Martin Luther had some serious chutzpah.
Though his well-documented anti-Semitism sowed some noxious weed-seed in both his theology and throughout the Protestant church culture that emerged from the Reformation, I’ve always admired the stories of Luther’s battles with unhealthy church culture. Luther was a monk, a Catholic church insider. He had every reason to support the status quo of the church at the time, which had grown into a bloated, powerful bureaucracy designed to benefit people in positions like his. Though history remembers Luther as a spiritually-intense, blunt, and brash man, he functioned in his day as a blustering German canary in a coal mine, alerting the Church to the noxious fumes smothering and distorting the gospel. [Read more]
