Question

What did Martin Luther post on a church door to publicly criticize the misuse of indulgences?


A.
Ninety-five theses


B.
Reformation


C.
Ten Commandments


D.
List of popes

Answer 1

Martin Luther (1483-1546) is rightly regarded as the founder of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation - the religious, political, cultural and social revolution that broke the hold of the Catholic Church over Europe. Luther was born in Eisleben in eastern Germany in 1483. Though in later accounts of himself he liked to dwell on the lowliness of his origins, in point of fact his father had made good in the mining industry, while his mother was from a professional bourgeois background.

Historians today tend to be skeptical about claims made some years ago by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson to the effect that the young Luther was haunted by a psychological collision with his parents, especially with his formidable father, and that he later transposed that conflict on to the fear of God’s judgement that was to haunt him as a monk. What is sure, though, is that the young Luther had to stand up for himself to defy his father, who wanted him to train for the legal profession, and assert his own desire to seek his everlasting salvation. In 1505, with that aim in mind, he got his own way when he entered the monastery, in Erfurt in Saxony, of the Augustinian Eremites, a strict order noted for its academic interests and pastoral concerns.

He was ordained priest in 1507 and proceeded to take up the academic focus of his order, becoming doctor of Sacred Scripture in 1512 and, at the same time, assuming a professorship of the bible at the newly founded University of Wittenberg in the Electorate of Saxony. Meanwhile, Luther’s monastic years were haunted by a dark shadow of acute anxiety as he sought, without any sense of success, to win God’s favour and forgiveness for his (largely imagined) sins through many acts of self-mortification.

Yet in lectures on Scripture texts, the Psalms of the Old Testament and the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans in the New, Luther gradually found assurance that sinners won acceptance from God the Father - were ‘justified’ - not actively, through their good deeds, but passively and simply by faith that Christ had died on the Cross to save them. However, by his own testimony, it may have been some years, perhaps not until as late as 1519, that he actually appropriated those insights fully to his own condition. In the midst of that process, in 1517, came the 95 Theses against Indulgences, a document showing that Luther’s practical appropriation of ‘justification by faith alone’ was far from fully formed at that point in time and that, although Luther disparaged papal indulgences as media of final forgiveness of sins, he was still placing considerable onus on the responsibility of the individual to secure remission of sins through contrition for them.

In the years to come, the breach that the 95 Theses opened up with the papacy by challenging its claimed divinely-endowed power to pardon widened inexorably, leading to Luther’s excommunication in 1520 and his outlawry as an impenitent heretic at the Diet (German parliament) in 1521. In the same year, in the most dangerous passage of his life, Luther secured protection and a safe hiding place from the ruler of Saxony, the Elector Frederick the Wise. In the years to come, following Frederick’s death in 1525 , Luther resettled as professor at Wittenberg (and a married family man from 1525) and became the builder of the Lutheran Protestant Reformation. Its church structures were to be incorporated in the ‘Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Pastors in Electoral Saxony’ of 1528 and its doctrines were formulated in the Augsburg Confession of 1530.

Martin Luther is a figure of titanic greatness in the history of religion, a man of insurmountable courage, a writer and preacher of vast output and great depth, with the most powerful sense of the immediacy of the divine. His character was marred by intense violence of emotion and language against all who disagreed with his religious views and he manifested rising bigotry against the Jewish people; he could be opportunistic and full of duplicity in advancing his cause. For good or ill, as both destructive revolutionary and patient builder, Luther’s place in the history of Europe is assured.

The 95 Theses: Origins

If anyone remembers anything about Martin Luther, it is likely to be the fact that, in protest against a papal indulgence being hawked around Germany by the salesman friar Johann Tetzel, he nailed 95 Theses to the door of a church - the Castle Church in Wittenberg, in the German principality of Saxony - and thereby precipitated the Reformation. Indeed in all biographies of him the central importance of Luther’s 95 Theses (to give them their full title, the ‘Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of indulgences’) has been recognised from the beginning.

