and the devil cry out against us until their outcry fills heaven and earth. The Spirit of God outcries them all. Our feeble groans, "Abba, Father," will be heard of God sooner than the combined racket of hell, sin, and the Law.

The Law scolds us, sin screams at us, death thunders at us, the devil roars at us. In the midst of the clamor the Spirit of Christ cries in our hearts: "Abba, Father." And this little cry of the Spirit transcends the hullabaloo of the Law, sin, death, and the devil, and finds a hearing with God.

1517 Theologian Martin Luther writes The Ninety-Five Theses, protesting against clerical abuses. It triggers the start of the Reformation.

Because love grows by works of love, and man becomes better;

When the Law drives you to the point of despair, let it drive you a little farther, let it drive you straight into the arms of Jesus who says: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Be a sinner—believing and rejoicing in Christ more boldly than you sin. And do so because Christ has overcome sin, death, and the world. If we are in this world, then we cannot help but sin. Our existence is not the dwelling place of righteousness. As Peter says, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.5

Manifest in this trade (commercial sale of indulgences via bankers) at the same time was a pernicious tendency in the Roman Catholic system, for the trade in indulgences was not an excess or an abuse but the direct consequence of the nomistic degradation of the gospel. That the Reformation started with Luther’s protest against this traffic in indulgences proves its religious origin and evangelical character. At issue here was nothing less than the essential character of the gospel, the core of Christianity, the nature of true piety. And Luther was the man who, guided by experience in the life of his own soul, again made people understand the original and true meaning of the gospel of Christ. Like the “righteousness of God,” so the term “penitence” had been for him one of the most bitter words of Holy Scripture. But when from Romans 1:17 he learned to know a “righteousness by faith,” he also learned “the true manner of penitence.” He then understood that the repentance demanded in Matthew 4:17 had nothing to do with the works of satisfaction required in the Roman institution of confession, but consisted in “a change of mind in true interior contrition” and with all its benefits was itself a fruit of grace. In the first seven of his ninety-five theses and further in his sermon on “Indulgences and Grace” (February 1518), the sermon on “Penitence” (March 1518), and the sermon on the “Sacrament of Penance” (1519), he set forth this meaning of repentance or conversion and developed the glorious thought that the most important part of penitence consists not in private confession (which cannot be found in Scripture) nor in satisfaction (for God forgives sins freely) but in true sorrow over sin, in a solemn resolve to bear the cross of Christ, in a new life, and in the word of absolution, that is, the word of the grace of God in Christ. The penitent arrives at forgiveness of sins, not by making amends (satisfaction) and priestly absolution, but by trusting the word of God, by believing in God’s grace. It is not the sacrament but faith that justifies. In that way Luther came to again put sin and grace in the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The forgiveness of sins, that is, justification, does not depend on repentance, which always remains incomplete, but rests in God’s promise and becomes ours by faith alone.

Beginning with the Psalms and continuing with Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews, Luther dug into Scripture, and it was these years of study, exegesis, writing, teaching, and preaching that formed the foundation of his theology—a theology that not only informed the Ninety-five Theses and his belief in salvation through grace alone, but also saved Luther from his own spiritual despair.

Yes, we've been spoiled by technology. We can't accept doing without loudspeakers or rotary presses. Handwritten placards and whispered proclamations just don't carry the same weight. Technology has devalued the impact of our own speech and writing. In the old days one man's call to arms was enough to set off an uprising - a few hand-printed leaflets, ninety-five theses nailed to a church door in Wittenberg. But today we need more, we need bigger and better, wider repercussions, mass-produced by machines and multiplied exponentially.

Baptism and Suffering XVI. It follows, therefore, that baptism makes all sufferings and especially death, profitable and helpful, since these things can only serve baptism in the doing of its work, i. e., in the slaying of sin. For he who would fulfil the work and purpose of his baptism and be rid of sin, must die. It cannot be otherwise. Sin, however, does not like to die, and for this reason it makes death so bitter and so horrible. Such is the grace and power of God that sin, which has brought death, is driven out again by its own work, viz., by death.

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there.

