30 theses of martin luther

by Dr. Martin Luther, 1517

Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences by Dr. Martin Luther (1517)

Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter. In the Name our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. 1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance. 2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance, i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by the priests. 3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh. 4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven. 5. The pope 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. 6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God's remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven. 7. God remits guilt to no one whom He does not, at the same time, humble in all things and bring into subjection to His vicar, the priest. 8. The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and, according to them, nothing should be imposed on the dying. 9. Therefore the Holy Spirit in the pope is kind to us, because in his decrees he always makes exception of the article of death and of necessity. 10. Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for purgatory. 11. This changing of the canonical penalty to the penalty of purgatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while the bishops slept. 12. In former times the canonical penalties were imposed not after, but before absolution, as tests of true contrition. 13. The dying are freed by death from all penalties; they are already dead to canonical rules, and have a right to be released from them. 14. The imperfect health [of soul], that is to say, the imperfect love, of the dying brings with it, of necessity, great fear; and the smaller the love, the greater is the fear. 15. This fear and horror is sufficient of itself alone (to say nothing of other things) to constitute the penalty of purgatory, since it is very near to the horror of despair. 16. Hell, purgatory, and heaven seem to differ as do despair, almost-despair, and the assurance of safety. 17. With souls in purgatory it seems necessary that horror should grow less and love increase. 18. It seems unproved, either by reason or Scripture, that they are outside the state of merit, that is to say, of increasing love. 19. Again, it seems unproved that they, or at least that all of them, are certain or assured of their own blessedness, though we may be quite certain of it. 20. Therefore by "full remission of all penalties" the pope means not actually "of all," but only of those imposed by himself. 21. Therefore those preachers of indulgences are in error, who say that by the pope's indulgences a man is freed from every penalty, and saved; 22. Whereas he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which, according to the canons, they would have had to pay in this life. 23. If it is at all possible to grant to any one the remission of all penalties whatsoever, it is certain that this remission can be granted only to the most perfect, that is, to the very fewest. 24. It must needs be, therefore, that the greater part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and highsounding promise of release from penalty. 25. The power which the pope has, in a general way, over purgatory, is just like the power which any bishop or curate has, in a special way, within his own diocese or parish. 26. The pope does well when he grants remission to souls [in purgatory], not by the power of the keys (which he does not possess), but by way of intercession. 27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory]. 28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone. 29. Who knows whether all the souls in purgatory wish to be bought out of it, as in the legend of Sts. Severinus and Paschal. 30. No one is sure that his own contrition is sincere; much less that he has attained full remission. 31. Rare as is the man that is truly penitent, so rare is also the man who truly buys indulgences, i.e., such men are most rare. 32. They will be condemned eternally, together with their teachers, who believe themselves sure of their salvation because they have letters of pardon. 33. Men must be on their guard against those who say that the pope's pardons are that inestimable gift of God by which man is reconciled to Him; 34. For these "graces of pardon" concern only the penalties of sacramental satisfaction, and these are appointed by man. 35. They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that contrition is not necessary in those who intend to buy souls out of purgatory or to buy confessionalia. 36. Every truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without letters of pardon. 37. Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ and the Church; and this is granted him by God, even without letters of pardon. 38. Nevertheless, the remission and participation [in the blessings of the Church] which are granted by the pope are in no way to be despised, for they are, as I have said, the declaration of divine remission. 39. It is most difficult, even for the very keenest theologians, at one and the same time to commend to the people the abundance of pardons and [the need of] true contrition. 40. True contrition seeks and loves penalties, but liberal pardons only relax penalties and cause them to be hated, or at least, furnish an occasion [for hating them]. 41. Apostolic pardons are to be preached with caution, lest the people may falsely think them preferable to other good works of love. 42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend the buying of pardons to be compared in any way to works of mercy. 43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons; 44. Because love grows by works of love, and man becomes better; but by pardons man does not grow better, only more free from penalty. 45. 45. 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. 46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons. 47. Christians are to be taught that the buying of pardons is a matter of free will, and not of commandment. 48. 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. 49. Christians are to be taught that the pope's pardons are useful, if they do not put their trust in them; but altogether harmful, if through them they lose their fear of God. 50. Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter's church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep. 51. 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 St. Peter might have to be sold. 52. The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain, even though the commissary, nay, even though the pope himself, were to stake his soul upon it. 53. They are enemies of Christ and of the pope, who bid the Word of God be altogether silent in some Churches, in order that pardons may be preached in others. 54. Injury is done the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or a longer time is spent on pardons than on this Word. 55. It must be the intention of the pope that if pardons, which are a very small thing, are celebrated with one bell, with single processions and ceremonies, then the Gospel, which is the very greatest thing, should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies. 56. The "treasures of the Church," out of which the pope. grants indulgences, are not sufficiently named or known among the people of Christ. 57. That they are not temporal treasures is certainly evident, for many of the vendors do not pour out such treasures so easily, but only gather them. 58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the Saints, for even without the pope, these always work grace for the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell for the outward man. 59. St. Lawrence said that the treasures of the Church were the Church's poor, but he spoke according to the usage of the word in his own time. 60. Without rashness we say that the keys of the Church, given by Christ's merit, are that treasure; 61. For it is clear that for the remission of penalties and of reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient. 62. The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God. 63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last. 64. On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is naturally most acceptable, for it makes the last to be first. 65. Therefore the treasures of the Gospel are nets with which they formerly were wont to fish for men of riches. 66. The treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men. 67. The indulgences which the preachers cry as the "greatest graces" are known to be truly such, in so far as they promote gain. 68. Yet they are in truth the very smallest graces compared with the grace of God and the piety of the Cross. 69. Bishops and curates are bound to admit the commissaries of apostolic pardons, with all reverence. 70. But still more are they bound to strain all their eyes and attend with all their ears, lest these men preach their own dreams instead of the commission of the pope. 71. He who speaks against the truth of apostolic pardons, let him be anathema and accursed! 72. But he who guards against the lust and license of the pardon-preachers, let him be blessed! 73. The pope justly thunders against those who, by any art, contrive the injury of the traffic in pardons. 74. But much more does he intend to thunder against those who use the pretext of pardons to contrive the injury of holy love and truth. 75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God -- this is madness. 76. We say, on the contrary, that the papal pardons are not able to remove the very least of venial sins, so far as its guilt is concerned. 77. It is said that even St. Peter, if he were now Pope, could not bestow greater graces; this is blasphemy against St. Peter and against the pope. 78. We say, on the contrary, that even the present pope, and any pope at all, has greater graces at his disposal; to wit, the Gospel, powers, gifts of healing, etc., as it is written in I. Corinthians xii. 79. To say that the cross, emblazoned with the papal arms, which is set up [by the preachers of indulgences], is of equal worth with the Cross of Christ, is blasphemy. 80. The bishops, curates and theologians who allow such talk to be spread among the people, will have an account to render. 81. This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due to the pope from slander, or even from the shrewd questionings of the laity. 82. 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? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial." 83. Again: -- "Why are mortuary and anniversary masses for the dead continued, and why does he not return or permit the withdrawal of the endowments founded on their behalf, since it is wrong to pray for the redeemed?" 84. Again: -- "What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul's own need, free it for pure love's sake?" 85. Again: -- "Why are the penitential canons long since in actual fact and through disuse abrogated and dead, now satisfied by the granting of indulgences, as though they were still alive and in force?" 86. Again: -- "Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?" 87. Again: -- "What is it that the pope remits, and what participation does he grant to those who, by perfect contrition, have a right to full remission and participation?" 88. Again: -- "What greater blessing could come to the Church than if the pope were to do a hundred times a day what he now does once, and bestow on every believer these remissions and participations?" 89. "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?" 90. To repress these arguments and scruples of the laity by force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to expose the Church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christians unhappy. 91. If, therefore, pardons were preached according to the spirit and mind of the pope, all these doubts would be readily resolved; nay, they would not exist. 92. Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Peace, peace," and there is no peace! 93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Cross, cross," and there is no cross! 94. Christians are to be exhorted that they be diligent in following Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hell; 95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven rather through many tribulations, than through the assurance of peace.

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Ninety-five Theses summary

Ninety-five Theses , Propositions for debate on the question of indulgence s, written by Martin Luther and, according to legend, posted on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Ger., on Oct. 31, 1517. This event is now seen as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. The theses were written in response to the selling of indulgences to pay for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. They represented an implicit criticism of papal policy and stressed the spiritual, inward character of the Christian faith. Widely circulated, they aroused much controversy. In 1518 Luther published a Latin manuscript with explanations of the theses.

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Martin Luther :: Ninety-Five Theses on the Power of Indulgences

Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences

In 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk posted upon the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg (in the manner common to those issuing bulletin of an upcoming event or debate) the Ninety-Five Theses on the Power of Indulgences , what has commonly become known as The Ninety-Five Theses . The contents of his posting challenged the current teaching of the Church on penance and indulgences, questioning as well the authority of the pope. Reaction to Luther's Theses was immediate and strong, leading to his excommunication from the Roman Church and the eventual birth of the Protestant Reformation. Luther's historically important defense of the gospel is noted and celebrated annually on 31 October, Reformation Day. The following is the translated text of the Ninety-Five Theses .

