God didn’t call the Lutheran church to be anything...He didn’ even call for its existance, Martin Luther did...and he was wrong!!Perhaps the declining membership is due to the fact that people are looking at the “protestant” concept to be without merit.....Let’s see, Christ founded a church on His apostles, it is almost 1,600 years old, and Martin Luther decides that he can do a better job explaining Christianity than could the church fathers....duh, that doesn’t seem to me to make any sense at all......does it to you???
Actually, Martin Luther took the church back to the early church fathers. He had very strong regard for them. He was an Augustinian monk, and was strongly influenced by Augustin. Specifically, Luther reintroduced the Pauline concept of justification by faith, and he protested the sale of indulgences as a way to earn one’s way out of purgatory (a place with no Biblical support, BTW). Paul was very, very clear about justification by faith. Martin Luther never meant to found a new denomination; he wanted only to return the Christian Church to Biblical practices.
The only thing Martin Luther called for was to have his bishop stop selling indulgences as if they were discount tickets to Heaven. The fact that the church as then established depended upon the income from the sale of the indulgences speaks to its weakness, not Dr. Luther’s.
All kinds of sense...Martin put the bible into the language of the people...People could see for themselves what God had to say...
And what God had to say was that there was no such thing as indulgances...Your church made that up...And you still wouldn't know that if Martin would not have provided his translation...