Death and the heart of Luther's understanding of justification

I have been listening to some great MP3s by Carl Trueman on the Reformation and Luther in particular (see here and here). They have taught me a lot, and reminded me of more. One of the greatest things he reminded me was how Luther began developing the doctrine of justification by faith alone initially by reflecting on baptism. Medieval Catholicism apparently saw baptism mainly as a washing/healing of people made dirty/sick by sin. Luther saw that baptism is more about death and resurrection and this profoundly affected how he then saw the human condition and justification. If we are dead we can do nothing. I remember now so clearly how this was central to Calvin too from when I read him a lot. The other day I was reading Romans and struck by how often death is mentioned in Romans. I did a search on an online bible and found these statistics:

• 'Death' is found 22 times in Romans
• 'Die' is found 21 times;
• 'mortal' is found 4 times;
• 'killed' is found 3 times;
• 'crucified' is found once;

Not that this means we should be the miserable caricature of Scotch Presbyterians that you read of in the media as the words 'live'/'life'/'resurrection'/'born' /'birth' can be found in a remarkably similar frequency. As Romans is not a very long book (433 verses) this is very significant (also worthy or reflection is that few of these references are in chapters 9-11).

Among other things this makes you wonder how often you hear preachers and ordinary Christians talking in this way. How often do you now hear of how the fall led to a 'messed up world' and a 'broken society' with 'fractured relationships'? Perhaps we ought to be more bleak in how we paint our current situation, and more bold in our description of the contrast of this with salvation.