Out of love and concern for the truth, and with the object of eliciting it, the following heads 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. He requests that whoever cannot be present personally to debate the matter orally will do so in absence in writing.

• When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said "Repent", He called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
• The word cannot be properly understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, i.e. confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.
• Yet its meaning is not restricted to repentance in one's heart; for such repentance is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh.
• As long as hatred of self abides (i.e. true inward repentance) the penalty of sin abides, viz., until we enter the kingdom of heaven.
• The pope has neither the will nor the power to remit any penalties beyond those imposed either at his own discretion or by canon law.
• The pope himself cannot remit guilt, but only declare and confirm that it has been remitted by God; or, at most, he can remit it in cases reserved to his discretion. Except for these cases, the guilt remains untouched.
• God never remits guilt to anyone without, at the same time, making him humbly submissive to the priest, His representative.
• The penitential canons apply only to men who are still alive, and, according to the canons themselves, none applies to the dead.
• Accordingly, the Holy Spirit, acting in the person of the pope, manifests grace to us, by the fact that the papal regulations always cease to apply at death, or in any hard case.
• It is a wrongful act, due to ignorance, when priests retain the canonical penalties on the dead in purgatory.
• When canonical penalties were changed and made to apply to purgatory, surely it would seem that tares were sown while the bishops were asleep.
• In former days, the canonical penalties were imposed, not after, but before absolution was pronounced; and were intended to be tests of true contrition.
• Death puts an end to all the claims of the Church; even the dying are already dead to the canon laws, and are no longer bound by them.
• Defective piety or love in a dying person is necessarily accompanied by great fear, which is greatest where the piety or love is least.
• This fear or horror is sufficient in itself, whatever else might be said, to constitute the pain of purgatory, since it approaches very closely to the horror of despair.
• There seems to be the same difference between hell, purgatory, and heaven as between despair, uncertainty, and assurance.
• Of a truth, the pains of souls in purgatory ought to be abated, and charity ought to be proportionately increased.
• Moreover, it does not seem proved, on any grounds of reason or Scripture, that these souls are outside the state of merit, or unable to grow in grace.
• Nor does it seem proved to be always the case that they are certain and assured of salvation, even if we are very certain ourselves.
• Therefore the pope, in speaking of the plenary remission of all penalties, does not mean "all" in the strict sense, but only those imposed by himself.
• Hence those who preach indulgences are in error when they say that a man is absolved and saved from every penalty by the pope's indulgences.
• Indeed, he cannot remit to souls in purgatory any penalty which canon law declares should be suffered in the present life.
• If plenary remission could be granted to anyone at all, it would be only in the cases of the most perfect, i.e. to very few.
• It must therefore be the case that the major part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and high-sounding promise of relief from penalty.
• The same power as the pope exercises in general over purgatory is exercised in particular by every single bishop in his bishopric and priest in his parish.
• The pope does excellently when he grants remission to the souls in purgatory on account of intercessions made on their behalf, and not by the power of the keys (which he cannot exercise for them).
• There is no divine authority for preaching that the soul flies out of the purgatory immediately the money clinks in the bottom of the chest.
• It is certainly possible that when the money clinks in the bottom of the chest avarice and greed increase; but when the church offers intercession, all depends in the will of God.
• Who knows whether all souls in purgatory wish to be redeemed in view of what is said of St. Severinus and St. Pascal? (Note: Paschal I, pope 817-24. The legend is that he and Severinus were willing to endure the pains of purgatory for the benefit of the faithful).
• No one is sure of the reality of his own contrition, much less of receiving plenary forgiveness.
• Rare as is the man that is truly penitent, so rare is also the man who truly buys indulgences, i.e., such men are most rare.
• All those who believe themselves certain of their own salvation by means of letters of indulgence, will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.
• We should be most carefully on our guard against those who say that the papal indulgences are an inestimable divine gift, and that a man is reconciled to God by them.
• For the grace conveyed by these indulgences relates simply to the penalties of the sacramental "satisfactions" decreed merely by man.
• It is not in accordance with Christian doctrines to preach and teach that those who buy off souls, or purchase confessional licenses, have no need to repent of their own sins.
• Any Christian whatsoever, who is truly repentant, enjoys plenary remission from penalty and guilt, and this is given him without letters of indulgence.
• Any true Christian whatsoever, living or dead, participates in all the benefits of Christ and the Church; and this participation is granted to him by God without letters of indulgence.
• Yet the pope's remission and dispensation are in no way to be despised, for, as already said, they proclaim the divine remission.
• It is very difficult, even for the most learned theologians, to extol to the people the great bounty contained in the indulgences, while, at the same time, praising contrition as a virtue.
• 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, and tends to make them hate the penalties.
• Papal indulgences should only be preached with caution, lest people gain a wrong understanding, and think that they are preferable to other good works: those of love.
• Christians should be taught that the pope does not at all intend that the purchase of indulgences should be understood as at all comparable with the works of mercy.
• Christians should be taught that one who gives to the poor, or lends to the needy, does a better action than if he purchases indulgences.
• Because, by works of love, love grows and a man becomes a better man; whereas, by indulgences, he does not become a better man, but only escapes certain penalties.
• Christians should be taught that he who sees a needy person, but passes him by although he gives money for indulgences, gains no benefit from the pope's pardon, but only incurs the wrath of God.
• Christians should be taught that, unless they have more than they need, they are bound to retain what is only necessary for the upkeep of their home, and should in no way squander it on indulgences.
• Christians should be taught that they purchase indulgences voluntarily, and are not under obligation to do so.
• Christians should be taught that, in granting indulgences, the pope has more need, and more desire, for devout prayer on his own behalf than for ready money.
• Christians should be taught that the pope's indulgences are useful only if one does not rely on them, but most harmful if one loses the fear of God through them.
• Christians should be taught that, if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence-preachers, he would rather the church of St. Peter were reduced to ashes than be built with the skin, flesh, and bones of the sheep.
• Christians should be taught that the pope would be willing, as he ought if necessity should arise, to sell the church of St. Peter, and give, too, his own money to many of those from whom the pardon-merchants conjure money.
• It is vain to rely on salvation by letters of indulgence, even if the commissary, or indeed the pope himself, were to pledge his own soul for their validity.
• Those are enemies of Christ and the pope who forbid the word of God to be preached at all in some churches, in order that indulgences may be preached in others.
• The word of God suffers injury if, in the same sermon, an equal or longer time is devoted to indulgences than to that word.
• The pope cannot help taking the view that if indulgences (very small matters) are celebrated by one bell, one pageant, or one ceremony, the gospel (a very great matter) should be preached to the accompaniment of a hundred bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies.
• The treasures of the church, out of which the pope dispenses indulgences, are not sufficiently spoken of or known among the people of Christ.
• That these treasures are not temporal are clear from the fact that many of the merchants do not grant them freely, but only collect them.
• Nor are they the merits of Christ and the saints, because, even apart from the pope, these merits are always working grace in the inner man, and working the cross, death, and hell in the outer man.
• St. Laurence said that the poor were the treasures of the church, but he used the term in accordance with the custom of his own time.
• We do not speak rashly in saying that the treasures of the church are the keys of the church, and are bestowed by the merits of Christ.
• For it is clear that the power of the pope suffices, by itself, for the remission of penalties and reserved cases.
• The true treasure of the church is the Holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God.
• It is right to regard this treasure as most odious, for it makes the first to be the last.
• On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is most acceptable, for it makes the last to be the first.
• Therefore the treasures of the gospel are nets which, in former times, they used to fish for men of wealth.
• The treasures of the indulgences are the nets to-day which they use to fish for men of wealth.
• The indulgences, which the merchants extol as the greatest of favours, are seen to be, in fact, a favourite means for money-getting.
• Nevertheless, they are not to be compared with the grace of God and the compassion shown in the Cross.
• Bishops and curates, in duty bound, must receive the commissaries of the papal indulgences with all reverence.
• But they are under a much greater obligation to watch closely and attend carefully lest these men preach their own fancies instead of what the pope commissioned.
• Let him be anathema and accursed who denies the apostolic character of the indulgences.
• On the other hand, let him be blessed who is on his guard against the wantonness and license of the pardon-merchant's words.
• In the same way, the pope rightly excommunicates those who make any plans to the detriment of the trade in indulgences.
• It is much more in keeping with his views to excommunicate those who use the pretext of indulgences to plot anything to the detriment of holy love and truth.
• It is foolish to think that papal indulgences have so much power that they can absolve a man even if he has done the impossible and violated the mother of God.
• We assert the contrary, and say that the pope's pardons are not able to remove the least venial of sins as far as their guilt is concerned.
• When it is said that not even St. Peter, if he were now pope, could grant a greater grace, it is blasphemy against St. Peter and the pope.
• We assert the contrary, and say that he, and any pope whatever, possesses greater graces, viz., the gospel, spiritual powers, gifts of healing, etc., as is declared in I Corinthians 12 [:28] .
• It is blasphemy to say that the insignia of the cross with the papal arms are of equal value to the cross on which Christ died.
• The bishops, curates, and theologians, who permit assertions of that kind to be made to the people without let or hindrance, will have to answer for it.
• This unbridled preaching of indulgences makes it difficult for learned men to guard the respect due to the pope against false accusations, or at least from the keen criticisms of the laity.
• They ask, e.g.: Why does not the pope liberate everyone from purgatory for the sake of love (a most holy thing) and because of the supreme necessity of their souls? This would be morally the best of all reasons. Meanwhile he redeems innumerable souls for money, a most perishable thing, with which to build St. Peter's church, a very minor purpose.
• Again: Why should funeral and anniversary masses for the dead continue to be said? And why does not the pope repay, or permit to be repaid, the benefactions instituted for these purposes, since it is wrong to pray for those souls who are now redeemed?
• Again: Surely this is a new sort of compassion, on the part of God and the pope, when an impious man, an enemy of God, is allowed to pay money to redeem a devout soul, a friend of God; while yet that devout and beloved soul is not allowed to be redeemed without payment, for love's sake, and just because of its need of redemption.
• Again: Why are the penitential canon laws, which in fact, if not in practice, have long been obsolete and dead in themselves-why are they, to-day, still used in imposing fines in money, through the granting of indulgences, as if all the penitential canons were fully operative?
• Again: since the pope's income to-day is larger than that of the wealthiest of wealthy men, why does he not build this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of indigent believers?
• Again: What does the pope remit or dispense to people who, by their perfect repentance, have a right to plenary remission or dispensation?
• Again: Surely a greater good could be done to the church if the pope were to bestow these remissions and dispensations, not once, as now, but a hundred times a day, for the benefit of any believer whatever.
• What the pope seeks by indulgences is not money, but rather the salvation of souls; why then does he suspend the letters and indulgences formerly conceded, and still as efficacious as ever?
• These questions are serious matters of conscience to the laity. To suppress them by force alone, and not to refute them by giving reasons, is to expose the church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christian people unhappy.
• If therefore, indulgences were preached in accordance with the spirit and mind of the pope, all these difficulties would be easily overcome, and indeed, cease to exist.
• Away, then, with those prophets who say to Christ's people, "Peace, peace," where in there is no peace.
• Hail, hail to all those prophets who say to Christ's people, "The cross, the cross," where there is no cross.
• Christians should be exhorted to be zealous to follow Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hells.
• And let them thus be more confident of entering heaven through many tribulations rather than through a false assurance of peace.

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New testament.

The 95 Theses: A reader’s guide

by Kevin Armbrust

October 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. Yet it is not the anniversary of any great statement Luther made as a reformer or in front of any court. There was no fiery and resounding speech given or dramatic showdown with the pope. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted the “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to the church door in a small city called Wittenberg, Germany. This rather mundane academic document contained 95 theses for debate. Luther was a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, and he was permitted to call for public theological debate to discuss ideas and interpretations as he desired.

Yet this debate was not merely academic for Luther. According to a letter he wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz explaining the posting of the 95 Theses, Luther also desired to debate the concerns in the Theses for the sake of conscience.

Luther’s short preface explains:

“Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following theses will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg under the chairmanship of the reverend father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology and regularly appointed Lecturer on these subjects at that place. He requests that those who cannot be present to debate orally with us will do so by letter.”

The original text of the 95 Theses was written in Latin, since that was the academic language of Luther’s day. Luther’s theses were quickly translated into German, published in pamphlet form and spread throughout Germany.

Though English translations are readily available , many have found the 95 Theses difficult to read and comprehend. The short primer that follows may assist to highlight some of the theses and concepts Luther wished to explore.

Repentance and forgiveness dominate the content of the Theses. Since the question for Luther was the effectiveness of indulgences, he drove the discussion to the consideration of repentance and forgiveness in Christ. The first three theses address this:

1. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [MATT. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

2. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.

3. Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.

The pope and the Church cannot cause true repentance in a Christian and cannot forgive the sins of one who is guilty before Christ. The pope can only forgive that which Christ forgives. True repentance and eternal forgiveness come from Christ alone.

Luther identifies indulgences as a doctrine invented by man, since there is no scriptural promise or command for indulgences. Although Luther stops short of entirely condemning indulgences in the Theses, he nonetheless argues that the sale of indulgences and the trust in indulgences for salvation condemns both those who teach such notions and those who trust in them.

27. They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.

28. Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.

God’s grace comes not through indulgences but through Christ. All Christians receive the blessings of God apart from indulgence letters.

36. Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters.

37. Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; and this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.

If Christians are going to spend money on something other than supporting their families, they should take care of the poor instead of buying indulgences.

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.

The second half of the 95 Theses concentrates on the preaching of the true Word of the Gospel. Luther states that the teaching of indulgences should be lessened so that there might be more time for the proclamation of the true Gospel.

62. The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.

63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last [MATT. 20:16].

The Gospel of Christ is the true power for salvation (ROM. 1:16), not indulgences or even the power of the papal office.

76. We say on the contrary that papal indulgences cannot remove the very least of venial sins as far as guilt is concerned.

77. To say that even St. Peter, if he were now pope, could not grant greater graces is blasphemy against St. Peter and the pope.

78. We say on the contrary that even the present pope, or any pope whatsoever, has greater graces at his disposal, that is, the gospel, spiritual powers, gifts of healing, etc., as it is written in I Cor. 12[:28].

Preaching a false hope is really no hope at all. As a matter of fact, a false hope destroys and kills because it moves people away from Christ, where true salvation is found. The Gospel is found in Christ alone, which includes a cross and tribulations both large and small.

92. Away then with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Peace, peace,” and there is no peace! [JER. 6:14].

93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Cross, cross,” and there is no cross!

94. Christians should be exhorted to be diligent in following Christ, their head, through penalties, death, and hell;

95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace [ACTS 14:22].

Throughout the 95 Theses, Luther seeks to balance the role of the Church with the truth of the Gospel. Even as he desired to support the pope and his role in the Church, the false teaching of indulgences and the pope’s unwillingness to freely forgive the sins of all repentant Christians compelled him to speak up against these abuses.

Luther’s pastoral desire for all to trust in Christ alone for salvation drove him to post the 95 Theses. This same faith and hope sparked the Reformation that followed.

Dr. Kevin Armbrust is manager of editorial services for LCMS Communications. 

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11 thoughts on “the 95 theses: a reader’s guide”.

Thx. This article does clear up a number of difficulties in interpreting the drift & theme of the 95 thesis. The fact that he supports the pope’s office at this juncture is new to me.

Very useful as I prepare a Sunday School lesson. Thanks

As important as the 95 Theses were for the beginning of the Reformation, and since they are not specifically part of the Lutheran Confessions, are there any of the Theses that we Lutherans consider unimportant or would rather avoid, theologically speaking?

I wish Luther was here, maybe things would change in our country and bring more folks to Jesus .

“When our Lord and master Jesus Christ says, ‘Repent,’ he wills that the entire life of the Christian be one of repentance.”

This seemingly joyless statement is often quoted, less often explained, and easily misunderstood. Is Jesus calling for the main theme of Christian life to be, “I’m ashamed of my sin”?

The full sentence from Matthew 4:17 is, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” spoken when Jesus was beginning His ministry. This layman might paraphrase those words as, “Change your mindset, for divine authority is coming among you.” Indeed, when a very important person is coming to visit, we depart from business as usual, adjust our priorities, focus on careful preparation, and behave as befits the status of the visitor.

The word “repent” is recorded in Greek as “metanoeite”, which I understand to be not about remorse — not primarily about feelings at all — but about changing one’s mind or purpose.

The Christian life has a variety of themes, of which repentance is one. But repentance is not an end in itself. It is pivoting and changing course to pursue a direction that better fulfills God’s purposes as He gives the grace. For Jesus also willed “that you bear much fruit” (John 15:8) and “that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).

Could you explain number 93? I need this one explained. Jackie

Agreed. 93 is confusing.

In contrast to the false security of indulgences referenced in 92, number 93 references the preaching of true repentance. With true contrition and repentance over our sins, we Christians humble ourselves to the truth that we have earned our place on the cross as punishment and condemnation. But then we find the eternal surprise and wellspring of joy that our cross has been taken away from us and made Christ’s own. In exchange He gives us forgiveness, life and salvation!

Thank you, James Athey.

I myself did not fully understand this thesis yesterday, when I searched the Internet for an explanation of it. I found that I was not the only person who was confused by it. I also found that Luther explained it in a letter that he wrote to an Augustinian prior in 1516. Here is his explanation:

You are seeking and craving for peace, but in the wrong order. For you are seeking it as the world giveth, not as Christ giveth. Know you not that God is “wonderful among His saints,” for this reason, that He establishes His peace in the midst of no peace, that is, of all temptations and afflictions. It is said “Thou shalt dwell in the midst of thine enemies.” The man who possesses peace is not the man whom no one disturbs—that is the peace of the world; he is the man whom all men and all things disturb, but who bears all patiently, and with joy. You are saying with Israel, “Peace, peace,” and there is no peace. Learn to say rather with Christ: “The Cross, the Cross,” and there is no Cross. For the Cross at once ceases to be the Cross as soon as you have joyfully exclaimed, in the language of the hymn,

Blessed Cross, above all other, One and only noble tree.

