Brad S. Gregory > Quotes

“Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus wrong. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Yes we can. Or so most participants in world history’s most insatiably consumerist society, the United States, continue implicitly to claim through their actions, considering the number of self-identified American Christians in the early twenty-first century who seem bent on acquiring ever more and better stuff, including those who espouse the “prosperity Gospel” within American religious hyperpluralism.190 Tocqueville’s summary description of Americans in the early 1830s has proven a prophetic understatement: “people want to do as well as possible in this world without giving up their chances in the next.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right,”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“It was not something called "religion" distinguished from the rest of life, but rather all of life lived in a certain way.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“with competing claims apparent among groups such as the Diggers, Quakers, Ranters, Baptists, Muggletonians, and Fifth Monarchists”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“human rights" cannot serve as a stable, shared basis for morality in a society riven by fundamental disagreement about what "human" means, as is apparent from the abortion debate.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“modern era of multivalent "secularity" and "exclusive humanism" in which we live, a shift from the premodern, socially embedded "porous self" to the meaning-constructing "buffered self" that lives within our "immanent frame" of disenchanted modern reality that (supposedly) lacks room for the sacred.24”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“But upon closer inspection, the Dutch Republic is vastly different from the Spanish Netherlands, specifically concerning the relationship between religion and politics. In fact, that relationship in the Dutch Republic is unique in Western Europe. In the Dutch Republic there is no state church, as there are in France, Spain, England, German Lutheran territories, Scandinavian countries, or the Reformed Protestant territories of the Holy Roman Empire. People in the Dutch Republic do not have to belong to a particular religion. Well into the seventeenth century, the dominant, state-supported, public church in the Dutch Republic includes only a small minority of the population. Equally unique is the fact that, from its establishment, the Dutch Republic remains a haven for religious groups of all sorts.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“It is frequently alleged that all human meaning, morality, and values can be nothing more than whatever human beings of different times and cultures subjectively and contingently construct for themselves, or at least that we cannot know whether any among them might be more than this.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“The first hint of what is to come occurs near the end of Luther’s obscurity. In September 1517 the dutiful Johann Rhau-Grunenberg publishes a one-page broadsheet by Luther with a boring title: A Disputation against Scholastic Theology. In his broadsheet, Luther ironically lists concise propositions to be argued over—a central practice of scholasticism—in order to criticize scholasticism itself, sort of like a poet writing a poem to criticize poetry.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“Through the medium of print, thorny questions intended for debate among authorized experts have been made available for public comment for the first time. But only a tiny percentage of the population can read Latin. Writing about touchy theological issues in German would be something else entirely, which is why it’s so alarming when Luther decides to respond to his critics publicly in the vernacular.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“These cities are also important centers of commerce, artisanal crafts, education, and culture—nodes in a network of communication and travel that connects the cities of northern France, England, and the Low Countries to the Italian peninsula. Their influence puts them in a position to shape the religious life of their communities in crucial ways. Over the previous couple of centuries, many of these cities have wrested control of church institutions away from bishops, precisely because many urban leaders were conscientious Christians who cared about the Church.22 If the bishops wouldn’t oversee reforms, secular authorities would.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“According to the Gospels, Jesus did not tell his listeners to believe whatever they wished to believe as individuals, or to follow him only in their private thoughts and interior sentiments but not in concrete, public, shared human life.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“A majority of political representatives that convene at the Diet of Speyer in 1529 vote to undo the changes in religion and enforce the Edict of Worms. A minority of five evangelical princes and fourteen cities protest this vote—the origin of the term Protestants.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“Regardless of their leaders' decisions, nation-states-their bureaucratic reach augmented by the increasingly centralized orchestration of tax revenues, industrial and communications technologies, military power, and police forces-controlled the churches and all expressions of religion with greater effectiveness than had ever been possible during the Reformation era. During the Cold War, this was no less true of the United States than it was of the Soviet Union, despite the radically different ways in which these two nations regarded religion and treated religious believers.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation appears in August, a scathing manifesto in German by a man now convinced of his role in a cosmic battle between God and Satan.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“Some scholars in recent years have expressed a certain wonderment that "religion is back"; the wonder is rather that it was thought ever to have departed, apart from the "scholarly wish fulfillment" or projections of those who accepted classic theories of modernization and secularization.30”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“Generally speaking, these Christians want basic changes inspired by the gospel to infuse their traditional, broader understanding of “divine law.” They want the right to choose their own clergy. They want an end to feudal taxes and fees they consider burdensome and unjust. They want access to shared woods, fields, and streams for their use. And they want the abolition of traditional serfdom and the oppressive conditions it entails.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“When a burdened Augustinian friar in Wittenberg in October 1516 lamented in a letter how busy he was, no Reformation was in sight. Only Luther’s religious anxiety and his pastoral concern for Christian souls were present. By the summer of 1521, Martin Luther is Europe’s most famous man and its all-time bestselling author.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“Any attempt to “cover everything” would succeed only in producing a completely unmanageable mountain of data. Indeed, in proportion to its increase, which has been enormous in the past half century, the sheer volume of historical scholarship—what Daniel Lord Smail has recently called “the inflationary spiral of research overproduction, coupled with an abiding fear of scholarly exposure for not keeping up with one’s field”—paradoxically militates against comprehension of the past in relationship to the present.

