On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, inadvertantly starting the Protestant Reformation. The following excerpt from my book
The Reformation for Armchair Theologians, which I also published last year on this date, explains what all this was about:
To understand the events leading to this break, we
must travel south to Rome, where Pope Leo X was building St. Peter’s Basilica.
Like any of us faced with financing new construction, Leo approached his
bankers for a loan. The Medici bank of Florence, which was owned by Leo’s
family, had been the papal bank for some time, though by Leo’s day it had been
replaced by the Fugger bank, centered in Augsburg, Germany. The Fugger bank had
been founded relatively recently, but it rose rapidly to become the largest
bank in the world due to the same silver boom in Germany that had led to the establishment
of the University of Wittenberg and the relative prosperity of the Luther
family. Jacob Fugger, the head of the bank, approved the loan, but this left
Leo with the problem of figuring out how to pay it back. Leo decided that the
best approach to handling that problem was to sell off some of the assets in
his treasury, specifically, the Treasury of Merits of which he was the
custodian. In other words, Leo decided to hold an indulgence sale.
So, what are indulgences? To understand that, we need
to know something about Roman Catholic conceptions of sin. According to
Catholic theology, every sin you commit results in both eternal and temporal
penalties. Eternal penalties affect your relationship with God; they are
spiritual and deal with your status in eternity, that is, whether you go to
Heaven or Hell. But since a sin against God is also a crime against your
neighbor, sins must also be punished in this life, hence the temporal
penalties, which are paid in time. When you confess your sins to a priest and
he absolves you, that absolution takes away the eternal penalty due to your
sins, but leaves the temporal untouched. He then assigns you a penance (a good
work) that you can perform that pays the temporal penalty. This may be saying
prayers, going on a pilgrimage, etc. These penalties could be pretty hefty; for
example, knights fighting at the battle of Hastings in 1066, in a campaign that
had been blessed by the Pope, were required to do 10 years of penance for every
person they killed in the battle. And this didn't even touch other battles the
knight fought in or any extra-curricular activities he might have indulged in.
If you die with your temporal debt unpaid, the remainder has to be paid in time
in the afterlife, so you go to Purgatory, a doctrine developed in the twelfth
century to deal with the problems associated with unpaid temporal penalties.
After your temporal penalty is completely paid in Purgatory, then you go to
Heaven.
So how do you avoid languishing in Purgatory for who
knows how long? There are a couple of possibilities. You could endow a
monastery or a church and get priests to say Mass or monks to pray for you. If
you pay the expenses, the credit for the time and the Masses goes to your
account. This may seem odd, but think of it like this: if you get a speeding
ticket, the town doesn't really care if you pay it or someone else does; it
just wants its money. The same logic applies here. As long as your temporal
debt is paid by someone, it counts. Going on pilgrimage is another good option.
Not only do you get credit for the time you spend on the road, but the shrine
you're visiting itself conveys a certain number of years of penance depending
on its importance.
This is where indulgences came in, particularly in
connection with armed, fighting pilgrimages, or as we call them, Crusades. To
try to drum up troops to free the Holy Land, the Pope had promised certain
unspecified spiritual benefits to all who fought for the faith; the Church then
needed to figure out exactly what these benefits were. The doctrines outlined
above were elaborated to a large extent to answer this question. The Church
eventually decided that going on a Crusade would remit the entire temporal
penalty due to sins that had been confessed to a priest and absolved. But since
not everyone could go on Crusade—women, the sick, the aged, etc.—and not
everyone who wanted to go on Crusade could afford it, it was decided that if
you paid the way for someone else to go on Crusade, you would receive the
benefits of Crusading yourself. These benefits would be paid to you out of the
Treasury of Merits, the collection of good works performed by Christ and the
saints above and beyond what was necessary for their own salvation. The Pope
was the custodian of this Treasury and could call a Crusade and authorize a
withdrawal for the participants. (Not all the Crusades were to the Holy Land:
the Reconquistà which drove the Muslims out of Spain actually began
before the Crusades proper, and other Crusades were called against the
Albigensians in France, pagans in the Baltic, the Hussites in Bohemia, and even
the Pope's political rivals.) With the end of the Crusades, the practice of
selling indulgences, as these crusading benefits were called, continued. Some
were limited indulgences, which paid only for a specific period of time, say,
10 years of penance. Others were plenary indulgences, which paid the whole
penalty. Leo's indulgence sale was the latter type.