It is posted here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/first_prin.iii.i.html

Magnificent!

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Martin Luther

(1483-1546)

Who Was Martin Luther?

Luther called into question some of the basic tenets of Roman Catholicism, and his followers soon split from the Roman Catholic Church to begin the Protestant tradition. His actions set in motion tremendous reform within the Church.

A prominent theologian, Luther’s desire for people to feel closer to God led him to translate the Bible into the language of the people, radically changing the relationship between church leaders and their followers.

Luther was born on November 10, 1483, in Eisleben, Saxony, located in modern-day Germany.

His parents, Hans and Margarette Luther, were of peasant lineage. However, Hans had some success as a miner and ore smelter, and in 1484 the family moved from Eisleben to nearby Mansfeld, where Hans held ore deposits.

Hans Luther knew that mining was a tough business and wanted his promising son to have a better career as a lawyer. At age seven, Luther entered school in Mansfeld.

At 14, Luther went north to Magdeburg, where he continued his studies. In 1498, he returned to Eisleben and enrolled in a school, studying grammar, rhetoric and logic. He later compared this experience to purgatory and hell.

In 1501, Luther entered the University of Erfurt , where he received a degree in grammar, logic, rhetoric and metaphysics. At this time, it seemed he was on his way to becoming a lawyer.

Becoming a Monk

In July 1505, Luther had a life-changing experience that set him on a new course to becoming a monk.

Caught in a horrific thunderstorm where he feared for his life, Luther cried out to St. Anne, the patron saint of miners, “Save me, St. Anne, and I’ll become a monk!” The storm subsided and he was saved.

Most historians believe this was not a spontaneous act, but an idea already formulated in Luther’s mind. The decision to become a monk was difficult and greatly disappointed his father, but he felt he must keep a promise.

Luther was also driven by fears of hell and God’s wrath, and felt that life in a monastery would help him find salvation.

The first few years of monastic life were difficult for Luther, as he did not find the religious enlightenment he was seeking. A mentor told him to focus his life exclusively on Jesus Christ and this would later provide him with the guidance he sought.

Disillusionment with Rome

At age 27, Luther was given the opportunity to be a delegate to a Catholic church conference in Rome. He came away more disillusioned, and very discouraged by the immorality and corruption he witnessed there among the Catholic priests.

Upon his return to Germany, he enrolled in the University of Wittenberg in an attempt to suppress his spiritual turmoil. He excelled in his studies and received a doctorate, becoming a professor of theology at the university (known today as Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg ).

Through his studies of scripture, Luther finally gained religious enlightenment. Beginning in 1513, while preparing lectures, Luther read the first line of Psalm 22, which Christ wailed in his cry for mercy on the cross, a cry similar to Luther’s own disillusionment with God and religion.

Two years later, while preparing a lecture on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, he read, “The just will live by faith.” He dwelled on this statement for some time.

Finally, he realized the key to spiritual salvation was not to fear God or be enslaved by religious dogma but to believe that faith alone would bring salvation. This period marked a major change in his life and set in motion the Reformation.

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'95 Theses'

On October 31, 1517, Luther, angry with Pope Leo X’s new round of indulgences to help build St. Peter’s Basilica , nailed a sheet of paper with his 95 Theses on the University of Wittenberg’s chapel door.

Though Luther intended these to be discussion points, the 95 Theses laid out a devastating critique of the indulgences - good works, which often involved monetary donations, that popes could grant to the people to cancel out penance for sins - as corrupting people’s faith.

Luther also sent a copy to Archbishop Albert Albrecht of Mainz, calling on him to end the sale of indulgences. Aided by the printing press , copies of the 95 Theses spread throughout Germany within two weeks and throughout Europe within two months.

The Church eventually moved to stop the act of defiance. In October 1518, at a meeting with Cardinal Thomas Cajetan in Augsburg, Luther was ordered to recant his 95 Theses by the authority of the pope.

Luther said he would not recant unless scripture proved him wrong. He went further, stating he didn’t consider that the papacy had the authority to interpret scripture. The meeting ended in a shouting match and initiated his ultimate excommunication from the Church.

Excommunication

Following the publication of his 95 Theses , Luther continued to lecture and write in Wittenberg. In June and July of 1519 Luther publicly declared that the Bible did not give the pope the exclusive right to interpret scripture, which was a direct attack on the authority of the papacy.

Finally, in 1520, the pope had had enough and on June 15 issued an ultimatum threatening Luther with excommunication.

On December 10, 1520, Luther publicly burned the letter. In January 1521, Luther was officially excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.

Diet of Worms

In March 1521, Luther was summoned before the Diet of Worms , a general assembly of secular authorities. Again, Luther refused to recant his statements, demanding he be shown any scripture that would refute his position. There was none.

On May 8, 1521, the council released the Edict of Worms, banning Luther’s writings and declaring him a “convicted heretic.” This made him a condemned and wanted man. Friends helped him hide out at the Wartburg Castle.

While in seclusion, he translated the New Testament into the German language, to give ordinary people the opportunity to read God’s word.

Lutheran Church

Though still under threat of arrest, Luther returned to Wittenberg Castle Church, in Eisenach, in May 1522 to organize a new church, Lutheranism.

He gained many followers, and the Lutheran Church also received considerable support from German princes.

When a peasant revolt began in 1524, Luther denounced the peasants and sided with the rulers, whom he depended on to keep his church growing. Thousands of peasants were killed, but the Lutheran Church grew over the years.

Katharina von Bora

In 1525, Luther married Katharina von Bora, a former nun who had abandoned the convent and taken refuge in Wittenberg.

Born into a noble family that had fallen on hard times, at the age of five Katharina was sent to a convent. She and several other reform-minded nuns decided to escape the rigors of the cloistered life, and after smuggling out a letter pleading for help from the Lutherans, Luther organized a daring plot.

With the help of a fishmonger, Luther had the rebellious nuns hide in herring barrels that were secreted out of the convent after dark - an offense punishable by death. Luther ensured that all the women found employment or marriage prospects, except for the strong-willed Katharina, who refused all suitors except Luther himself.

The scandalous marriage of a disgraced monk to a disgraced nun may have somewhat tarnished the reform movement, but over the next several years, the couple prospered and had six children.

Katharina proved herself a more than a capable wife and ally, as she greatly increased their family's wealth by shrewdly investing in farms, orchards and a brewery. She also converted a former monastery into a dormitory and meeting center for Reformation activists.

Luther later said of his marriage, "I have made the angels laugh and the devils weep." Unusual for its time, Luther in his will entrusted Katharina as his sole inheritor and guardian of their children.

Anti-Semitism

From 1533 to his death in 1546, Luther served as the dean of theology at University of Wittenberg. During this time he suffered from many illnesses, including arthritis, heart problems and digestive disorders.

The physical pain and emotional strain of being a fugitive might have been reflected in his writings.

Some works contained strident and offensive language against several segments of society, particularly Jews and, to a lesser degree, Muslims. Luther's anti-Semitism is on full display in his treatise, The Jews and Their Lies .

Luther died following a stroke on February 18, 1546, at the age of 62 during a trip to his hometown of Eisleben. He was buried in All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, the city he had helped turn into an intellectual center.

Luther's teachings and translations radically changed Christian theology. Thanks in large part to the Gutenberg press, his influence continued to grow after his death, as his message spread across Europe and around the world.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Luther Martin
• Birth Year: 1483
• Birth date: November 10, 1483
• Birth City: Eisleben
• Birth Country: Germany
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Martin Luther was a German monk who forever changed Christianity when he nailed his '95 Theses' to a church door in 1517, sparking the Protestant Reformation.
• Christianity
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Martin Luther studied to be a lawyer before deciding to become a monk.
• Luther refused to recant his '95 Theses' and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
• Luther married a former nun and they went on to have six children.
• Death Year: 1546
• Death date: February 18, 1546
• Death City: Eisleben
• Death Country: Germany

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Martin Luther Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/religious-figures/martin-luther
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 20, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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• God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.
• Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.
• You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.

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This Day In History : October 31

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Martin Luther posts 95 theses

On October 31, 1517, legend has it that the priest and scholar Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation .

In his theses, Luther condemned the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the papal practice of asking payment—called “indulgences”—for the forgiveness of sins. At the time, a Dominican priest named Johann Tetzel, commissioned by the Archbishop of Mainz and Pope Leo X, was in the midst of a major fundraising campaign in Germany to finance the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Though Prince Frederick III the Wise had banned the sale of indulgences in Wittenberg, many church members traveled to purchase them. When they returned, they showed the pardons they had bought to Luther, claiming they no longer had to repent for their sins.