First in the field was Luther’s leading Reformation partner and academic colleague as professor of Greek at Luther’s University of Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon. It was Melanchthon who first assembled as a literary record what we may term the drama of the Theses. It main ingredients were: Luther the lover of truth versus Tetzel, a father of lies; the nailing of the Theses; and the role of Providence in those events. Melanchthon recorded how:

When Luther was in [his] course of study, venal indulgences were circulated in these regions by Tetzel the Dominican, a most shameless sycophant. Luther, angered by Tetzel’s impious and execrable debates, and burning with the eagerness of piety, published Propositions concerning indulgences [the 95 Theses] and he publicly nailed these to the church attached to Wittenberg Castle, on the day [31 October] before the feast of All Saints, 1517. These were the beginnings of this controversy, in which Luther, as yet suspecting or dreaming nothing about the future change of rites [religion], was certainly not completely getting rid of indulgences themselves, but only urging moderation.
In writing thus, Melanchthon showed, first, how Luther was goaded by Tetzel beyond the limits of righteous exasperation, that the Theses were nailed and, most significantly, that as yet Luther hardly knew what he was doing (‘as yet suspecting or dreaming nothing’). So Melanchthon was indicating that the delivery to the world of the Theses, an action whose eventual outcome was at first not envisaged by their human instrument, had to be the working of Providence, shaping God’s ends through a human agent. Thus, even though Luther himself was not to know where his actions, divinely inspired without his knowing, would lead, it was entirely valid to see in that drama of a starved monk, some paper, hammer, nails and a church door, the real, if distant, origins of the Protestant Reformation. It was Melanchthon, fixing the date of Luther’s protest unmistakably to 31 October, who helped make that day, in subsequently devised annual commemorative celebrations, ‘Reformation day’ throughout the Lutheran world: not because that was when the Reformation really began, but because that was when God initiated, through Luther, the process that would lead to the Reformation.

God’s instrument, Luther, was also a brave man and Melanchthon showed that he did what he had to do because he was pushed beyond endurance by doctrinal abuse and ‘sycophancy’. He had to nail the Theses, with all the theatre of action that such moments require. We might think of Robin Hood, forced to make a stand in brave defence of an oppressed friend; or of the part-legendary Swiss national hero Wilhelm Tell, inaugurating his nation’s defiance of their Austrian overlords by refusing the degradation of saluting the hat of the local representative of Austrian power. In all these cases - Robin Hood, Wilhelm Tell, Luther - mere words, unaccompanied by brave action, were not enough for true valour, and in the Melanchthon version, which passed into posterity, Luther had to have nailed the Theses.

In the accumulating tradition of Luther biography, the act of nailing in turn represented the triumph of manly action. Thus a selection of Victorian English lives of Luther, celebrating him as a hero of virile Christian courage, related how he ‘went boldly [my emphasis] down to the church, and affixed to the door ninety-five Theses against the doctrine of indulgences’. The act of nailing, ‘this courageous attack’, was literally striking hammer blows for freedom, and it took a courage that contrasted with Erasmus’s lack of that virtue, ‘for the only thing which gives a man true courage to speak what he knows to be right .... is “the fear of the Lord”...’. Again, in another example of this literary type, while the learned ‘timidly’ drew back from confrontation with Tetzel’s aggressiveness, Luther alone, though fortified by the word of God and so ‘not deficient in courage’, spoke out in what another biography acknowledged was his ‘audacious act’. In turn, such audacious acts – as Luther’s, Robin Hood’s or Tell’s – may immediately become public acts, exemplary in their inspiration to large numbers of people to take heart from them.

Fact and legend collude in the image of Luther’s brave action, not just in composing the 95 Theses, which were so critical of the papal power of issuing those remissions of the guilt of sin known as indulgences, but in taking the bold step of making them a public manifesto. In terms of the classification as the kind of production they were, the 95 Theses may have been one, two or all three of three things.

First, they were an attachment to an advisory letter, private and confidential and dated 31 October 1517, from Luther as a professorial expert on theology to his ecclesiastical superior, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, archbishop of Mainz, warning him of the doctrinally dubious nature of indulgences in general. There would have been little of the heroic about such a procedure, even though archbishop Albrecht, on receipt of the letter enclosing the Theses, issued a kind of gagging order against the bold professor-monk of Wittenberg.

