Lutheranism Facts for Kids

Martin Luther initiated the Protestant Reformation in 1517.

Lutheranism is a denomination within the Christian religion.

The person who led the Lutherans in their separation from the Catholic Church was Martin Luther. He began this separation from the Catholic Church in the 16th century. Luther was a German priest, theologian, and university professor in Wittenberg. He worked to improve the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. At first he did not want to separate from the Roman Catholic Church. He just wanted some Roman Catholic practices to be changed.

Lutheranism starteded when Martin Luther and his followers separated from the Roman Catholic Church. This overall movement is known as the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s ideas helped begin the Protestant Reformation. Other church leaders who separated from the Roman Catholic Church agreed with Luther on some things and disagreed with him on other things (see John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli).

Lutherans believe the Bible is the first and best source for Christian faith and teaching. Like other Christians, they believe in the Trinity, that Jesus Christ was both God and man, that all humans are sinful since Adam and Eve (see Original sin), and that humans are saved by Jesus' death on the cross. Lutherans believe that the central idea to all of their beliefs is that humans are saved by grace through faith because of Jesus Christ (see Justification (theology)). The main points of Lutheran theology were summed up in 1530 by Philip Melanchthon in the writing called The Augsburg Confession.

Unlike Roman Catholic priests, Lutheran pastors are allowed to marry.

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Martin Luther (1529) by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Title page of the Swedish Gustav Vasa Bible, translated by the Petri brothers, along with Laurentius Andreae
The University of Jena around 1600. Jena was the center of Gnesio-Lutheran activity during the controversies leading up to the Formula of Concord and afterwards was a center of Lutheran Orthodoxy.
Danish Queen Sophie Magdalene expressed her Pietist sentiment in 1737 by founding a Lutheran convent.
A nineteenth-century Haugean conventicle
The Olbers, one of the ships that carried Old Lutherans to the Western Hemisphere
Representing the continuation of the Finnish Awakening to the present, youth are confirmed at the site of Paavo Ruotsalainen's homestead.
Luther's translation of the Bible, from 1534
Title page from the 1580 Dresden Book of Concord
Lutherans believe that whoever has faith in Jesus alone will receive salvation from the grace of God and will enter eternity in heaven instead of eternity in hell after death or at the second coming of Jesus.
A.C. Article IX: Of Confession
Lutherans practice infant baptism.
Luther communing John the Steadfast
A.C. Article 18: Of Free Will
The Broad and the Narrow Way, a popular German Pietist painting, 1866
"Even though I am a sinner and deserving of death and hell, this shall nonetheless be my consolation and my victory that my Lord Jesus lives and has risen so that He, in the end, might rescue me from sin, death, and hell."—Luther
Luther composed hymns and hymn tunes, including "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God").
Divine Service at the St. Nicholas church in Luckau, Germany
Christ Lutheran Church, Narsapur in India
Georg Calixtus taught at the University of Helmstedt during the Syncretistic controversy.
Stormtroopers holding German Christian propaganda during the church council elections on 23 July 1933 at St. Mary's Church, Berlin. After that, internal struggles, controversies, reorganization, and splits struck the German Evangelical Church.
LCMS pastor wearing a chasuble during communion
Confirmation in Lunder Church, Ringerike, Norway, 2012. The Church of Norway is a member of the Porvoo Communion, which means that these confirmands would be readily transferred into any Anglican church should they ever emigrate.
Læstadian lay preacher from Finnmark, Norway, 1898
Hallowed be Thy Name by Lucas Cranach the Elder illustrates a Lutheran pastor preaching Christ crucified. During the Reformation and afterwards, many churches did not have pews, so people would stand or sit on the floor. The elderly might be given a chair or stool.
Nathan Söderblom is ordained as archbishop of the Church of Sweden, 1914. Although the Swedish Lutherans boast of an unbroken line of ordinations going back prior to the Reformation, the bishops of Rome do not recognize such ordinations as valid.
Lutheran Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in St. Petersburg
Schwäbisch Hall Church Order, 1543
The Pennsylvania Ministerium published this 1803 hymnal.
Lighthouse Lutheran Church, an LCMC congregation in Freedom, Pennsylvania
A church of the Batak Protestant Church in Balige, Indonesia, a merged denomination that includes a Lutheran element
View of the altar and the pulpit in the Church of the Ascension in Jerusalem
Faith Lutheran School in Hong Kong
- Countries with a member of the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference as of 2013

Lutheranism facts for kids

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