Luther’s frustration with this practice led him to write the 95 Theses, which were quickly snapped up, translated from Latin into German and distributed widely. A copy made its way to Rome, and efforts began to convince Luther to change his tune. He refused to keep silent, however, and in 1521 Pope Leo X formally excommunicated Luther from the Catholic Church. That same year, Luther again refused to recant his writings before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Germany, who issued the famous Edict of Worms declaring Luther an outlaw and a heretic and giving permission for anyone to kill him without consequence. Protected by Prince Frederick, Luther began working on a German translation of the Bible, a task that took 10 years to complete.

The term “Protestant” first appeared in 1529, when Charles V revoked a provision that allowed the ruler of each German state to choose whether they would enforce the Edict of Worms. A number of princes and other supporters of Luther issued a protest, declaring that their allegiance to God trumped their allegiance to the emperor. They became known to their opponents as Protestants; gradually this name came to apply to all who believed the Church should be reformed, even those outside Germany. By the time Luther died, of natural causes, in 1546, his revolutionary beliefs had formed the basis for the Protestant Reformation, which would over the next three centuries revolutionize Western civilization.

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How Martin Luther Changed the World

By Joan Acocella

Clang! Clang! Down the corridors of religious history we hear this sound: Martin Luther, an energetic thirty-three-year-old Augustinian friar, hammering his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and thus, eventually, splitting the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church into two churches—one loyal to the Pope in Rome, the other protesting against the Pope’s rule and soon, in fact, calling itself Protestant. This month marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s famous action. Accordingly, a number of books have come out, reconsidering the man and his influence. They differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on is that the hammering episode, so satisfying symbolically—loud, metallic, violent—never occurred. Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened. He remembered drawing up a list of ninety-five theses around the date in question, but, as for what he did with it, all he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop. Furthermore, the theses were not, as is often imagined, a set of non-negotiable demands about how the Church should reform itself in accordance with Brother Martin’s standards. Rather, like all “theses” in those days, they were points to be thrashed out in public disputations, in the manner of the ecclesiastical scholars of the twelfth century or, for that matter, the debate clubs of tradition-minded universities in our own time.

If the Ninety-five Theses sprouted a myth, that is no surprise. Luther was one of those figures who touched off something much larger than himself; namely, the Reformation—the sundering of the Church and a fundamental revision of its theology. Once he had divided the Church, it could not be healed. His reforms survived to breed other reforms, many of which he disapproved of. His church splintered and splintered. To tote up the Protestant denominations discussed in Alec Ryrie’s new book, “ Protestants ” (Viking), is almost comical, there are so many of them. That means a lot of people, though. An eighth of the human race is now Protestant.

The Reformation, in turn, reshaped Europe. As German-speaking lands asserted their independence from Rome, other forces were unleashed. In the Knights’ Revolt of 1522, and the Peasants’ War, a couple of years later, minor gentry and impoverished agricultural workers saw Protestantism as a way of redressing social grievances. (More than eighty thousand poorly armed peasants were slaughtered when the latter rebellion failed.) Indeed, the horrific Thirty Years’ War, in which, basically, Europe’s Roman Catholics killed all the Protestants they could, and vice versa, can in some measure be laid at Luther’s door. Although it did not begin until decades after his death, it arose in part because he had created no institutional structure to replace the one he walked away from.

Almost as soon as Luther started the Reformation, alternative Reformations arose in other localities. From town to town, preachers told the citizenry what it should no longer put up with, whereupon they stood a good chance of being shoved aside—indeed, strung up—by other preachers. Religious houses began to close down. Luther led the movement mostly by his writings. Meanwhile, he did what he thought was his main job in life, teaching the Bible at the University of Wittenberg. The Reformation wasn’t led, exactly; it just spread, metastasized.

And that was because Europe was so ready for it. The relationship between the people and the rulers could hardly have been worse. Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, was dying—he brought his coffin with him wherever he travelled—but he was taking his time about it. The presumptive heir, King Charles I of Spain, was looked upon with grave suspicion. He already had Spain and the Netherlands. Why did he need the Holy Roman Empire as well? Furthermore, he was young—only seventeen when Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses. The biggest trouble, though, was money. The Church had incurred enormous expenses. It was warring with the Turks at the walls of Vienna. It had also started an ambitious building campaign, including the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. To pay for these ventures, it had borrowed huge sums from Europe’s banks, and to repay the banks it was strangling the people with taxes.

It has often been said that, fundamentally, Luther gave us “modernity.” Among the recent studies, Eric Metaxas’s “ Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World ” (Viking) makes this claim in grandiose terms. “The quintessentially modern idea of the individual was as unthinkable before Luther as is color in a world of black and white,” he writes. “And the more recent ideas of pluralism, religious liberty, self-government, and liberty all entered history through the door that Luther opened.” The other books are more reserved. As they point out, Luther wanted no part of pluralism—even for the time, he was vehemently anti-Semitic—and not much part of individualism. People were to believe and act as their churches dictated.

The fact that Luther’s protest, rather than others that preceded it, brought about the Reformation is probably due in large measure to his outsized personality. He was a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic. Above all, he was intransigent. To oppose was his joy. And though at times he showed that hankering for martyrdom that we detect, with distaste, in the stories of certain religious figures, it seems that, most of the time, he just got out of bed in the morning and got on with his work. Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks.

Luther was born in 1483 and grew up in Mansfeld, a small mining town in Saxony. His father started out as a miner but soon rose to become a master smelter, a specialist in separating valuable metal (in this case, copper) from ore. The family was not poor. Archeologists have been at work in their basement. The Luthers ate suckling pig and owned drinking glasses. They had either seven or eight children, of whom five survived. The father wanted Martin, the eldest, to study law, in order to help him in his business, but Martin disliked law school and promptly had one of those experiences often undergone in the old days by young people who did not wish to take their parents’ career advice. Caught in a violent thunderstorm one day in 1505—he was twenty-one—he vowed to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that if he survived he would become a monk. He kept his promise, and was ordained two years later. In the heavily psychoanalytic nineteen-fifties, much was made of the idea that this flouting of his father’s wishes set the stage for his rebellion against the Holy Father in Rome. Such is the main point of Erik Erikson’s 1958 book, “ Young Man Luther ,” which became the basis of a famous play by John Osborne (filmed, in 1974, with Stacy Keach in the title role).

Today, psychoanalytic interpretations tend to be tittered at by Luther biographers. But the desire to find some great psychological source, or even a middle-sized one, for Luther’s great story is understandable, because, for many years, nothing much happened to him. This man who changed the world left his German-speaking lands only once in his life. (In 1510, he was part of a mission sent to Rome to heal a rent in the Augustinian order. It failed.) Most of his youth was spent in dirty little towns where men worked long hours each day and then, at night, went to the tavern and got into fights. He described his university town, Erfurt, as consisting of “a whorehouse and a beerhouse.” Wittenberg, where he lived for the remainder of his life, was bigger—with two thousand inhabitants when he settled there—but not much better. As Lyndal Roper, one of the best of the new biographers, writes, in “ Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet ” (Random House), it was a mess of “muddy houses, unclean lanes.” At that time, however, the new ruler of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, was trying to make a real city of it. He built a castle and a church—the one on whose door the famous theses were supposedly nailed—and he hired an important artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, as his court painter. Most important, he founded a university, and staffed it with able scholars, including Johann von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustinian friars of the German-speaking territories. Staupitz had been Luther’s confessor at Erfurt, and when he found himself overworked at Wittenberg he summoned Luther, persuaded him to take a doctorate, and handed over many of his duties to him. Luther supervised everything from monasteries (eleven of them) to fish ponds, but most crucial was his succeeding Staupitz as the university’s professor of the Bible, a job that he took on at the age of twenty-eight and retained until his death. In this capacity, he lectured on Scripture, held disputations, and preached to the staff of the university.

He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis. He called his problem his Anfechtungen —trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. Years later, commenting on his reading of Scripture as a young friar, Luther spoke of his rage at the description of God’s righteousness, and of his grief that, as he was certain, he would not be judged worthy: “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.”

There were good reasons for an intense young priest to feel disillusioned. One of the most bitterly resented abuses of the Church at that time was the so-called indulgences, a kind of late-medieval get-out-of-jail-free card used by the Church to make money. When a Christian purchased an indulgence from the Church, he obtained—for himself or whomever else he was trying to benefit—a reduction in the amount of time the person’s soul had to spend in Purgatory, atoning for his sins, before ascending to Heaven. You might pay to have a special Mass said for the sinner or, less expensively, you could buy candles or new altar cloths for the church. But, in the most common transaction, the purchaser simply paid an agreed-upon amount of money and, in return, was given a document saying that the beneficiary—the name was written in on a printed form—was forgiven x amount of time in Purgatory. The more time off, the more it cost, but the indulgence-sellers promised that whatever you paid for you got.

