Let’s say you have repented your sin, whatever it was, and can rely on the merits of Christ for your salvation. That doesn’t mean that God is going to let you completely off the hook now, does it? Let’s say you murdered a particularly annoying relative. You confessed your sin to a priest and were assigned a significant penance. All well and good, but you still must suffer for that sin, if not in this world, then in the next. You won’t go to Hell, though you may end up spending a very long time in Purgatory (exactly like Hell, except that you finally get out). But an indulgence can lessen your sentence. And a plenary indulgence means that all the temporal punishment due to your sin is erased. So if you have won a plenary indulgence (or someone else has won it on your behalf) and if you die right at that moment, without the opportunity to commit additional sins, you will go straight to Heaven.
It is not only rather easy, it is even tempting, to knock over this elaborately rationalized house of cards. Several aspects of it—such as the dominance of clergy over the lives of other Christians, the necessity for a sacrament of Penance, and the existence of a place called Purgatory14—were not, in any genuine sense, part of the faith of the earliest Christians and took centuries for bishops and theologians to construct and justify. These constructions became ever more elaborate in the course of the Middle Ages; by the time of Luther what we might call “justification by rationalization alone” had become so much a part of the clerical mindset that many would no longer have noticed how much invention and even fantasy was going into these constructions.
In spring 1517, bands of indulgences salesmen arrived in Hohenzollern Saxony. They were selling plenary indulgences in return for monetary “donations.” They stayed through summer. They walked (or rode)15 everywhere, preaching in cathedrals, churches, and public squares. Wherever they went (and there were few places too small for their attentions), they were received as celebrities, stirring up interest and enthusiasm. They offered an excellent return on investment: salvation for gold, just an insignificant bit of gold. Whether or not the words are accurate, news of their rhyming pitch resounded through the land:
When the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from Purgatory springs!
Some, it seems, believed that a little gold could even release a damned soul from Hell itself. “Even if you have ravished the Virgin Mary, an indulgence will free you from punishment!” is one of the promises the gossips claimed had been made. Whatever was said—and we have no recordings to consult—it is only too likely that the peddlers, Dominican friars all, were no more scrupulous in their pitches than Columbus in his descriptions of the North Atlantic route. The object of a successful salesman is to clinch the sale.
We do have drafts of their sermons, probably penned by their leader, Johann Tetzel, and, while they do not engage in the basest claims, they are models of how to stir a crowd by pity and fear:
You priest, you nobleman, you merchant, you woman, you virgin, you matron, you youth, you elder, go into your church (which, as I have said, is now Saint Peter’s) and visit the hallowed cross that has been set up for you, that incessantly calls you.… Remember that you are in such stormy peril on the raging sea of this world that you do not know if you can reach the Harbor of Salvation.… You should know: whoever has confessed and is contrite and puts alms into the box, as his confessor counsels him [emphasis mine], will have all his sins forgiven.… So why are you standing about idly? Run, all of you, for the salvation of your souls. Be quick and concerned about redemption as about the temporal goods you doggedly pursue day till night. “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found … while he is near”; work, as John says, “while it is day,” for “the night cometh when no man can work.”
Do you not hear the voices of your dead parents and others, screaming and crying: “ ‘Have pity on me, have pity on me … for the hand of God hath touched me’? We are suffering severe punishments and pain, from which you could rescue us with a few alms [emphasis mine], if only you would.” Open your ears, because the father is calling to the son and the mother to the daughter.
One of the most revealing sentences is the opening invocation, addressing priests, nobles, merchants, and their wives—in other words the people with some money. Little time would be wasted on farmers, serfs, the poor. We’re really interested only in those who have gold to part with. The salvation of the penniless is none of our business.
Wittenberg, located in the part of Saxony ruled by Frederick the Wise, lay just outside the commission of Tetzel and his fellow friars. Frederick had one of the largest collections of holy relics in Europe. He was not about to allow their power and importance to be leeched away by a new papal indulgence. And, anyway, cooperation with Albrecht (who also had a large collection)16 was unthinkable. But Tetzel set himself up across the border in nearby Jüterbog whither Wittenbergers were lured to hear the famous friar preach. They returned to Wittenberg with their purchased certificates, granting full remission of sins, which some of them brought to Doctor Luther in confession. Luther was deeply troubled by what they showed him and horrified by the promises they claimed had been made to them. He felt compelled to act.
What he did not do, despite the strength of the legend, was to nail ninety-five theses to Wittenberg’s church door in an act of public rebellion. It is important to realize that Brother Martin was at this time a faithful Augustinian monk, a small-town professor who taught theology at his little, new university. He would later express regret that, as he came to public notice, he was still a convinced papist. If we know he had a somewhat rocky spiritual life, the world knew nothing of him; and what he knew of himself hardly suggested the revolutionary fame that would soon accrue to him. Martin framed his displeasure, not in a public act of any kind, but in a diplomatically phrased and private letter to Archbishop Albrecht.
