Herbert Butterfield Quotes

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

About the scientific revolution: it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes".

If you had to find a period in history that would equate to what the Internet has presented us with now, it would be Elizabethan England. It was a world in flux.

One of the things that always fascinated me about the Renaissance was that it was a time both of great scientific discovery and also of superstition and belief in magic. And so it was a period in which Galileo invented the telescope, but also a time when hundreds were burned at the stake because people thought they were witches.

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.

Once Europe existed in a Dark Age and Islam carried the torch of learning. Now we Muslims live in a Dark age.

If Switzerland was not the real cradle of the Reformation, she soon became its home, at least for the French and Anglo-Saxon countries.

The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch 'dark.' Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.

I'm a bit of a history goon, and I love all that. Anything that's medieval-based up until, probably, the Tudor period and just after, I'm quite into.

Renaissance or the reawakening of Europe. And, and this reawakening actually involved an era during which the people of Europe, who were coming out of the Dark Ages, were then adopting the value system of the people in the East, in the, of the oriental society.

The calculus is the story this [the Western] world first told itself as it became the modern world.

I have a hard time picturing several aspects of the modern world without Luther.

[During the Renaissance] the Italians said, "We are one in the Father: we will go back." The Northern races said, "We are one in Christ, we will go on.

We can never expect to grow in the likeness of our Lord unless we follow His example and give more time to communion with the Father. A revival of real praying would produce a spiritual revolution.

In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet.

The Reformation was immensely important for all of Danish culture.

The hardest part of being a Christian is surrendering and that is where the real struggle happens. Once we have overcome our own desire to be elevated, our own desire to be recognized, our own desire to be independent and all those things that we value very much because we are Americans and we are part of this American culture. Once we have overcome that struggle then God can use us as a part of His body to accomplish what the body of Christ was left here to accomplish.

Luther and the Reformation were of fundamental importance to Denmark. We Danes are still Lutherans today. We spoke about him a lot in school, and we feel very close to him.

The real truth, I thought, in terms of what faith is and what Christianity is.

Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.

There's no way you could convince me today that Jesus is not real.

Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.

The proof of how real Jesus knew hell to be is that He came to earth to save us from it.

My faith, my hermeneutics does not demand that I correlate every verse. In other words, there are often verses that appear, I'm a John 3:16 Christian, I believe God so loved the world, I do believe that, and I believe that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish. But I also believe, you know, predestination from the foundation of the Earth. So to me, I'm able to hold tensions in my mind rather than having to explain them. To me, I don't fit in a real good box and I believe them both.