New Lutheran Quote of the Day

These two sides of our church, its toleration and its narrowness, are an absolute mystery to the Reformed. That the pope should be called the Antichrist, and yet, at the same time, every effort made to preserve the canonical organization of the church; that the Mass should be criticized, as Luther criticized it in his Babylonian Captivity of the Church and Smalcald Articles, and yet that it should not be replaced by an entirely-new evangelical service instead keeping it in a purified form; that the invocation of the saints should be abolished, and yet that the most important saints' days continue to be observed for several generations—all these, in the eyes of a Reformed Christian, are insufferable contradictions.—Hermann Sasse, Here We Stand, p. 105