Top 57 Protestantism Quotes & Sayings

I am not sure I can make clear what it means to say I come from the Catholic side of Protestantism, but at the very least, it means that I do not think Christianity began with the Reformation.

You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to it!

Some have said that the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism illustrates the old maxim that religious freedom is the product of two equally pernicious fanaticisms, each cancelling the other out.

The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual to God is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism.

Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-conformity almostfinished the deed.... Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage.

The pope being informed of the great increase of Protestantism, in the year 1542 sent inquisitors to Venice to make an inquiry into the matter, and apprehend such as they might deem obnoxious persons.

In the agreement to rescue Rome [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy] from the predicament of losing its world control to Protestantism, and to preserve the spiritual and temporal supremacy which the popes [had] 'usurped' during the Middle Ages, Rome now 'sold' the [Roman Catholic] Church to the Society of Jesus [i.e., the Jesuits]; in essence the popes surrendered themselves into their hands.

It's a long way from Martin Luther's 'On the Freedom of a Christian' to 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and a vigorous Protestantism should be able to prevent the former from degenerating into the latter.

Catholicism is the tomb of intelligence, of thought, of brain; Protestantism, the tomb of conscience, of feeling, of heart.

You are American, whether you profess Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, whether you adhere to Islam, or whether you believe in nothing at all. And you're as American as anybody else, whatever your religious beliefs. But try not to get caught up in media stereotypes of your neighbors and of your country. Think about people that you know and how they treat you. As you get to know someone, it matters not what religious background they have, or what their nationality is, or where they came from. And I think that's how Americans really do relate to each other on a personal level.

For those interested in Reformed thought more broadly, I'd recommend Peter Leithart's recent book on Reformed Catholicism entitled, The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church (Brazos Press, 2016), as a thought-provoking and stimulating read that should get us all thinking about the future shape of the Church, wherever we come from.

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions - the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life.

Before all else, Protestantism is, in its very essence, an appeal from all other authority to the divine authority of Holy Scripture

This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins.... It is one step away from protestantism.

In many ways, American evangelicalism is somewhat stronger today than it was in, say 1955 - certainly more mainstream and influential in the culture as a whole. But, the increased strength of evangelicalism hasn't increased fast enough to compensate for the total collapse of mainline Protestantism and the pretty steady weakening of my own Roman Catholic Church.

Venereal: From Venus, the goddess of love, this word refers to the reality of desire. With the rise of Protestantism and science, the word disease was tacked on in a revealing combination of categorization and moralizing. Which disease? The disease of love.

Martin Luther dreamed up Protestantism while sitting on the toilet at Wittenburg monastery, and we know what a big movement that became.

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance

Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, 'conscience,' watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a 'matter of conscience,' i.e. police business.

Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren't monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism - either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture - and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing.

Protestants attacked Catholics during the 1844 Nativist riots in Philadelphia. Guess what that was about? Anti-immigrant sentiment. Back then, it was the influx of Irish Catholics into the city. Now, it's Donald Trump clinging to a bygone notion of Protestant ascendancy and nativist sentiments, when mainline Protestantism is on the wane in the U.S.

. . . I fail to find a trace [in Protestantism] of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible.

The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.

Protestantism includes every type of religious thought and organization from 'high church' Anglicanism to high-principled Quakerism, from ecstatic Methodism to relentlessly intellectual Unitarism. Only slowly, and with many pangs is even Protestantism shaking off the religion about Christ.

Every new movement or group of people who seek to explore awareness is considered a cult. The United States was founded by several cults. They felt that Protestantism had become much too lax, so they came to America and set up a hard line religious cult.

Broadly speaking, Protestants like to be good and have invented theology in order to keep themselves so, whereas Catholics like to be bad and have invented theology in order to keep their neighbors good. Hence, the social character of Catholicism and the individual character of Protestantism.

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes

I believe that Judaism was an improvement on polytheism; Christianity was an improvement on Judaism (to some degree and in some departments only); that Protestantism is an improvement on Catholicism; that Mormonism is an improvement on Protestantism. So I give Joseph Smith credit as an innovator and as a smart fellow.

The spiritual ambiguity growing up made me really latch onto a faith - Protestantism - that was somewhat conventional. Everyone else was rebelling against traditions and institutions, whereas I was rebelling against the upheaval and uncertainty in my family.

Thus, Protestantism will always stand up for the advancement of all Germans as such, as long as matters of inner purity or national deepening as well as German freedom are involved, since all these things have a firm foundation in its own being; but it combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established.

The idea that Christianity is basically a religion of moral improvement... has its roots in the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century... It is this stereotype which continues to have influence today... But then came the First World War... What had gone wrong was that the idea of sin had been abandoned by liberal Christianity as some kind of unnecessary hangover from an earlier and less enlightened period in Christian history.

So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

While majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat.

Trump's blatant racism and demonization of Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants also serves as a foil for white evangelicals. By othering these groups, Trump allows evangelicals to persist in their belief that white Anglo-saxon Protestantism is the default for true American Christianity and is best suited to lead America as a 'Christian Nation.'

In proportion to its power, Protestantism has been as persecuting as Catholicism.

Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism,in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.

Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic.

Susannah Heschel's The Aryan Jesus is a brilliant and erudite investigation of the convergence between major trends in German Protestantism and Nazi racial anti-Semitism. By concentrating on the history of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, Heschel describes in forceful detail the Nazification of all aspects of Protestant theology, including the Aryanization of Jesus himself. This is a highly original and important contribution to our understanding of the Third Reich.

I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.

Protestantism as such is a better defender of the interests of Germanism, in so far as this is grounded in its genesis and later tradition; it fails, however, in the moment when this defense of national interests must take place in a province which is either absent from the general line of its ideological world and traditional development, or is for some reason rejected.

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance.

One classical role of the pulpit in Protestantism has been to 'preach sermons' which imply indoctrination more than education. Within this from of communication, there is an inherent, intrinsic inclination to intimidate, manipulate, and, hence, offend the person's most prized quality of humanness - his dignity.

The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.

In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a kind of Protestantism that said, "If you could only get rid of the Bishop, then you'd be a true Christian".

Trump's defense of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism is gathering those who support him into a strong solidified base. Since the election of Francis, Republicans have been very wary of the Pope, attacking his liberal statements on homosexuality, global warming, and capitalism.

You might get rid of the Bishop and get to the local Ku Klux Klan leader. That, on the whole, has been the fate of certain types of Protestantism. They get under the control of a White Citizens Council while the Catholic Church has an authoritarian system, yes, in which the Bishop expresses the conscience of the whole Christian community and they say there are some things that you can't do on this matter.

I know that Buddhism is to Hinduism what Protestantism is to Roman Catholicism, only in a much stronger light, to a much greater degree.

Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end in itself. This presumption was then reinforced by an unassailable belief in the common sense of the individual.

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.

I just got fed up with the Protestantism that I'd been brought up with being rubbed out, disregarded. There's an awful lot of frailty and doubt about it, which I understand and share, but there are certain things you just have to acknowledge.

Every theistic religion, including Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism, Judaism, Mormonism, and Islam, has traditionally held homosexual congress in moral opprobrium.

When the problems in Northern Ireland started, it was not a question of Protestantism or Catholicism, because the Catholic church was the only church at that time-it was a nationalist conflict.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity.

My parents and I - I'm an only child - are not particularly religious, but I was christened and raised in that vague and characteristically Canadian form of Protestantism known as the United Church.