Christian Liberals & Progressive People of Faith

Luther was so turned off by the Catholic church's selling of indulgences and taking money to say masses for the dead that he actually changed his German translation of the Bible. Where Paul says "The just shall live by faith" in the first chapter of Romans, Luther translated it as "The just shall live by faith alone." He also had past experience as a monk, where he realized that all the monastic discipline couldn't make him into a perfect human being, so he decided that works were irrelevant, to the point that he wanted to eliminate the Letter of James from the Bible. (I think others persuaded him not to.)

Calvin believed that people were predestined for heaven or hell, so what you did in this life didn't matter.

When I was a graduate student and knew some people who were doing graduate work in religious studies as devout Lutherans, they scoffed at the idea of good people vs. bad people as "works righteousness." This was a bad thing, in their minds.

While it's true, as Luther noted, that you can't make yourself perfect, the strictest Lutherans and the evangelicals have gone off in the other direction, saying that only faith matters and that if you do good works, it's only out of gratitude for having been saved.