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As a Lutheran, I can tell you that we all know Martin Luther's views and deeds, good and bad. He was a sinful man, just like us all. What does this have to do with anything?

The Catechism of the Lutheran Church is a deeply spiritual book. And the Augsburg Confessions are the cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation, and they are incredibly valuable to all Protestants, and the truth contained within them is also very deep and profound. Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura.

We are saved by grace through faith. That is the heart of the Protestant Faith - and that includes all Evangelicals, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and a myriad of independent evangelical congregations.

Paul was a murderer who killed many Christians before he was converted. Even after he was converted he wrote Romans 7:13-7:28. He was a sinful man and he knew it. Just because he was an apostle did not remove his sinful nature. The same can be said of Luther. Just because he did and said sinful things does not destroy the Biblical truths he restored to mankind. Luther's 95 theses were a direct challenge to the Church and its wickedness at the time.

Luther helped (not solely by himself, but he started it) to cast off all of the manufactured ideas of men that had crept into the Church and were enforced on an ignorant population through the concept of "magesterium". He confronted the evils of the Church, especially the selling of indulgences to fill the coffers of the Vatican, the untrue teaching of things like "purgatory" (which was a money making scheme from the beginning), the worship of relics, and so many other teachings the church "made up" (ultimately this led to jettisoning things like Mariolotry too).

Luther's "Here I Stand" speech contains some of the most honest and profound truth, and is one of the greatest pieces of oratory, ever.

“He was a sinful man, just like us all. What does this have to do with anything?”

He set himself up as the arbiter of the Christian faith, rejecting that which he had been given and creating a new structure. In his role as the head of that new structure he called for attacks on Jews, he approved bigamy for the powerful and he exhorted people to sin. That he was rtight about many things won’t change the reality of the damage he did and still does to all of Christendom. Ask “Bishop” Vicky Eugene Robinson.