Alec Ryrie > Quotes

“What made Luther’s stance so outrageous was not that he valorized the Bible. That is hardly unusual for Christians. What was shocking was that he set it above everything else. He treated the views of the early church fathers, of more recent scholars, even of church councils, with great respect, but he would not be constrained by them. In the end, anything outside the Bible, including anyone else’s interpretation of the Bible, was a mere opinion. This was the true and enduring radicalism of Protestantism: its readiness to question every human authority and tradition.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“Luther’s revolution had, like all great revolutions, failed. But like all great revolutions, it had created a new world.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern 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.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“Protestants are Christians whose religion derives ultimately from Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church. They are a tree with many tangled branches but a single trunk.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“We cannot understand the modern age without understanding the dynamic history of Protestant Christianity.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“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.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“More important, however, Henry’s book found its mark in Rome. He had long resented the pope’s gift of glorious titles to the kings of Spain (“the Catholic King”) and France (“the Most Christian King”), while England was left out. Now, finally and after some negotiation, Henry got his prize and became “Defender of the Faith.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“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.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“Luther disliked the idea of secret meetings, which he said reminded him of rats. Calvin had found a way of forming the rats into a choir and then drilling them to march.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“It was sharpest of all for Protestants who did not belong to tightly organised and disciplined churches, in which there was either formal confession of sins (as in many Lutheran churches) or systematic oversight of the moral status of church members (as in many Calvinist churches). Those systems did not solve the problem of belief logically, but they did solve it emotionally, since anxious Christians could outsource their concern about themselves to the ministers who policed them. It was a kind of fideism: you cannot be certain of your own beliefs, but you can place your trust in your community instead.”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“John Calvin, brought characteristic rigor to the question. Luther dreamed of good princes, disliked law on principle, and had little interest in institutions. As a result, Lutheran churches ended up with a mishmash of governing structures. Calvin, by contrast, had trained as a lawyer, knew that structures matter, and favored more participatory government.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“Protestant princes believed the Gospel their ministers taught and valued the moral order, sobriety, and social cohesiveness their churches fostered. All sides usually rubbed along well enough.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“I. G.’s sufferings were positively transient compared to Hannah Allen’s. As a teenager in the 1650s, Allen went through a period of despair in which she was convinced she was damned. She found a more even keel when she married, but when her husband died in 1664, her spiritual agonies returned worse than ever. She considered suicide, repeatedly harmed herself, and once crawled into a roof void in order to starve to death (her resolve broke after three days). In the end the fog gradually lifted, which she ascribed to God’s mercy, her family’s love and the passage of time. What matters for us is that during her struggles, her family repeatedly tried to persuade her of God’s mercy, but she would have none of it. Once she heard a thunderclap, and told her aunt it was a message from God that she was damned. Surely not, said the aunt: God would not send a miracle to convince someone of their damnation. ‘We do not read of such a thing in all the Scripture.’ But Allen would not be reasoned with. ‘My Answer was, “Therefore my condition is unparalleled; there was never such a one [as me] since God made any Creature, either Angels or Men, nor never will be to the end of the world.”’ She begged friends not to pray for her, since ‘it would but sink me the deeper into Hell’. At first she worried that she had committed the ‘unpardonable sin’ mentioned in the Gospels, but soon she concluded that that sin was for amateurs and she had committed even worse:

My Sins are so great, that if all the Sins of all the Devils and Damned in Hell, and all the Reprobates on Earth were comprehended in one man, mine are greater. There is no word comes so near the comprehension of the dreadfulness of my Condition; as that, I am the Monster of the Creation.

”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“Some Protestants insist that Protestantism is “Bible Christianity,” a religion that takes the whole, inspired Bible as the only and final authoritative source of truth.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“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.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“The kind of sociopolitical structure that Protestantism engenders—based on free inquiry, participatory politics, and limited government—tends to favor market economics.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“Their tradition began in Martin Luther’s ravishing love affair with the God he met in the Bible. It was a love for which he was willing to sweep aside any tradition or power structure that stood in his way. Since his day, Protestants have pursued that love in radically different ways: individually or through institutions, intellectually or emotionally, tolerantly or violently, calmly or restlessly, apocalyptically or idealistically, working within older traditions or radically rejecting them. Often that old flame has been reduced to a simmer or doused altogether, sometimes it has blazed beyond any control, but it is the same fire. To understand Protestantism’s enormous impact on our world, we need to understand the restless burning it has kindled and rekindled in generations of believers.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“Doubts crept up on them unawares, seeping to the surface or erupting without warning. At the least, the language of temptation tells us that although this phenomenon was widespread, it was no sort of movement or party. If these doubters learned their doubts from other people, they were not conscious of it. I have found no accounts of being tempted into unbelief by others. The recurrent fear that no one else had ever had such terrible thoughts no doubt reflects the experience of feeling God’s absence, but it does also suggest that these doubters reached their doubts without outside assistance.”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“All these people described their doubts in the same way: as having been thrust unwillingly into their minds by the devil. We might be inclined to dismiss that. In fact it is vital for understanding what this kind of unbelief was and why it matters.

