Word: lutheranism
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Prophetic Figure. Appropriately enough, contemporary interest in Luther is proportionate to his direct impact on Protestant Christianity. Of the world's 230 million Protestants, 74.5 million call themselves Lutherans. Although a truly universal church, Lutheranism is strongest in Germany, Scandinavia and the U.S., where it is the third largest Protestant segment (after the Baptists and the Methodists). Three branches of the faith account for most of the nation's 10 million Lutherans: the Lutheran Church in America, the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod...
...answer that he found-that man is saved by God's grace through faith alone-is as old as Paul, but Luther's particular framing of it came precisely at the right moment. A few decades earlier, suggests Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the Lutheran Church in America, Luther the rebel might have gone the way of Jan Hus or Savonarola, who were burned at the stake before their ideas could gain momentum. And by the end of the 16th century, spiritual renewal of the church might have been achieved from within, perhaps by that charismatic figure...
...conviction, Luther stood for truth at the expense of unity-but the truths he stood for are essential to the Christian church: the primacy of faith and God's word, the necessity of an ecclesia semper refor-manda (ever-reforming church), and the centrality of Jesus Christ. The Lutheran heritage, sums up Theologian Joseph Sittler of the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "a tradition of profound, relentless, critical Biblical studies, a theological reflection of truly catholic scope, a type of piety nurtured by liturgical continuity with the old Catholic tradition...
Even after the break with Rome, church historians agree, Luther wanted only to reform the one true church-and not to found a new Lutheran de nomination. With that in mind, many contemporary theologians agree that he could hardly fail to be displeased by much of the present condition of the churches...
...graver charge is that in much of Protestantism -including many of the churches that bear Luther's name-his central insight into the primacy of faith has been lost in a bog of building campaigns, service agencies, relief programs and other church-instigated "good works." American Christianity, charges Lutheran Theologian Martin Marty, has fallen back on precisely the kind of spiritual error that the Reformation was designed to combat. The typical parishioner, adds Marty's colleague at the University of Chicago, Theologian Brian Gerrish, feels that he has "done something that puts God in his debt...