Protestants Quotes

“It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.”
― Philip Pullman

“If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.

[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772]”
― ben franklin, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Franklin

“I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind.

[Letter to Sir Edward Newenham, 22 June 1792]”
― George Washington, Writings

“Scholars have argued that without humanism the Reformation could not have succeeded, and it is certainly difficult to imagine the Reformation occurring without the knowledge of languages, the critical handling of sources, the satirical attacks on clerics and scholastics, and the new national feeling that a generation of humanists provided. On the other hand, the long-term success of the humanists owed something to the Reformation. In Protestant schools and universities classical culture found a permanent home. The humanist curriculum, with its stress on languages and history, became a lasting model for the arts curriculum.”
― Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe

“Surely we can only come to understand each other's beliefs by means of direct encounter and open, honest discussion. In the meantime, many free churches invite all believers in Jesus Christ to the Table for the sake of true spiritual unity that transcends intellectual differences of interpretation. Withholding sacramental sharing on the basis of disagreement about the nature of the Lord's Supper seems odd to us. What two people think exactly alike about the act? We are not offended by Catholics' closed Communion, but we find it odd and exclusive. It places intellectual understanding above fellowship among disciples of Jesus Christ.”
― Roger E. Olson

“The emphasis of the churches were not in how much work or home keeping is done in the four walls of the church itself, they rather told the Protestants to go prove their love to God at their work places through the quality of their works”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Another confusing thing about Protestants: they ask “What would Jesus do?” then they give themselves Lego man haircuts and vote Republican and avoid the wrong side of town. Jesus was a bearded, long-haired socialist who hung out with lepers; someone those prigs would call a wild man.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“The medieval period based its scriptural exegesis upon the Vulgate translation of the Bible. There was no authorized version of this text, despite the clear need for a standardized text that had been carefully checked against its Hebrew and Greek originals. A number of versions of the text were in circulation, their divergences generally being overlooked. It was not until 1592 than an 'official' version of the text was produced by the church authorities, sensitive to the challenges to the authority of the Vulgate by Renaissance humanist scholars and Protestant theologians.”
― Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation

“The common Calvinist experience of life as a refugee, or of being part of a host community that received refugees, led to lasting international connections between individuals and communities...As churches became established in Switzerland, the Palatinate, Scotland, England and Bearn, and the churches in the Netherlands, France, Hungary and Poland battled for legal recognition and survival, princely courts, noble houses, universities and colleges also became locations for interactions between many Calvinists. Theologians, clergy, students, booksellers, merchants, diplomats, courtiers and military officers became involved in networks of personal contacts, correspondence, teaching and negotiation.”
― Graeme Murdock, Beyond Calvin: The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe's Reformed Churches, c. 1540-1620

“In their churches the Protestants taught believers to go out of the four walls of the church to demonstrate their love for God by how they serve fellow humans”
― Sunday Adelaja

“The most revolutionary aspect of the Protestant teaching however, is the fact that the Protestants began to look for ways and means to serve God better through inventions, discoveries, researches, sciences, factories, industries, etc.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“All of anarchism, libertarianism, and anti-Statism can be traced back to the rise of Protestantism. The USA - founded by Protestants (often extremist Protestants expelled from their own countries) is where the love of the individual and hatred of the collective is practically written into its Constitution, which is extremely Protestant in its character.”
― Steve Madison, The Quality Agenda: The Search for Excellence

“If the teachings of the Protestants in Europe gave birth to the Protestant ethics and the modern civilization, it becomes alarming that most of our charismatic teachings today mainly concentrate on individual aggrandizement”
― Sunday Adelaja

“The basic teachings of the Protestants were all surrounding values, ethics and morals”
― Sunday Adelaja

“The Protestants teachings affected the view of the populace to work”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Up to 90% of all inventions of the world comes from the Protestant world”
― Sunday Adelaja

“One major teaching of the Protestants that we the Protestants of today must go back to is the fact that the European Protestants did not emphasize five fold ministry the way we do today. Today our teaching on the five fold ministry only tends to view only those called to the five fold ministry as those called to be ministers, while the rest of the congregation is just viewed as laity who just go to secular jobs.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“The way the early Protestants taught on the other hand is that everybody is a full time minister in their various places of work. They went to the extent of saying, your job, profession, occupation is your calling”
― Sunday Adelaja

“We call ourselves Protestants, but we have totally departed from the teachings of the early Protestants. Martin Luther, John Wesley and John Calvin would turn in their graves, if they hear the kind of teachings we are now feeding the people of God with.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Because believing in the inerrancy and absolute authority of the Bible is so widespread today, it is important to realize that this is a Protestant phenomenon. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians (together the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived) have never taught it.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most

“The Protestants don't believe in Britain and the Catholics don't believe in God. And none of us believes in the future.”
― Brian Moore, The Doctor's Wife

“Liberals are the sons of Protestants.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“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

“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