ectypal.net

Ecclesia semper reformanda est: The church is always to be reformed or always needing to be reformed; a saying often attributed to the early modern Reformed but as yet not documented from their actual usage. The phrase and its variants, Ecclesia reformata et semper reformanda; Ecclesia reformata quia semper reformanda; and Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, secundum verbum Dei, are most probably all twentieth-century inventions, employed for the sake of justifying doctrinal change. Early modern identifications of the church as reformanda do not carry with them the modern claim that it was the intention of the Reformers that doctrine be constantly modified to suit the times: rather, use of the term connoted such things as the need to move further away from the abuses and superstitions of the Roman church or, in a seventeenth-century application identified among Dutch Reformed pietists, a need to be continually observant in the reformation of Christian life.