Martin Luther's Concerning Christian Liberty is considered by many to be Luther's seminal work which encapsulates Salvation by Grace through Faith alone as a rallying cry that shook the world of his time. It's a remarkable short work and it's two sections are demarcated by it's opening lines, ""a Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone." This of course is pretty much a restatement of Christ's paradoxical statement, "He who would be the greatest among you, must be the servant of all." The first section, related to faith, is of course, the strongest message related to Luther and in many ways the reclaiming of what characterized the Gospel of the early Church but which over time, had been laden with tradition, reason and experience to where the key message of the gospel was all but drowned out. Luther ties the message back to Scripture and the Word of God, which Luther rightly doesn't separate from the person of Jesus Christ. The Gospel message is brought strongly with a separation from the works and indulgences of Luther's day that had replaced the simple truth. Luther expands upon the three great "virtues" of faith. First, faith gives us true Christian liberty: we are free from the law and works. Second, faith honors God because by believing His promise it truth and righteousness are imputed to Him. So to not believe the word of the gospel is to make God a liar. Third, faith unites the soul to Christ. Believing in Christ is compared simply and stunningly to a marriage of king and a prostitute, where both share equally in what each brings to the union, for example: "Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation; the soul is full of sin, death, and condemnation. Let faith step in, and then sin, death and hell will belong to Christ, and grace, life, and salvation to the soul." Following this Luther then expounds upon works and their role carefully separating them from the Salvation message. He points that works serve as a means or purification for us against the continued presence of the flesh in our lives and further evidence of the love we have for God and our brothers and sisters in the faith. When you consider that this message, so familiar in so many contexts today, was coming out in a manner that had been muffled for years it's easy to see the power with which it burst onto the scene of its times. What is more, when we consider that many traditions today which claim the message of Grace and Faith but which have equally in time become slowly laden with tradition, reason and experience, there is great value in returning to this as an opportunity to cast off those elements that perhaps in our own communities of faith, like the organized church of old, have crept in and begun to muffle the message of Grace that is the most remarkable message of God. Luther was not a perfect man by any means. When you examine his life and some of his views in other areas, it's hard to reconcile the grace he spoke of with the bigotry he expressed in some regards, even if you try to factor in the context of the society he lived in as some form of justification. Even with that, Luther's message of Grace echoing what he found in the Bible and which society at that time was able to access without the filtering of the institutional church, echoes still even 500 years later.
About the Author: Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a German priest and professor of theology who initiated the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment of sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the emperor. Luther taught that salvation is not earned by good deeds but received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus as redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood. Those who identify with Luther's teachings are called Lutherans. His translation of the Bible into the language of the people (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation, and influenced the translation into English of the King James Bible. His hymns influenced the development of singing in churches. His marriage to Katharina von Bora set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry.