Lutherans are members of a Protestant tradition flowing from the
life and thought of Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century German
monk turned theologian, pastor, and family patriarch. Lutherans
became a major religious group in the Great Plains of North
America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and as the
twenty-first century began, they continued to color the society
and culture of various locales in the Plains and their
borderlands. Theologically, Lutherans have identified themselves
as evangelical in that Luther in his break with Roman
Catholicism stressed the Gospels and the evangel of
justification by faith in the gracious work of God in Jesus
Christ. An individual's ultimate standing before God, in other
words, is not gained by moral works or by keeping God's law;
rather, it is by sola gratia (grace alone) and sola fides (faith
alone). Sola scriptura (Scripture alone) has also been a key
affirmation of Lutherans, indicating that the canonical books of
the Bible, not any church office, institu