There are Californians who waiver in their allegiance to the climate of California. Sometimes the climate of San Francisco has made me cross. Sometimes I have thought that the winds in summer were too cold, that the fogs in summer were too thick. But whenever I have crossed the continent—when I have emerged from New York at ninety-five degrees, and entered Chicago at one hundred degrees—when I have been breathing the dust of alkali deserts and the fiery air of sagebrush plains—these are the times when I have always been buoyed up by the anticipation of inhaling the salt air of San Francisco Bay. If ever a summer wanderer is glad to get back to his native land, it is I, returning to my native fog. Like the prodigal youth who returned to his home and filled himself with husks, so I always yearn in summer to return to mine, and fill myself up with fog. Not a thin, insignificant mist, but a fog—a thick fog—one of those rich pea-soup August fogs that blow in from the Pacific Ocean over San Francisco. When I leave the heated capitals of other lands and get back to California uncooked, I always offer up a thank-offering to Santa Niebla, Our Lady of the Fogs. Out near the Presidio, where Don Joaquin de Arillaga, the old comandante, revisits the glimpses of the moon, clad in rusty armor, with his Spanish spindle-shanks thrust into tall leathern boots—there some day I shall erect a chapel to Santa Niebla. And I have vowed to her as an ex-voto a silver fog-horn, which horn will be wound by the winds of the broad Pacific, and will ceaselessly sound through the centuries the litany of Our Lady of the Fogs. Every Californian has good reason to be loyal to his native land. If even the Swiss villagers, born in the high Alps, long to return to their birthplace, how much more does the exiled Californian yearn to return to the land which bore him. There are other, richer, and more populous lands, but to the Californian born, California is the only place in which to live. And to the returning Californian, particularly if he be native-born, the love of his birthplace is only intensified by visits to other lands. Why do men so love their native soil? It is perhaps a phase of human love for the mother. For we are compact of the soil. Out of the crumbling granite eroded from the ribs of California’s Sierras by California’s mountain streams—out of earth washed into California’s great valleys by her mighty rivers—out of this the sons of California are made, brain, and muscle, and bone. Why then should they not love their mother, even as the mountaineers of Montenegro, of Switzerland, of Savoy, lover their mountain birth-place? Why should not exiled Californians yearn to return? And we sons of California always do return; we are always brought back by the potent charm of our native land—back to the soil which gave us birth—and at the last back to Earth, the great mother, from whom we sprung, and on whose bosom we repose our tired bodies when our work is done.

The third revolutionary upheaval, that of the Protestant Reformation, was initiated when Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517, insisting on the individual’s direct relationship with God; hence individual conscience—not established orthodoxy—was put forward as the key to salvation. A number of feudal rulers seized the opportunity to enhance their authority by embracing Protestantism, imposing it on their populations, and enriching themselves by seizing Church lands. Each side regarded the other as heretical, and disagreements turned into life-or-death struggles as political and sectarian disputes commingled. The barrier separating domestic and foreign disputes collapsed as sovereigns backed rival factions in their neighbors’ domestic, often bloody, religious struggles. The Protestant Reformation destroyed the concept of a world order sustained by the “two swords” of papacy and empire. Christianity was split and at war with itself.

The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.

one of the dates that historians like best is October 31, 1517. On that day one monk with mallet in hand nailed a document to the church door in Wittenberg. It contained a list of Ninety-Five Theses for a debate. The

When I pounded ninety-five theses at the Wittenberg doors in 2005 shortly after Ratzinger was made pope, I did so knowing that this man and his minions were a dangerous team to turn the church over to.

Ultimately, the Black Death planted the seeds of discontentment with the Church. Instead of being seen as a way for salvation, it was increasingly described as a corrupt institution. Less than 150 years later, the doubt sowed by the Black Death would come to a head as Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to a church door, beginning the Reformation.

His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive. They asserted that a Christianity founded on the spiritual power of God’s grace—in effect Christianity in its Platonized form as received from Saint Augustine—and the view of law and nature derived from Aristotle could never be reconciled. “The whole Aristotelian ethic,” Luther wrote, “is grace’s worst enemy.” And so as the tidal wave of Reformation overwhelmed the heart of Europe and changed its religious and cultural contours forever, it also swept Aristotle almost out of sight.

His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive.

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, setting off an upheaval that eventually split Christendom in two. Luther accused religious officials of being more concerned with money and power than saving souls, and challenged the Church to reform itself.

We can sense the heart of Luther’s concern about God if we begin with his public efforts at reform—with the Ninety-Five Theses that he displayed in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. The first of the ninety-five says simply: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” The last four theses carry us even closer to his main concern: 92.

Leo’s profligacy as patron and builder, which kept him perpetually strapped for cash, lay behind his authorization of the sale of indulgences in Germany, against which Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses was such a forceful protest.

The thirty-first of October 1517, when Martin Luther is said to have posted his ninety-five theses against indulgences on the door of the Castle Church in the small town of Wittenberg in Saxony,

These shifts started well before Luther nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses, so they were not launched by the Protestant Reformation per se. But the changing political and socioeconomic landscape of Europe found a supportive partner in Reformation theology. The language of God, argues Roper, married the gender hierarchy of early modern Europe, and subordinate wifedom became synonymous with being a godly woman. Biblical womanhood is rooted in human patriarchal structures that keep seeping back into the church, but the emphasis in biblical womanhood on being a wife was strengthened and reinforced during the social changes wrought by the sixteenth

In 1517 a prominent salesman of Papal indulgences, Tetzel, showed a shamelessness and buffoonery in his business which, more perhaps than anything else, impressed on people its inherent charlatanry. When he came to Wittenberg, Luther, failing to arouse the Elector of Saxony to action, and encouraged by Stanpitz, himself nailed on the church door the Ninety-five Theses which set Europe in a blaze, as men realized that a voice had at last been raised to utter what most felt—that the whole system of indulgences was a fraud and had no place in the Gospel.

Martin Luther nail his Ninety-five Theses to the Church of Wittenberg in 1517 AD as a new manifesto that spawns a whole new crop of Protestant revolutionaries.