Martin Luther: Ninety-five Theses

Context

Martin Luther, an ordained Catholic priest with a doctorate in theology, joined the theology faculty at Wittenberg University, at the same time serving as a parish priest at Schlosskirche, or Castle Church, in Wittenberg. In the years that followed, Luther came to dispute many of the theological principles of Catholicism and concluded that the church had gone astray by becoming worldly and corrupt. At the core of his reexamination of Catholicism was the issue of how a person achieved salvation in heaven. According to church teaching, salvation could be achieved in part through good works, that is, by leading an exemplary life. This teaching was based on a theological principle called supererogation, which states that Jesus; his mother, Mary; and the church's saints had performed a great many good works—far in excess of what was needed to achieve their own salvation—and these good works were stored as treasure in heaven. An ordinary person typically died with more sin than merits on his or her soul, so in effect the merits of Jesus, Mary, and the saints were used to cleanse the soul, allowing a person's soul to enter heaven. This is why a deceased person's living relatives and loved ones prayed and offered masses for the dead; prayers and masses were their supplication to God to transfer these stored-up merits to the deceased. This doctrine, then, was the foundation of the belief in good works as one path to salvation.

Based on his reading of the Bible, particularly the book of Romans, Luther came to conclude that this view was erroneous. He insisted instead on the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, which is now usually phrased more simply as “justification through faith.” According to this view, salvation in heaven is an unconditional gift of God's love and grace. A person receives it through faith alone and acceptance of Jesus Christ as the source of salvation; it cannot be “earned” through the performance of good works, for that would imply that a well-behaved, charitable atheist could be admitted to heaven. The doctrine of justification by faith became a central doctrine of the Protestant Reformation.

Luther's teachings about indulgences began to attract the attention of church authorities. Catholic theology teaches that when a penitent confesses a sin to a priest and is given absolution (or forgiveness from God through the priest), the sin is forgiven, the person is now in a state of grace, and the person's soul can enter heaven. (The church distinguishes between mortal sins, or severe sins that merit punishment in hell, and venial sins, or minor transgressions that by themselves do not preclude entrance to heaven.) According to the church, however, the stain of sin is not fully taken away by the sacrament of penance, or confession. After death, a person's soul has to spend time in purgatory, an intermediate state between this world and heaven. In purgatory, a word related to the word purge through the Latin word purgare, a person is shut out from God's presence, a form of punishment that enables the person to give satisfaction for past sins and become fit to enter heaven. An indulgence, which is typically in the form of a prayer or some other type of religious observance, earns the soul a reduction in the time spent in purgatory. Church teaching distinguishes between partial and plenary indulgences. A partial indulgence reduces the time spent in purgatory; a plenary indulgence remits all of the time the person's soul would otherwise have spent in purgatory.

In the sixteenth century the practice of granting indulgences was much abused. The church often sold them by granting letters of indulgence (or what Luther called letters of pardon) to people who donated money to the church. Among the worst offenders was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who traveled about selling indulgences to raise funds for the renovation of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. Tetzel was reported to have often said, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs” (qtd. in Estep, p. 119). Luther was deeply troubled by this practice, along with other indications that the church had grown greedy and worldly, and he preached sermons against it. He objected to what he saw as Pope Leo X's greed and wealth, for the pope had struck a bargain with an ambitious German nobleman, Alfred of Mainz, who was trying to buy a bishopric and who took part in the Tetzel scheme in Germany as part of his payment to the pope for the position. Luther, meanwhile, feared that Catholics would neglect confession, absolution, and penance because they believed that buying indulgences would serve the same purpose—that, in effect, they would believe they could buy their way into heaven.

Put simply, conflict was brewing between Luther and the church hierarchy. The growing dispute was not just with a faraway pope, for the Wittenberg church at which Luther served contained one of the largest collections of sacred relics in Europe, some seventeen thousand items at the time, including a purported twig from the burning bush of Moses and a fragment of bread from the Last Supper. The church had a special dispensation from the pope allowing it to sell indulgences to people who came to view the relics—and who paid a stipulated fee. The church hierarchy actually computed that a person who visited the relics on All Saints' Day (November 1) and paid the fee would have the time spent in purgatory reduced by 1,902,202 years and 270 days. Luther had had enough of this practice and was determined to provoke debate and public discussion about it. It was for this reason that he published his Ninety-five Theses.