Sublime

Many of his tracts were written in German rather than in the Latin of the learned. These, combined with his efforts to translate the Bible into a language intelligible across the wide variety of dialects that stretched from the Netherlands to Poland, accelerated the birth of a modern German capable of serving as a language of culture.

The exhortation of the apostle to make fast one’s own call is here interpreted as a duty to attain certainty of one’s own election and justification in the daily struggle of life. In the place of the humble sinners to whom Luther promises grace if they trust themselves to God in penitent faith are bred those self-confident saints46 whom we can redi

Melanchthon had begun to employ the notion of the so-called

John Wycliffe (c.1330–84) argued that the Church should surrender its riches, serve rather than profit from the poor and acknowledge scripture as its sole source of doctrinal authority.

Luther’s