Luther, aware of the enormous social distance between himself and the princely archbishop, begins humbly, calling himself “fex hominum” (a shit among men),17 who nonetheless dares to address his august archbishop on account of the gravity of the occasion. Indulgences, he argues, cannot bring a human soul to salvation or holiness; and Christ never commanded anyone to preach such things, only to preach his gospel, which is being submerged and lost beneath the vulgar clatter of this hawking of indulgences. It is a simple but pure and powerful argument that any saint would have taken seriously.
Along with his letter, Luther included a list of thesis statements. These were not fully reasoned arguments, nor were they meant to be; they were just sentences intended to spark a formal academic argument or disputation. Such statements are still used in our day to announce a public debate, usually following the word “Resolved.” Sending off such thesis statements was not an unusual action at the time. Many writers and university lecturers availed themselves of the format. Erasmus used it, as would Galileo. The thesis statement was simply the announced proposition that would then have to be defended or opposed by reasoned argument in the course of a scheduled academic defense.18 Ninety-five such thesis statements may have seemed a bit much, but then Luther was an overreacher, not a man easily confined to conventional limits.
The first thesis statement smartly sets the stage for all that will follow: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when he said ‘Poenitentiam agite,’19 willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.” The second thesis statement calls into question the need for the church’s sacramental confession, asserting that Jesus cannot have meant to impose such a thing when he spoke the words quoted in the first thesis. As always, Brother Martin is not far from his own experience, whether as confessant or confessor. The fourth thesis statement continues in this personal vein: “The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is true inward repentance, and continues till our entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Self-hatred, though hardly smiled upon in our current how- to books on self-esteem, was part and parcel of an exemplary Christian life from the time of Jesus till well past the time of Luther. Bu
t Luther’s early emphasis here on the primacy of self-hatred surely speaks of his own inner turmoil.
By the fifth thesis statement the pope is cited with the claim that he “does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the canons [of church law].” Thereafter, the pope is cited more than thirty times, in some instances to delightfully humorous effect. (At the time of composing these thesis statements, Luther was reading Julius Exclusus, which can only have cheered him on.) “Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting pardons, needs, and therefore desires, their devout prayer for him more than the money they bring” (Thesis 48). “Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that Saint Peter’s church should burn to ashes than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep” (50). So the pardon-preachers have begun to reach out even to those with little or no gold to spare (not unlike the greedy American bankers who, in our day, have made fortunes by luring those with insufficient resources into taking on subprime mortgage loans). “Christians are to be taught that it would be the pope’s wish, as it is his duty, to give of his own money to very many of those from whom certain hawkers of pardons cajole money, even though the church of Saint Peter might have to be sold” (51). Oh, yeah.
Luther goes on—in the form of thesis statements, no less—to report some of the questions he has heard people raise: “This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men [like Luther], to rescue the reverence due to the pope from slander, or even from the shrewd questionings of the laity. To wit: ‘Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a church?’ ” (81, 82). These questions, supposedly framed by others, occupy eight theses, ending with “Since the pope, by his pardons, seeks the salvation of souls rather than money, why does he suspend the indulgences and pardons granted heretofore, since these have equal efficacy?” (89).
The questions, couched in innocent language, are actually clever and sophisticated. And, for the most part, they are unanswerable. Luther may not have nailed his theses to the church door, but he has nailed the papal scam for what it was. “The true treasure of the Church,” as he states in Thesis 62, “is the most holy Gospel,” in keeping with which “Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God” (45). But perhaps the most unanswerable is Thesis 86, also couched as a “shrewd” question from “the laity”: “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than that of the richest Crassus,20 build just this one church of Saint Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”
The piquancy, the verve, of these “theses” is enough, even today, to stimulate a reader’s thinking or even to shock one into wakefulness. Though Luther would continue to write reams and reams of books and broadsides throughout his life, some exceedingly eloquent and few dull, he seldom if ever improved on the lively asperity of the Ninety-Five Theses; and so it is not surprising that this list of statements, tucked in with his humble letter to the archbishop, should continue to stand as his most famous work.
Good ol’ Marty Luther, oh good ol’ Marty Luther
Played in the Reformation Band.
His Five-and-Ninety Theses
Just tore the pope to pieces.
We think the Reformation’s gra-n-d!
So sing children at Lutheran summer camps in the United States (or so they did before a new fashion of interconfessional ecumenism embarrassed their counselors).