Leo, of course, was not going to go out hawking
indulgences on the streets. The man who was reputed to have said, "God
gave us the papacy; let us enjoy it!" was not about to turn himself into a
salesman. Instead, he let it be known that for a fee, he would authorize other
ecclesiastical authorities to sell plenary indulgences themselves. One person
who bought into the scheme was Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, in the Holy Roman
Empire. Albrecht wasn’t about to peddle indulgences on the corner any more than
the Pope was, so he sub-contracted the indulgences sale to the Dominicans, an
order of friars founded in the 13th century to supply the Church with preachers
and expert theologians. The Dominicans would sell the indulgences and take a
cut of the profits; the rest would go to Albrecht to recoup the money he had
paid Leo to hold the indulgence sale; Leo used Albrecht’s money to help pay
back the loan he had gotten from the Fugger bank to build St. Peter’s Basilica.
Unfortunately, the Dominicans were not above twisting
the theology of indulgences to make more sales. One of them, Johan Tetzel by name,
was a master of the hard sell and was generally the sort of person who gave
used car salesmen a bad name. He literally would tell his listeners that his
indulgences were so good that even if you had violated the Blessed Virgin Mary
herself, this would get you off the hook. He told people repentance wasn't
necessary for the indulgences to work and that it was a virtual ticket to
Heaven regardless of what you had done or would do. And when he couldn’t get
any more sales from that, he ratcheted things up a bit more. If you are not
worried about yourself, what about your dearly departed mother languishing
perhaps for thousands of years in Purgatory? Were you to spend but a few coins
on an indulgence, she would be released to go directly into Heaven. After going
on about this for a while, Tetzel would end with a little jingle: "As soon
as the coin in the coin box rings, another soul from Purgatory springs!"
(It rhymes in German, too.) There was no mention that indulgences applied only
to sins already committed, confessed to a priest and absolved, only to the
temporal penalties due to such sins, etc.
The Indulgence
Controversy and the 95 Theses
This indulgence sale upset many people. Among them
was Elector Frederick the Wise, the prince of Electoral Saxony and one of the
people who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. He opposed the indulgence sale for
two basic reasons. First, it meant that money his people were producing in
Saxony was being sent out of the country to Mainz and ultimately to Rome,
thereby hurting the prosperity of Electoral Saxony. In fact, Frederick
suspected the whole thing was a scam designed to enrich Italy at the expense of
Germany. Second, in addition to using his revenues from silver mining to build
the University of Wittenberg, he had also spent a great deal of it purchasing
relics; in fact, he had one of the largest relic collections ever assembled.
People went on pilgrimages to view these relics—further enriching Saxony's
coffers—and Frederick was afraid that the indulgence sale would hurt business.
So Frederick simply banned the Dominicans from his territories; Tetzel and
company were forbidden to set foot in Saxony, and thus the indulgence sale had
none of the negative consequences that Frederick feared.
This wasn't the end of the matter, however. The
University of Wittenberg had picked up a star theologian from the University of
Erfurt, an Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther. He had begun work as
a Bachelor lecturer at Wittenberg, then completed his doctorate in theology a
few years later. Luther was very proud of that doctorate, and always referred
to himself as Herr Dr. Luther. Luther had
new approach to theology based on the insights he gained from his Tower
Experience; he and his students had converted the rest of the theological
faculty at Wittenberg to his way of thinking. And like Frederick, Luther was
also upset about the indulgence sale, though more for theological reasons, and
thus he decided to back up his prince by doing what theologians did in the
sixteenth century: he challenged the Dominicans to a debate. Debates were the
standard academic exercise of the period, more or less like a combination of
term papers and exams today. The protocol involved first writing a list of
propositions, or theses, in Latin (the language of academia), which the debater
was willing to defend against either specified individuals or all comers. He
then posted the theses along with information on the time and place of the
debate on the University bulletin board. In theological debates, the theses
also had to be sent to the person's spiritual superior to be checked for
heresy. Luther wrote a series of theses against the abuses of this indulgence
sale—ninety-five of them, to be exact—and posted them on the University
bulletin board, the church door at Wittenberg. This has often been portrayed as
a great act of defiance, as Luther boldly challenging the corruption of the
Church. Actually, it was more like an act of conformity. All Luther was doing
was following standard procedures for debate in an attempt to defend what he
thought was good church doctrine against the abuses of the Dominicans. Although
the debate never took place (remember, the Dominicans couldn't enter Saxony),
two things came together to make the 95 Theses an enormously controversial
event.
First, following standard procedures, Luther sent a
copy of the theses to his spiritual superior, who happened to be Archbishop
Albrecht of Mainz. Like Queen Victoria, he was not amused. Second, some of
Luther's students got hold of the theses, thought, "this is really hot
stuff," and sent them off to a printer AFTER TRANSLATING THEM INTO
GERMAN. Much to everyone's surprise, the 95 Theses became a runaway best
seller, with translations following into most European languages. Despite the
best efforts of professors since then, this was the only time in history that
an academic exercise has generated such an incredible volume of sales. Luther
thus unexpectedly found himself at the center of an international controversy
over indulgences.