First of all, it shows that these narratives are a literary genre, akin to the modern genre of narratives of recovery from mental illness. Like that genre, they suffer from survivorship bias. Early modern Protestants who lost their struggles with atheism did not tell their stories, any more than did those who killed themselves.”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“Christians had always known that they only accounted for a fraction of humanity, but the age of exploration confronted them with the vastness of the non-Christian world as never before. A famous summary in the 1620s guessed that no more than a fifth of humanity were Christian, and that many so-called Christians were so beset with ‘superstitions’ as scarcely to deserve the name. ‘That horrible consideration of diversity of Religions’ inevitably fostered ‘Atheistical spirits’. As Montaigne asked about the cannibals: what reason, laziness aside, do we have to believe that we are right and they are wrong?”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“One of Gunter’s fears was that the Bible was a ‘policy’, a deliberately manipulative hoax. This venerable theme, revived by Machiavelli, now seemed more compelling than ever. During the Reformation age, Christendom had been splintered into national churches closely controlled by secular governments – none more so than the Church of England. Apparently God’s eternal truth changed when you crossed a border, or on the whims of kings and queens. Bishop Earle’s ‘sceptic’ was ‘troubled at this naturalness of Religion to Countries, that Protestantism should be born so in England, and Popery abroad’. What if we only believe what we believe out of chauvinism and habit? A popular advice-book warned young Englishmen travelling to the Continent against sampling foreign churches, fearing not so much that they would convert as that they would conclude that all churches had good points and bad points, ‘and so, displeased on all sides, you dash upon the rock of Atheism’ – a fate to which those who had ‘seen many countries’ were proverbially prone. Even if you did not give ‘perfect credit’ to another religion, merely to ‘admit of a suspicion that things may be’ as others say was to set the woodworm to work.”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“In the 1640s, a formerly pious London teenager named Sarah Wight suffered four years of spiritual agonies. As she recalled: ‘I could see nothing but Hell, and wrath: I was as desperate, as ever was any … I felt myself, soul and body, in fire and brimstone already.’ From that agonised conviction, it was only a short step to wonder if ‘there was no other Hell, but that which I felt’. At least that held out the hope that death would end her sufferings. On that basis she attempted suicide several times, thinking that ‘if I made away [with] myself, there was an end of my misery, and that there was no God, no Heaven; and no Hell’. But the very fact she had such thoughts convinced her that she ‘was damned already, being an unbeliever’.”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“The pioneering surveyor Richard Norwood was aged about seven when he fell ‘several times’ to ‘reasoning … about whether there were a God’. Like many adults, Norwood’s doubts began with questioning his own salvation. Offhand adult assurances that God loved him felt flimsy. He began to read the Bible in earnest, but when he eagerly shared his scriptural discoveries with his parents,

they made me little answer … but seemed rather to smile at my childishness. Upon which and the like occasions I often doubted whether things were really so as I conceived them or whether elder people did not know them to be otherwise, only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them, that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play. And thus did atheism show.

”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“Luther’s fire caught because fuel had been quietly building up for some time. The principal fuel was desire for reform of the church.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“The Reformation became notorious for two fat men. The first, Martin Luther, we have already met. The second, King Henry VIII of England.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“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.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“What makes Marlowe’s defiance and even D’Amville’s anticlerical contempt compelling is their moral edge. And in their very different ways, Acosta, Coornhert, Eleazar Duncan, Tourneur’s Sebastian and Shakespeare’s secularised ethical vision suggest that it was not only possible, but even natural for the unbelief of anger to be fired by its own moral code. The Church wanted angry unbelievers to stick to their role as villains. Instead, they were beginning to bid for the moral high ground.”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“It turned out that the Germans’ modest and conscientious reforms were only a starting point for more rapacious regimes to come.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“To outsiders, Protestantism may seem admirable for its role in promoting racial equality and in fighting apartheid, or it may seem culpable for its role in promoting racism and defending injustice. Yet it was only incidentally and temporarily a vehicle for those causes. Protestant movements that become too deeply attached to such social and political issues tend to find that they are running out of steam. Like it or loathe it, the heart of Protestantism’s message is a spiritual one, a message of salvation and of divine power.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World