Sublime

Martin Luther, for instance, opposed relics not because they were inauthentic tourist kitsch but because they offered an encounter with a transcendent reality contrary to the one presented in the Bible (and particularly the Pauline Epistles).

Martin Luther: “If I had my time to go over again, I would make my sermons much shorter, for I am conscious they have been too wordy.”

We should avoid these comments as if they were poison from hell.

Christ wants to teach us that we should look at trials and suffering very differently from the way they appear and feel to us in this world.

Faith should be first. After faith is preached, then we should teach good works. It is faith—without good works and prior to good works—that takes us to heaven. We come to God through faith alone.

Our hearts throw out all self-chosen works and perform only the work of their calling and the works of love, which God commands.

Most importantly, the council rejected Luther’s teachings on justification, asserting the reality of human freedom in the work of redemption, the indispensability of good works and the need for the co-operation of the will set free by grace. Moreover, it did this with so thorough and plenteous an exposition from scripture that no Protestant theolog

Speaking broadly, Saint Ambrose determined the ecclesiastical conception of the relation of Church and State; Saint Jerome gave the Western Church its Latin Bible and a great part of the impetus to monasticism; while Saint Augustine fixed the theology of the Church until the Reformation, and, later, a great part of the doctrines of Luther and Calvi

by affirming Augustine’s inwardness and the ability of each individual to read the Bible and stand before God’s justifying action themselves, Luther rejects that some people are spiritually dependent on what other people do. What the priest and pope do is not superior in kind to what farmers and housemaids do.