In politics, Erasmus embraced consensus, compromise, and peaceful cooperation, ideals he recommended to the participants in the Reformation debate, albeit with little success. Considered a forerunner of the Reformation by his contemporaries, he broke with Martin Luther over the latter's sectarianism.
According to Erasmus and other Christian humanists, Christianity needed to be reformed to show people how to lead good lives. It needed to recapture some of the simplicity it had during the early days of Christianity, before the Church made pilgrimages, fasts, and relics important.
Throughout his life, Erasmus forged his own approach to Christianity: knowing Christ by reading the Bible. He called his approach the “Philosophia Christi,” or the philosophy of Christ. He thought that learning about Jesus' life and teachings would strengthen people's Christian faith and teach them how to be good.
Erasmus, in full Desiderius Erasmus, (born October 27, 1469 [1466?], Rotterdam, Holland [now in the Netherlands]—died July 12, 1536, Basel, Switzerland), Dutch humanist who was the greatest scholar of the northern Renaissance, the first editor of the New Testament, and also an important figure in patristics and ...
While so many men of his time were concerned with proving their adversaries wrong or wicked or heretical, Erasmus, ever sensitive to the human situation, was concerned with winning others to piety and to Christ. He was convinced that neither side in an argument can completely express the truth, and he did not suffer the delusion which makes a man feel he can at one blow destroy all that is bad upon this earth. "Old institutions," he said, "cannot be rooted up in an instant, and quiet argument may do more than wholesale condemnation."
The true remnant does not seek privileges but rather is completely willing, even eager, to accept responsibilities. Nor does it wish to withdraw from the world, however unpleasant it may appear to be. A true remnant, if it is to live, must embrace the world, must ever go out into the world performing its rightful mission, working as a leaven in the lump.
The remnant, says Jones, "possess consciences that are more acute than those of their fellows. They are more detached from the world and more ready than most people to forego the advantages of a successful career and the rewards which go with conformity to prevailing customs, in order to champion the cause of truth and light, and to work for what ought to be. They preserve a fundamental faith in the conquering power of truth, and they believe all things, hope all things, and are ready to endure all things, in the great business of making others see what they see."
Erasmus’ dream was a return to the early Christianity of practice, not of opinion, where the church would no longer insist on particular forms of belief and hence mankind would cease to hate and slaughter each other because they differed on points of theology. To Erasmus, religion meant purity and justice and mercy, with the keeping of moral commandments, and to him these Graces were not the privilege of any peculiar creed.