The Theses send out a spirit that is catching: here is a bandwagon, the reader may be prompted to declare, that I’d like to jump on. Of course, if they’d remained in their envelope or been deep-sixed in the archiepiscopal archives, no one would ever have heard of them. Somebody (a disgruntled secretary perhaps) had them printed; and then the distribution began! For the network of printing presses had now become what the Internet is for us: an unstoppable, nearly instant, and universal marketplace of communication. Within a month, all of Germany had read the Theses or heard them read publicly; by year’s end, all of Europe—in Luther’s original Latin or in the many vernacular translations made with amazing alacrity. There were as yet no copyright laws, so no one asked Luther’s permission to print his Latin text or to make and publish translations.
The Theses appeared so fresh, so bold that no one could remain neutral: you loved them or you hated them. In Germany, at least, where there was much muttering against the anti-German policies of the papal establishment (which collected fees and taxes and gave back little or nothing), most people delighted in the Theses’ vigor and passion but even more in their clarity and appositeness. All of Germany’s resentments, and no doubt even some points no one had thought to raise before, had at last been given clarion expression. The sale of indulgences plunged throughout the German lands, as people roared with laughter and the name “Luther” became a household word. No wonder the Theses are remembered as having been nailed to the door of Wittenberg’s collegiate church.
1 In the United States in our day, the word “evangelical” has come to be associated almost solely with fundamentalist (and similarly unbending) Christians. But its original meaning is “of the Gospel.” Our word “gospel” is an early English contraction for “good spell,” “spell” then meaning “tidings” or “news.” This English word “gospel” is intended as a translation of the Greek euaggelion and the Latin evangelium, both meaning “good news” and referring to the four narratives of the New Testament, the earliest of which, Mark’s, is actually labeled “the good news of Jesus Christ.”
2 Many of Erasmus’s favorite sayings were taken from Lucian, a Greek satirist of the second century AD, whose copious writings and hilarious skepticism would continue to inspire Erasmus’s work. Luther would find the atheistic Lucian repellant.
3 Publicly, at least, Erasmus condemned homosexual relations, taking the same Aristotelian line as the church: it was obvious that the penis–vagina instrumentality of the human body indicated that the Creator had intended sex for procreation. Anything else—sex for any other reason—was therefore a violation of the Creator’s wishes and a grievous sin. But it is impossible to know whether Erasmus actually subscribed to this view or was just keeping himself out of unnecessary trouble with theological authorities. Sex, as may be seen by its absence from his treatise to his friend the philandering knight, was not one of Erasmus’s subjects.
4 Another Greek New Testament was printed a year or two earlier than Erasmus’s version. It was to be part of a much larger Spanish project, the Complutensian Polyglot, which would include the entire Greek Bible, the Vulgate, the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, and an ancient Aramaic rabbinical commentary. Its New Testament had to await the editing and printing of the much larger Old Testament before it could be distributed. Meanwhile, Erasmus got wind of the Spanish project and won from pope and emperor an exclusive four-year license, thus ensuring that his own multilingual work, rather than the Complutensian Polyglot, would become the European standard. He understood instinctively what has since become conventional publishing wisdom: if there are to be two books on the same subject, be sure to get yours out there first.
5 As an undergraduate he studied at Erfurt (which he would later describe as a “beerhouse and whorehouse,” i.e., a typical German university of the time). His doctorate in theology, however, would be bestowed by Wittenberg when he was twenty-six.
6 In this volume, I normally use the King James Version (with modernized punctuation and spelling) when quoting from the Bible, because it seems especially appropriate for tasting the flavor of the period. Here, however, and in subsequent quotations from Romans, I employ the Anchor Bible translation by Josep
h A. Fitzmyer, because of the clarity of its contemporary English.
7 I do not mean to pass judgment on the sufficiency of the ethical norms of ancient Judaism, which does so repeatedly on its own, as in Isaiah 64:6, which condemns “our upright deeds” as no better than “used tampons.” (Some of the best lines in the Hebrew Bible never quite make it into the translations.)
8 The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), a gender-inclusive translation, renders this phrase as “the firstborn within a large family,” certainly a defensible translation. The Greek word for brother, adelphos, meaning “from the same womb,” has a ready feminine form, adelphe.
9 Pace Fitzmyer, I doubt this is an assertion of Jesus’s divinity. A more likely translation might be “the Messiah. God who is over all be blessed forever. Amen,” a very Jewish conclusion. The translation challenge lies in the lack of punctuation in ancient manuscripts.
10 Paul’s first scriptural quotation here is from Isaiah 28:16, the second from Joel 3:5, in both of which “the Lord” referred to is—in the Hebrew original, which Paul would have known—“YHWH,” the God of the Jews. These glancing references could suggest that, at least toward the end of his life, Paul may have seen Jesus as, in some sense, God—a development I found no evidence for when considering Paul’s earlier letters in Volume III of the Hinges of History, Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Chapter III.
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