At the same time, the Theses, a handwritten schedule in Latin, must be seen as a fairly routine announcement of, and the agenda for, a forthcoming university debate amongst theologians on the legitimacy or otherwise of indulgences, a discussion to be conducted by expert theologians. The chairman, Professor Luther, was using the ‘disputation’ Theses to put forward his own viewpoint and inviting others to submit theirs: ‘The following heads [the 95 Theses] will be the subject of a public discussion at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the reverend father, Martin Luther, Augustinian, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and duly appointed Lecturer on these subjects in that place’. Universities are known for their posters advertising forthcoming events, and the door of the castle church was the recognised bulletin board for Wittenberg university. Luther, in posting the Theses, ‘had no intention’, he claimed, ‘to give [them] so much publicity. I wished only to confer on their contents with some of those who reside with us or near us’.

A learned debate amongst academic theologians from the region’s universities might have had little significance as a world-shattering event. However, the Theses next took on a third identity. From what we might call a ‘whistle-blowing’ letter to a superior, to topics for a seminar, they turned next into a sensational printed artefact, precipitated fully into the public domain, to be a manifesto for change and rebellion, against papal Rome in a country seething with a mixture of religious, moral, political and financial grievances against the Roman Church. As Luther reported, ‘... now they are printed, reprinted, and spread far and wide, beyond my expectation’.

So, it is pretty well certain that the Theses were nailed to the door, in an ordinary act of bill-posting that came to be constructed as one of history’s emblematic moments. Then, before Christmas 1517, what was intended as the syllabus for a colloquium of theologians from a group of provincial universities to discuss had been transformed into a public manifesto by two simple processes. First, using a German invention of the previous century, they were printed in such centres as Magdeburg and Leipzig and, second, in December in the great south German city of Nuremberg they were translated into German. But it is at least worth speculating that this distribution of the Theses ‘far and wide’ was not entirely, as Luther put it, ‘beyond my expectation; so much so that I repent of their production’. On 11 November he was sending copies of the Theses to friends, and from this arose the mass printing that took place in the dying weeks of that year. Evidently intended in the first instance for a debate within academia, the propositions were not theoretical, technical or ‘scholastic’, in the sense of the abstruse academic method in which Luther was trained. Their tone was simple, from the opening ringing declaration ‘When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said “Repent”, he called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence’. That announcement in turn set the keynote for the Theses as a practical, teaching document ideal for public consumption. For, as well as a professor, Luther was a working parish priest in Wittenberg, and his immediate worry over the indulgence of 1517 was that it dangerously deluded parishioners into the mistaken belief that their sins could be forgiven by purchasing indulgences rather than by genuine heartfelt contrition for sins.

Concern with what is known as pastoral, that is practical or applied, theology suffuses the Theses, above all in the almost incantatory overtures to Theses 42-3 and 45-51: ‘Christians should be taught...’. By 1515 Luther was already no stranger to the press - he had, for example, had the scripture texts for his earliest university lectures printed for his students. So, if the 95 Theses were motions for a symposium which somehow got out into the public domain, they could not have been more skillfully drawn up for the latter use.

The 95 Theses: Contents

What, then, were their major concerns? For one thing they were not centrally concerned with the financial scam surrounding the 1517 indulgence, a complex racket to raise money for Rome and allow von Hohenzollen to pay off debts he had built up to pay for papal dispensation to hold more benefices - highly lucrative ones - than the Church’s own law allowed: Luther knew nothing of that then.

Instead, the 95 Theses were insistently preoccupied with the theology and practice of indulgences, those papal remissions of the guilt still attaching to sins after the sins themselves had been absolved, primarily in the Church’s sacrament of Penance. If that guilt was not somehow discharged in his life, by doing good deeds of mercy and charity or by performing penances and by such pious actions as going on pilgrimages, then before admission into heaven could be considered the same guilt would have to be cleared in intense suffering by fire for whatever duration was appropriate in the state beyond death known as purgatory. Individuals could, however, acquire in advance for themselves what we might term insurance policies in the form of indulgences so as to reduce or eliminate detention in purgatory after their deaths.

The Catholic Church had come to teach that indulgences, forged out of a massive ‘treasury of merit’ built up by Christ and the saints and in the custody of the Church itself to draw upon and dispense, could also be applied to the credits of friends, relations and benefactors in purgatory. In these senses, the doctrine of indulgences was part of the then current widespread anxiety over the ways that men and women, as sinners, were made acceptable and forgiven in God’s sight.

