"Everybody speaks of Reformation but the Reformers!"

     "It is therefore no accident that the concept of 'Reformation' appears so frequently in the texts of this 'Counter-Reformation' Council, while it is used so seldom in the confessional writings of the 16^th century on the Protestant side.  One might almost say, Everybody speaks of Reformation but the Reformers!  That the concept is now [widely] assumed [to have been] established by them [(Dass sich ausgerechnet bei ihnen der Begriff festsetzt)] is not lacking in a certain irony.  History takes at times strange paths, and historiography follows it [in this].  Yet it has, as it happens, [an] absolute right to call those men 'Reformers' who never designated themselves as such, [and] to understand [(Doch hat sie in der Sache absolut Recht, indem sie . . . nennt; indem sie . . . versteht)] by 'Reformation' what was for the Radical Reformers too little, and the Catholic Reformers too much:  the question of the decisive foundation [(Fundament)] of all renewal in Christendom, without regard for the present form of the church."

     Emidio Campi, "»Ecclesia semper reformanda«:  Metamorphosen einer altehrwürdigen Formel," Zwingliana 37 (2010):  9 (1-19).  To inquire into "the use of the formula ecclesia semper reformanda in modernity" is to be confronted with a paradox:  "it looks—for starters at any rate [(jedenfalls zunächst)]—as though the Roman Catholic Church has something like a concept of reform over against which would stand on the Protestant side only incomprehension, indeed bewilderment [(Konzeptionlosigkeit, ja Verwirring)]." For the Protestant emphasis on the centrality of the Word of God raised the question of "the essence of legitima reformatio" "to a completely new [and unanticipated] level" (6).  Hmmm.
     For much more, go here.