Martin Luther never hesitated to condemn himself as a sinner. Being a sinner is profound. It is adequate description of anything unsavory that he or you did or wrote.
What he objected to was people in seats of authority sending people off to unbelief, pride and despair.
You can only get this if you believe Jesus was and is God (in a traditional Trinitarian sense) and that He lived, died and rose again to save and justify mortal sinners (us).
If you believe that, very good, and you don’t have to like Martin Luther.
Note: he was kicked out of the Roman church for trying to bring to the Pope’s attention errors in his doctrine and practice. Even then, he sought only to remove the errors from Roman practice, unlike the reactionaries who threw out some beautiful things that were not harmful.
While you are reviling Luther, check out some papal abuses of the flesh. And it only starts there. Christ said if you light itself is darkness, it’s darkness indeed. The Roman church, responsible for spiritual care of millions, sent them off to vain, bogus and even bad works, sent them to despair, instead of doing what it was charged with, which was to share the Good News.
That's a weird non-sequitor. I was questioning the character of a very well known, and very famous person. who was paert of the topic of the original poster. And you respond by contrasting him with "the Popes".
I guess that's almost on topic, in so far as Luther set himself up as the man to bring down the Popes, so all of his failings are balanced against that: his great accomplishment.
What I actually said was "I am surprised that people venerate him". To the point of celebrating his life, and even starting an entire new denomination "Lutheranism". There were many other reformers of the Church, few have entire sects named after them.
There is a lot of space between "veneration" and "reviling", but yes, I would lean more towards the "revling" side if I was ranking him.
Many, maybe even most of the Popes fall in the middle too, and many towards the "revilling" end in my opinion. But, people don't venerate most old Popes, and their aren't any schismed sects that are named after them. If there were I would find that very surprising, too. Just like I do with people who look up to Luther.
It was good to end the selling of indulgences. But, I think from a historical point of view the main reason the Reformation gained a hold was that the entire edifice of the Middle Ages was exhausted, and people were tired of a distant ecclisiastical authority in Rome, or anywhere else, having so much power over them. The people most unhappy with that were the elites in many countries.
The English Reformation made this quite explicit. The Pope was done away with because he interfered in the affairs of the King of England. Henry VIII was the great Protestant Reformer in England, but the Church he founded isn't called the "Henryist Church". Why is that? Well, because he was a pretty wretched fellow, at least in part.
It's called the Church of England, secular control of the Church made it a subsidiary of the State. Luther was a handy fellow to enable this transformation,
Today we have the:
Obviously the Founders did not think the National Chruch model was ideal, as our Constitution explicitly forbade it, despite the vast majority of the Founders being members of the Church of England. And, of course, breaking with the King meant breaking with the Church. (Thus "The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States", and many other new churches formed in America in the wake of the Revolution.)
Do you think making the Church a subdivision of the State was a good idea, in retrospect? Has it helped advance Christianity?