Historians give a lot of time and thought to why and how wars start, are engaged, and then the circumstances of the end. But rarely if ever do they ever get to the underlying story of all wars which is the brutal conflict over the glory of God that has been carried out throughout the history of human beings. This brutal war is still going on and will continue until God Himself steps down and ends it. It seems as if the Christian Church is like the waves of the sea that advance and then fall back only to advance again. As the Scripture teaches, the gates of hell will not overpower the Church (Mat 16:18). While it seems as if the Church has almost been conquered or even subjugated, that is not the case. Scripture cannot fail. While it is true that humanism has seemingly engulfed the Church with its man-centered teachings, and even those with orthodox theology seem to have been engulfed with a man-centered God, the living God will not share His glory with another. Right now the glory of His wrath is being demonstrated day after day (Rom 1:18) as men seek themselves while trying to use His name to do it.
“The history of Christianity is a story of continuous conflict between the two contrasted tendencies. In the light of what has been said, it should be clear what is implied by the claim that Luther is a Copernicus in the realm of religion. Religion as he found it in medieval Catholicism was of an essentially egocentric character-despite the presence of certain undeniably theocentric traits in it. His significance in the history of religion is that in him the theocentric tendency fully and unequivocally asserted, or rather reasserted itself. For it had done so at least once before. In primitive Christianity, God was both Alpha and Omega, both the ground and the goal of the religious relationship. Of Him and through Him and unto Him were all things. But this insight early began to be obscured and subordinated to the egocentric tendency that crept in with moralistic and eudemonistic ideas. Such ideas Luther found playing a dominant role in medieval Catholicism.” (Let God Be God! An Interpretation of the Theology of Martin Luther)
The modern Church finds itself at a crucial point in its history. Liberalism eroded a lot of the thinking and teaching for sometime but it is really quite irrelevant to conservatives in many ways. The real issue that gets at the heart of the problem within the Church today has to do with the focus of the living God and therefore the focus of human beings. We must realize that conservative theology is not enough and conservative morality is not enough. We can hold both of those things while we are full of ourselves and of our pride God is opposed to the proud whether they are conservative or not. God is opposed to the proud even if they hold to all the fundamentals of the faith. As Martin Luther began to awaken to the fact that Roman Catholicism was man-centered and had been removed from the biblical teaching on God and the Gospel he saw the central issues. In his book The Bondage of the Will he repeatedly went to the central issue, which was God Himself.
Why did Luther stress Scripture so much? In speaking to Erasmus, he said this: “For your teaching is designed to induce us, out of consideration for Popes, princes and peace, to abandon and yield up for the present the sure Word of God. But when we abandon that, we abandon God, faith salvation, and all Christianity” (p. 91). At the core of Luther’s thinking on Scripture, then, was a fidelity to God Himself. It was God speaking in His Word. How audacious are human beings in their pride when they prefer themselves to the wisdom of God in the Scriptures. We either listen to ourselves or to the Word of God. His thoughts on other subjects pointed to or were judged by Go as well. “Your thoughts of God are too human…but such please neither God nor men, even by affirming that God is in the heaven of heavens” (p. 87). “Our aim is, simply, to investigate what ability ‘free-will’ has, in what respect it is the subject of Divine action and how it stands related to the grace of God” (p. 78).
Luther wrote The Bondage of the Will to defend the grace of God in salvation and therefore the glory of God in salvation. Apart from grace alone in salvation there is no salvation through faith alone and it is not to the glory of God alone. In the more modern “Historical and Theological Introduction” to Luther’s Bondage of the Will the editors said this: “God-centered thinking is out of fashion to-day, and its recovery will involve something of a Copernican revolution in our outlook on many matters. But ought we to shrink from this? Do we not stand in urgent need of such teaching as Luther here gives us-teaching which humbles man, strengthens faith, and glorifies God-and is not the contemporary Church weak for the lack of it?” They then went on to say that if God and the Gospel are the same, then “is any other position than Luther’s possible?” Our pride and self-preservation will not want to suffer mocking and persecution, but God-centeredness in all things will require it.
God Loves... Himself 
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