Actually, they could change their minds about that. In 1515, the Church cancelled the exculpatory powers of already purchased indulgences for the next eight years. If you wanted that period covered, you had to buy a new indulgence. Realizing that this was hard on people—essentially, they had wasted their money—the Church declared that purchasers of the new indulgences did not have to make confession or even exhibit contrition. They just had to hand over the money and the thing was done, because this new issue was especially powerful. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar locally famous for his zeal in selling indulgences, is said to have boasted that one of the new ones could obtain remission from sin even for someone who had raped the Virgin Mary. (In the 1974 movie “ Luther ,” Tetzel is played with a wonderful, bug-eyed wickedness by Hugh Griffith.) Even by the standards of the very corrupt sixteenth-century Church, this was shocking.

In Luther’s mind, the indulgence trade seems to have crystallized the spiritual crisis he was experiencing. It brought him up against the absurdity of bargaining with God, jockeying for his favor—indeed, paying for his favor. Why had God given his only begotten son? And why had the son died on the cross? Because that’s how much God loved the world. And that alone, Luther now reasoned, was sufficient for a person to be found “justified,” or worthy. From this thought, the Ninety-five Theses were born. Most of them were challenges to the sale of indulgences. And out of them came what would be the two guiding principles of Luther’s theology: sola fide and sola scriptura .

Sola fide means “by faith alone”—faith, as opposed to good works, as the basis for salvation. This was not a new idea. St. Augustine, the founder of Luther’s monastic order, laid it out in the fourth century. Furthermore, it is not an idea that fits well with what we know of Luther. Pure faith, contemplation, white light: surely these are the gifts of the Asian religions, or of medieval Christianity, of St. Francis with his birds. As for Luther, with his rages and sweats, does he seem a good candidate? Eventually, however, he discovered (with lapses) that he could be released from those torments by the simple act of accepting God’s love for him. Lest it be thought that this stern man then concluded that we could stop worrying about our behavior and do whatever we wanted, he said that works issue from faith. In his words, “We can no more separate works from faith than heat and light from fire.” But he did believe that the world was irretrievably full of sin, and that repairing that situation was not the point of our moral lives. “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger,” he wrote to a friend.

The second great principle, sola scriptura , or “by scripture alone,” was the belief that only the Bible could tell us the truth. Like sola fide , this was a rejection of what, to Luther, were the lies of the Church—symbolized most of all by the indulgence market. Indulgences brought you an abbreviation of your stay in Purgatory, but what was Purgatory? No such thing is mentioned in the Bible. Some people think that Dante made it up; others say Gregory the Great. In any case, Luther decided that somebody made it up.

Guided by those convictions, and fired by his new certainty of God’s love for him, Luther became radicalized. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints. He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he (Frederick) had founded at Wittenberg. He vowed to protect this troublemaker.

Things came to a head in 1520. By then, Luther had taken to calling the Church a brothel, and Pope Leo X the Antichrist. Leo gave Luther sixty days to appear in Rome and answer charges of heresy. Luther let the sixty days elapse; the Pope excommunicated him; Luther responded by publicly burning the papal order in the pit where one of Wittenberg’s hospitals burned its used rags. Reformers had been executed for less, but Luther was by now a very popular man throughout Europe. The authorities knew they would have serious trouble if they killed him, and the Church gave him one more chance to recant, at the upcoming diet—or congregation of officers, sacred and secular—in the cathedral city of Worms in 1521. He went, and declared that he could not retract any of the charges he had made against the Church, because the Church could not show him, in Scripture, that any of them were false:

Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything.

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The Pope often errs! Luther will decide what God wants! By consulting Scripture! No wonder that an institution wedded to the idea of its leader’s infallibility was profoundly shaken by this declaration. Once the Diet of Worms came to an end, Luther headed for home, but he was “kidnapped” on the way, by a posse of knights sent by his protector, Frederick the Wise. The knights spirited him off to the Wartburg, a secluded castle in Eisenach, in order to give the authorities time to cool off. Luther was annoyed by the delay, but he didn’t waste time. That’s when he translated the New Testament.

During his lifetime, Luther became probably the biggest celebrity in the German-speaking lands. When he travelled, people flocked to the high road to see his cart go by. This was due not just to his personal qualities and the importance of his cause but to timing. Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him once he got going. Among the quincentennial books is an entire volume on his relationship to print, “ Brand Luther ” (Penguin), by the British historian Andrew Pettegree. Luther’s collected writings come to a hundred and twenty volumes. In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him.

By producing them, he didn’t just create the Reformation; he also created his country’s vernacular, as Dante is said to have done with Italian. The majority of his writings were in Early New High German, a form of the language that was starting to gel in southern Germany at that time. Under his influence, it did gel.

The crucial text is his Bible: the New Testament, translated from the original Greek and published in 1523, followed by the Old Testament, in 1534, translated from the Hebrew. Had he not created Protestantism, this book would be the culminating achievement of Luther’s life. It was not the first German translation of the Bible—indeed, it had eighteen predecessors—but it was unquestionably the most beautiful, graced with the same combination of exaltation and simplicity, but more so, as the King James Bible. (William Tyndale, whose English version of the Bible, for which he was executed, was more or less the basis of the King James, knew and admired Luther’s translation.) Luther very consciously sought a fresh, vigorous idiom. For his Bible’s vocabulary, he said, “we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street,” and, like other writers with such aims—William Blake, for example—he ended up with something songlike. He loved alliteration—“ Der Herr ist mein Hirte ” (“The Lord is my shepherd”); “ Dein Stecken und Stab ” (“thy rod and thy staff”)—and he loved repetition and forceful rhythms. This made his texts easy and pleasing to read aloud, at home, to the children. The books also featured a hundred and twenty-eight woodcut illustrations, all by one artist from the Cranach workshop, known to us only as Master MS. There they were, all those wondrous things—the Garden of Eden, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel—which modern people are used to seeing images of and which Luther’s contemporaries were not. There were marginal glosses, as well as short prefaces for each book, which would have been useful for the children of the household and probably also for the family member reading to them.

These virtues, plus the fact that the Bible was probably, in many cases, the only book in the house, meant that it was widely used as a primer. More people learned to read, and the more they knew how to read the more they wanted to own this book, or give it to others. The three-thousand-copy first edition of the New Testament, though it was not cheap (it cost about as much as a calf), sold out immediately. As many as half a million Luther Bibles seem to have been printed by the mid-sixteenth century. In his discussions of sola scriptura , Luther had declared that all believers were priests: laypeople had as much right as the clergy to determine what Scripture meant. With his Bible, he gave German speakers the means to do so.

In honor of the five-hundredth anniversary, the excellent German art-book publisher Taschen has produced a facsimile with spectacular colored woodcuts. Pleasingly, the book historian Stephan Füssel, in the explanatory paperback that accompanies the two-volume facsimile, reports that in 2004, when a fire swept through the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, in Weimar, where this copy was housed, it was “rescued, undamaged, with not a second to lose, thanks to the courageous intervention of library director Dr. Michael Knoche.” I hope that Dr. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. I don’t know what the price of a calf is these days, but the price of this facsimile is sixty dollars. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. Master MS’s Garden of Eden is full of wonderful animals—a camel, a crocodile, a little toad—and in the towns everyone wears those black shoes like the ones in Brueghel paintings. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear. Even if you don’t understand German, you can sort of read them.

Among the supposedly Biblical rules that Luther pointed out could not be found in the Bible was the requirement of priestly celibacy. Well before the Diet of Worms, Luther began advising priests to marry. He said that he would marry, too, if he did not expect, every day, to be executed for heresy. One wonders. But in 1525 he was called upon to help a group of twelve nuns who had just fled a Cistercian convent, an action that was related to his reforms. Part of his duty to these women, he felt, was to return them to their families or to find husbands for them. At the end, one was left, a twenty-six-year-old girl named Katharina von Bora, the daughter of a poor, albeit noble, country family. Luther didn’t want her, he said—he found her “proud”—but she wanted him. She was the one who proposed. And though, as he told a friend, he felt no “burning” for her, he formed with her a marriage that is probably the happiest story in any account of his life.

One crucial factor was her skill in household management. The Luthers lived in the so-called Black Monastery, which had been Wittenberg’s Augustinian monastery—that is, Luther’s old home as a friar—before the place emptied out as a result of the reformer’s actions. (One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on.) It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. Käthe, as Luther called her, made it livable, and not just for her immediate family. Between ten and twenty students lodged there, and the household took in many others as well: four children of Luther’s dead sister Margarete, plus four more orphaned children from both sides of the family, plus a large family fleeing the plague. A friend of the reformer, writing to an acquaintance journeying to Wittenberg, warned him on no account to stay with the Luthers if he valued peace and quiet. The refectory table seated between thirty-five and fifty, and Käthe, having acquired a large market garden and a considerable amount of livestock (pigs, goats), and now supervising a staff of up to ten employees (maids, a cook, a swineherd, et al.), fed them all. She also handled the family’s finances, and at times had to economize carefully. Luther would accept no money for his writings, on which he could have profited hugely, and he would not allow students to pay to attend his lectures, as was the custom.

Luther appreciated the sheer increase in his physical comfort. When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man. More important, he began to take women seriously. He objects, in a lecture, to coitus interruptus, the most common form of birth control at the time, on the ground that it is frustrating for women. When he was away from home, he wrote Käthe affectionate letters, with such salutations as “Most holy Frau Doctor” and “To the hands and feet of my dear housewife.”