Luther, on the other hand, is firmly associated with an alternative routemap towards redemption, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He was already feeling his way towards the realisation of this doctrine in the course of University exegetical lectures on the Psalms (1513-1515) and on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (1515-1516). According to its mature formulation, sinful people were accounted acceptable and just (‘justified’) in God’s eyes not through the worth that they actively pursued by their own efforts, but only passively, by accepting and trusting that Christ had died to atone for their sins: the ‘just’ were saved by their faith.

This central ‘Lutheran’ perception,m however, is not to the fore in the 95 Theses. Indeed, in the ‘Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Writings’, 1545, he carefully chronicled the issue of the 95 Theses before he recorded his full discovery of justification by faith. In their nature, these slow and gradual intellectual and psychological processes cannot always be precisely dated, but it seems certain that his fullest insight into justification by faith and his deepest appropriation of this doctrine to his own condition cannot have come earlier than 1518. In fact, Luther recalled, that discovery synchronized with the events of 1519, which were themselves partly the fall-out from the 95 Theses. Though he had earlier hit upon most of the ingredients of justification by faith in a mental and doctrinal way, it was in 1519, he claimed, that he took possession of the doctrine in a sudden and direct experiential manner, appropriating itto his own spiritually distressed and hyper-anxious condition. He recalled how he had for so long, as a monk, hated the scriptural term the ‘righteousness’ (Justitia) of a judgmental God which he was sure convicted him and damned him:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience ... I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners … At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith … Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.
Yet those revolutionary, liberating realisations, the cornerstones of the Reformation, were not fully at Luther’s disposal when he drew up the 95 Theses, or if they were they did not inspire his devastating critique of indulgences. In the Theses Luther did not reveal the redundant and delusive nature of indulgences on the grounds that the just were saved by faith alone and therefore, being already pardoned by the Father in recognition of the Son’s atoning sacrifice, did not need those ‘pardons’. Instead he required sinners to win their forgiveness, not, it is true, by their good works or by any external mechanisms, but through what came from within themselves, sorrow for sins, contrition, repentance:

Any Christian who is truly penitent, enjoys full remission from penalty and guilt, and this is given him without letters of indulgence. [Thesis 36] A truly contrite sinner seeks out, and loves to pay, the penalties of his sins; whereas the very multitude of indulgences dulls men’s consciences. [Thesis 40]
Conclusion: Luther’s Theology in 1517

When he wrote the 95 Theses, Luther was still so largely anchored in medieval understandings of how justification was achieved that he found a place for the salvationary role of ‘good works’ in his Theses. ‘Works of mercy ... works of love’ are set against mechanical, mercenary indulgences as routes to justification. However, the starkest contrast in the 95 Theses was not that between necessary good works and unnecessary indulgences but that between vain papal indulgences and indispensable penitence, that state of mind, heart and soul in which the sinner freely acknowledges what he or she is, and bewails the fact. Luther was in fact strongly influenced by medieval analyses of the sacrament of Penance conducted by commentators such as Gabriel Biel (1418-1495). According to this approach, the Almighty responded with His full forgiveness to whatever quotient of grief for sin, no matter how paltry, the penitent could summon up: quod in se est, literally ‘whatever is in one’.

In October 1517 the protester against indulgences was far from being the Protestant leader of later years and the full theology of the Reformation was to emerge from, not to give rise to, the 95 Theses.

In April 1518 Luther attended the general chapter of his order of Augustinians in Heidelberg and there delivered further Theses that reveal the growing occupancy of his mind by justification through faith and the invincible importance of God’s forgiving and healing initiative towards us, known as grace: ‘The one who does much “work” is not the righteous one, but the one who, without “work”, has much faith in Christ.’ And even in those propositions that herald the fuller articulation of Reformation theology in the future, such as ‘The Freedom of a Christian’ of 1520, Luther was still attached to active human striving for reconciliation with the Almighty – ‘stirring up the eagerness to seek the grace of Christ’. The 95 Theses, then, were only the beginning of the process by which Luther the monk became Luther the reformer.

Answer 2

What do you think it is? @logan13

Answer 3

@logan13
Your guess?

Answer 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation

Answer 5

Parallel to events in Germany, a movement began in the Swiss Confederation under the leadership of Huldrych Zwingli. Zwingli was a scholar and preacher who moved to Zurich – the then-leading city state – in 1518, a year after Martin Luther began the Reformation in Germany with his 95 Theses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation

Answer 6

Read that and then tell what you think it is.

Answer 7

idk