A different approach is needed if we are to avoid being overwhelmed by specialized scholarship, the proliferation of which tends to reinforce ingrained assumptions about historical periodization that in turn hamper an adequate understanding of change over time.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“After the Leipzig Disputation, Luther’s cornerstone becomes more firmly settled. “By scripture alone”—or in Latin, sola scriptura—becomes his rock. On this basis he will criticize whatever in Church teaching and practice contradicts God’s Word. On this basis he will reconstruct authentic Christian teaching and practice for the sake of laypeople, who have been sadly misled through no fault of their own. And on this basis he will become the unwitting progenitor of a revolution in Western Christianity—a revolution that will affect just about everything because of how religion is interconnected with the rest of life.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“The Calvinist nobles convey their objections by throwing two imperial representatives out the window of Prague Castle in the famous “defenestration of Prague.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“In the 1520s, dozens of free imperial cities are the sites of an aggressive, disruptive Reformation movement as unexpected as an Augustinian friar becoming a publishing sensation and celebrity papal critic.7”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“The key point is not, as is commonly but wrongly believed, that the empirical investigation of the natural world made or makes a transcendent God’s existence increasingly implausible. It is rather that this presumption depended historically and continues to depend on a conception of God as a hypothetical supernatural agent in competition with natural causality, polemically vulgarized, for example, in the rants of Richard Dawkins about the “God hypothesis” and the putative “God delusion.” In diametric contrast, with the Christian conception of God as transcendent creator of the universe, it is precisely and only because of his radical difference from creation that God can be present to and through it.89 This is the metaphysics that continues to underlie and make possible a sacramental worldview, against supersessionist conceptions of history, in combination with any and all scientific findings.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“The dispute between Erasmus and Luther signals the end of Christian humanism as a reforming initiative aiming to renew Christendom as a whole. As the sixteenth century unfolds, Protestant and Catholic humanists will marshal their knowledge of languages and scholarship against each other in the service of rival theological commitments. Like Catholics and magisterial Protestants more generally, Erasmus and Luther believe in original sin but remain deeply divided about the extent and the range of its effects. Ultimately, this divide implies very different views about human nature. On one side are those convinced that only if utterly sinful human beings acknowledge their inability to contribute to their salvation can they be saved by God’s grace. On the other side are those who agree that human beings cannot be saved without God but that we retain some goodness and capacity to freely cooperate with God’s grace as a necessary precondition for our salvation. Different views of human nature go together with different views of God and of how God interacts with human beings. And through all the rancor eternal salvation is hanging in the balance.”
― Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World

“difference in kind between empirical questions characteristic of science and philosophical questions about the fact of existence itself (a distinction lost on those who think that the universe as a whole, or matter-energy, or anything else that exists, might adequately explain its own being).135”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society