Among Käthe’s virtues was fertility. Every year or so for eight years, she produced a child—six in all, of whom four survived to adulthood—and Luther loved these children. He even allowed them to play in his study while he was working. Of five-year-old Hans, his firstborn, he wrote, “When I’m writing or doing something else, my Hans sings a little tune for me. If he becomes too noisy and I rebuke him for it, he continues to sing but does it more privately and with a certain awe and uneasiness.” That scene, which comes from “ Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval ” (Oxford), by the German historian Heinz Schilling, seems to me impossible to improve upon as a portrait of what it must have been like for Luther to have a little boy, and for a little boy to have Luther as a father. Luther was not a lenient parent—he used the whip when he felt he needed to, and poor Hans was sent to the university at the age of seven—but when, on his travels, the reformer passed through a town that was having a fair he liked to buy presents for the children. In 1536, when he went to the Diet of Augsburg, another important convocation, he kept a picture of his favorite child, Magdalene, on the wall of his chamber. Magdalene died at thirteen. Schilling again produces a telling scene. Magdalene is nearing the end; Luther is holding her. He says he knows she would like to stay with her father, but, he adds, “Are you also glad to go to your father in heaven?” She died in his arms. How touching that he could find this common-sense way to comfort her, and also that he seems to feel that Heaven is right above their heads, with one father holding out a hand to take to himself the other’s child.

One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies. When Hans finally learned to bend his knees and relieve himself on the floor, Luther rejoiced, reporting to a friend that the child had “crapped in every corner of the room.” I wonder who cleaned that up—not Luther, I would guess—but it is hard not to feel some of his pleasure. Sixteenth-century Germans were not, in the main, dainty of thought or speech. A representative of the Vatican once claimed that Luther was conceived when the Devil raped his mother in an outhouse. That detail comes from Eric Metaxas’s book, which is full of vulgar stories, not that one has to look far for vulgar stories in Luther’s life. My favorite (reported in Erikson’s book) is a comment that Luther made at the dinner table while in the grip of a depression. “I am like a ripe shit,” he said, “and the world is a gigantic asshole. We will both probably let go of each other soon.” It takes you a minute to realize that Luther is saying that he feels he is dying. And then you want to congratulate him on the sheer zest, the proto-surrealist nuttiness, of his metaphor. He may feel as though he’s dying, but he’s having a good time feeling it.

The group on which Luther expended his most notorious denunciations was not the Roman Catholic clergy but the Jews. His sentiments were widely shared. In the words of Heinz Schilling, “Late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews.” But Luther despised them dementedly, ecstatically. In his 1543 treatise “On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of Christ,” he imagines the Devil stuffing the Jews’ orifices with filth: “He stuffs and squirts them so full, that it overflows and swims out of every place, pure Devil’s filth, yes, it tastes so good to their hearts, and they guzzle it like sows.” Witness the death of Judas Iscariot, he adds: “When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss . . . and afterwards together they ate the shit.” The Jews’ synagogues should be burned down, he wrote; their houses should be destroyed. He did not recommend that they be killed, but he did say that Christians had no moral responsibilities to them, which amounts to much the same thing.

This is hair-raising, but what makes Luther’s anti-Semitism most disturbing is not its extremity (which, by sounding so crazy, diminishes its power). It is the fact that the country of which he is a national hero did indeed, quite recently, exterminate six million Jews. Hence the formula “ From Luther to Hitler ,” popularized by William Montgomery McGovern’s 1941 book of that title—the notion that Luther laid the groundwork for the slaughter. Those who have wished to defend him have pointed out that his earlier writings, such as the 1523 pamphlet “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” are much more conciliatory in tone. He seemed to regret that, as he put it, Christians had “dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs.” But making excuses for Luther on the basis of his earlier, more temperate writings does not really work. As scholars have been able to show, Luther was gentler early on because he was hoping to persuade the Jews to convert. When they failed to do so, he unleashed his full fury, more violent now because he believed that the comparative mildness of his earlier writings may have been partly responsible for their refusal.

Luther’s anti-Semitism would be a moral problem under any circumstances. People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. But when one adds the historical factor—that, in Luther’s case, the judgment is being made five centuries after the event—we hit a brick wall. At the Nuremberg trials, in 1946, Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of the Jew-baiting newspaper Der Stürmer , quoted Luther as the source of his beliefs and said that if he was going to be blamed Luther would have to be blamed as well. But, in the words of Thomas Kaufmann, a professor of church history at the University of Göttingen, “The Nuremberg judges sat in judgment over the mass murderers of the twentieth century, not over the delusions of a misguided sixteenth-century theology professor. . . . Another judge must judge Luther.” How fortunate to be able to believe that such a judge will come, and have an answer.

Luther lived to what, in the sixteenth century, was an old age, sixty-two, but the years were not kind to him. Actually, he lived most of his life in turmoil. When he was young, there were the Anfechtungen . Then, once he issued the theses and began his movement, he had to struggle not just with the right, the Roman Church, but with the left—the Schwärmer (fanatics), as he called them, the people who felt that he hadn’t gone far enough. He spent days and weeks in pamphlet wars over matters that, today, have to be patiently explained to us, they seem so remote. Did Communion involve transubstantiation, or was Jesus physically present from the start of the rite? Luther, a “Real Presence” man, said the latter. Should people be baptized soon after they are born, as Luther said, or when they are adults, as the Anabaptists claimed?

When Luther was young, he was good at friendship. He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him. (Hence the fifty-seat dinner table.) As he grew older, he changed. He found that he could easily discard friends, even old friends, even his once beloved confessor, Staupitz. People who had dealings with the movement found themselves going around him if they could, usually to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Always sharp-tongued, Luther now lost all restraint, writing in a treatise that Pope Paul III was a sodomite and a transvestite—no surprise, he added, when you considered that all popes, since the beginnings of the Church, were full of devils and vomited and farted and defecated devils. This starts to sound like his attacks on the Jews.

His health declined. He had dizzy spells, bleeding hemorrhoids, constipation, urine retention, gout, kidney stones. To balance his “humors,” the surgeon made a hole, or “fontanelle,” in a vein in his leg, and it was kept open. Whatever this did for his humors, it meant that he could no longer walk to the church or the university. He had to be taken in a cart. He suffered disabling depressions. “I have lost Christ completely,” he wrote to Melanchthon. From a man of his temperament and convictions, this is a terrible statement.

In early 1546, he had to go to the town of his birth, Eisleben, to settle a dispute. It was January, and the roads were bad. Tellingly, he took all three of his sons with him. He said the trip might be the death of him, and he was right. He died in mid-February. Appropriately, in view of his devotion to the scatological, his corpse was given an enema, in the hope that this would revive him. It didn’t. After sermons in Eisleben, the coffin was driven back to Wittenberg, with an honor guard of forty-five men on horseback. Bells tolled in every village along the way. Luther was buried in the Castle Church, on whose door he was said to have nailed his theses.

Although his resting place evokes his most momentous act, it also highlights the intensely local nature of the life he led. The transformations he set in motion were incidental to his struggles, which remained irreducibly personal. His goal was not to usher in modernity but simply to make religion religious again. Heinz Schilling writes, “Just when the lustre of religion threatened to be outdone by the atheistic and political brilliance of the secularized Renaissance papacy, the Wittenberg monk defined humankind’s relationship to God anew and gave back to religion its existential plausibility.” Lyndal Roper thinks much the same. She quotes Luther saying that the Church’s sacraments “are not fulfilled when they are taking place but when they are being believed.” All he asked for was sincerity, but this made a great difference. ♦

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Faith seeking Understanding

The 95 Theses by Dr. Martin Luther

The Ninety-Five Theses were written by Martin Luther in 1517 and are widely regarded as the initial catalyst for the Protestant Reformation.

Overview ● Full Text

The Ninety-Five Theses protest against clerical abuses, especially nepotism, simony, usury, pluralism, and the sale of indulgences.

It is believed that, according to university custom, on October 31, 1517, Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg.

In those days it was common for scholars to announce a debate by posting a list of Quaestiones Disputatae (disputed questions) on the door of the main church in town. People would gather to hear their scholars debate. It is likely that Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses for this purpose.

The full text of the Ninety-Five Theses follow, along with our own comments:

DISPUTATION ON THE POWER AND EFFICACY OF INDULGENCES COMMONLY KNOWN AS THE 95 THESES

BY DR. MARTIN LUTHER

Out of love and concern for the truth, and with the object of eliciting it, the following heads 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. He requests that whoever cannot be present personally to debate the matter orally will do so in absence in writing.

Out of love and concern for the truth . Martin Luther is concerned with truth. Truth needed to shine forth to everybody. It had long been obscured by Catholic clerics.

THESIS 1. When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said “Repent”, He called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

THESIS 2. The word cannot be properly understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, i.e. confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.

cannot be … the sacrament of penance . Centuries of tradition had eroded sacramental confession to a powerless ritual. It was commonly done by rote. People often confessed the same sins over and over. Clerics were bored with it, and they merely consulted manuals that told them what penance to assign.

THESIS 3. Yet its meaning is not restricted to repentance in one’s heart; for such repentance is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh.

produces outward signs . It is one thing to feel sorry for your sins. It is another thing altogether to change your life accordingly. The weakness in sacramental confession is that it requires sorrow, but does not require people to change their lives.

THESIS 4. As long as hatred of self abides (i.e. true inward repentance) the penalty of sin abides, viz., until we enter the kingdom of heaven.

THESIS 5. The pope has neither the will nor the power to remit any penalties beyond those imposed either at his own discretion or by canon law.

The pope . Here we get to the crux of the matter. For centuries, the Catholic church had popes who were corrupt.

THESIS 6. The pope himself cannot remit guilt, but only declare and confirm that it has been remitted by God; or, at most, he can remit it in cases reserved to his discretion. Except for these cases, the guilt remains untouched.

himself cannot remit guilt . Many people have the mistaken notion that a cleric forgives sin.

declare and confirm that it has been remitted by God . The truth is that only God can forgive sin.

THESIS 7. God never remits guilt to anyone without, at the same time, making him humbly submissive to the priest, His representative.

THESIS 8. The penitential canons apply only to men who are still alive, and, according to the canons themselves, none applies to the dead.

THESIS 9. Accordingly, the Holy Spirit, acting in the person of the pope, manifests grace to us, by the fact that the papal regulations always cease to apply at death, or in any hard case.

THESIS 10. It is a wrongful act, due to ignorance, when priests retain the canonical penalties on the dead in purgatory.

THESIS 11. When canonical penalties were changed and made to apply to purgatory, surely it would seem that tares were sown while the bishops were asleep.

tares were sown . That is, “weeds” were sown.

the bishops were asleep . The job of a shepherd is to feed and protect the people under your authority. They are called to vigilance. But many of the bishops were like corrupt politicians and thought only of themselves.

THESIS 12. In former days, the canonical penalties were imposed, not after, but before absolution was pronounced; and were intended to be tests of true contrition.

THESIS 13. Death puts an end to all the claims of the Church; even the dying are already dead to the canon laws, and are no longer bound by them.

THESIS 14. Defective piety or love in a dying person is necessarily accompanied by great fear, which is greatest where the piety or love is least.

THESIS 15. This fear or horror is sufficient in itself, whatever else might be said, to constitute the pain of purgatory, since it approaches very closely to the horror of despair.

THESIS 16. There seems to be the same difference between hell, purgatory, and heaven as between despair, uncertainty, and assurance.

the same difference . This is an interesting comparison. Charting it out, it looks like this:

THESIS 17. Of a truth, the pains of souls in purgatory ought to be abated, and charity ought to be proportionately increased.

THESIS 18. Moreover, it does not seem proved, on any grounds of reason or Scripture, that these souls are outside the state of merit, or unable to grow in grace.

on any grounds of reason or Scripture . Those are two great ways to consider an idea:

• Is it Scriptural?
• Does it make sense?

THESIS 19. Nor does it seem proved to be always the case that they are certain and assured of salvation, even if we are very certain ourselves.

THESIS 20. Therefore the pope, in speaking of the plenary remission of all penalties, does not mean “all” in the strict sense, but only those imposed by himself.

those imposed by himself . The Catholic church announces that certain sins result in a penalty of such-and-such number of years in Purgatory. Then they announce that the penalty can be reduced if you give money to the Catholic church.

THESIS 21. Hence those who preach indulgences are in error when they say that a man is absolved and saved from every penalty by the pope’s indulgences.

THESIS 22. Indeed, he cannot remit to souls in purgatory any penalty which canon law declares should be suffered in the present life.

THESIS 23. If plenary remission could be granted to anyone at all, it would be only in the cases of the most perfect, i.e. to very few.

THESIS 24. It must therefore be the case that the major part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and high-sounding promise of relief from penalty.

THESIS 25. The same power as the pope exercises in general over purgatory is exercised in particular by every single bishop in his bishopric and priest in his parish.

THESIS 26. The pope does excellently when he grants remission to the souls in purgatory on account of intercessions made on their behalf, and not by the power of the keys (which he cannot exercise for them).

THESIS 27. There is no divine authority for preaching that the soul flies out of the purgatory immediately the money clinks in the bottom of the chest.

the money clinks in … the chest . There was a heinous practice. The cleric announced that as soon as your money clinked into the bottom of the plate, at that very moment the soul of your loved one would be instantaneously liberated from Purgatory.

THESIS 28. It is certainly possible that when the money clinks in the bottom of the chest avarice and greed increase; but when the church offers intercession, all depends in the will of God.

THESIS 29. Who knows whether all souls in purgatory wish to be redeemed in view of what is said of St. Severinus and St. Pascal? (Note: Paschal I, pope 817-24. The legend is that he and Severinus were willing to endure the pains of purgatory for the benefit of the faithful).

THESIS 30. No one is sure of the reality of his own contrition, much less of receiving plenary forgiveness.

No one is sure of the reality of his own contrition . That is, we do not even know if our contrition is sincere.

THESIS 31. One who bona fide buys indulgence is a rare as a bona fide penitent man, i.e. very rare indeed.

THESIS 32. All those who believe themselves certain of their own salvation by means of letters of indulgence, will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.

THESIS 33. We should be most carefully on our guard against those who say that the papal indulgences are an inestimable divine gift, and that a man is reconciled to God by them.

THESIS 34. For the grace conveyed by these indulgences relates simply to the penalties of the sacramental “satisfactions” decreed merely by man.

THESIS 35. It is not in accordance with Christian doctrines to preach and teach that those who buy off souls, or purchase confessional licenses, have no need to repent of their own sins.

THESIS 36. Any Christian whatsoever, who is truly repentant, enjoys plenary remission from penalty and guilt, and this is given him without letters of indulgence.

THESIS 37. Any true Christian whatsoever, living or dead, participates in all the benefits of Christ and the Church; and this participation is granted to him by God without letters of indulgence.

participates in all the benefits of Christ and the Church . The grace of our Jesus Christ is not withheld from any Christian believer.

granted to him by God without letters of indulgence . God does not need the pope’s permission in order to grant the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

THESIS 38. Yet the pope’s remission and dispensation are in no way to be despised, for, as already said, they proclaim the divine remission.

THESIS 39. It is very difficult, even for the most learned theologians, to extol to the people the great bounty contained in the indulgences, while, at the same time, praising contrition as a virtue.

THESIS 40. 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, and tends to make them hate the penalties.

the very multitude of indulgences . The selling of indulgences was a widespread practice, and people everywhere were duped.

THESIS 41. Papal indulgences should only be preached with caution, lest people gain a wrong understanding, and think that they are preferable to other good works: those of love.

THESIS 42. Christians should be taught that the pope does not at all intend that the purchase of indulgences should be understood as at all comparable with the works of mercy.

THESIS 43. Christians should be taught that one who gives to the poor, or lends to the needy, does a better action than if he purchases indulgences.

does a better action . It is far better to live the Christian life than to purchase indulgences.

THESIS 44. Because, by works of love, love grows and a man becomes a better man; whereas, by indulgences, he does not become a better man, but only escapes certain penalties.

THESIS 45. Christians should be taught that he who sees a needy person, but passes him by although he gives money for indulgences, gains no benefit from the pope’s pardon, but only incurs the wrath of God.

THESIS 46. Christians should be taught that, unless they have more than they need, they are bound to retain what is only necessary for the upkeep of their home, and should in no way squander it on indulgences.

squander it on indulgences . To purchase an indulgence is to squander your money.

THESIS 47. Christians should be taught that they purchase indulgences voluntarily, and are not under obligation to do so.

THESIS 48. Christians should be taught that, in granting indulgences, the pope has more need, and more desire, for devout prayer on his own behalf than for ready money.

THESIS 49. Christians should be taught that the pope’s indulgences are useful only if one does not rely on them, but most harmful if one loses the fear of God through them.

THESIS 50. Christians should be taught that, if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence-preachers, he would rather the church of St. Peter were reduced to ashes than be built with the skin, flesh, and bones of the sheep.

if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence-preachers . Did the pope know what the indulgence preachers were saying?

the church of St. Peter were reduced to ashes . Would a pope really prefer the Vatical to be burned to the ground than to give up the profit from the selling of indulgences?

THESIS 51. Christians should be taught that the pope would be willing, as he ought if necessity should arise, to sell the church of St. Peter, and give, too, his own money to many of those from whom the pardon-merchants conjure money.

THESIS 52. It is vain to rely on salvation by letters of indulgence, even if the commissary, or indeed the pope himself, were to pledge his own soul for their validity.

THESIS 53. Those are enemies of Christ and the pope who forbid the word of God to be preached at all in some churches, in order that indulgences may be preached in others.

THESIS 54. The word of God suffers injury if, in the same sermon, an equal or longer time is devoted to indulgences than to that word.

THESIS 55. The pope cannot help taking the view that if indulgences (very small matters) are celebrated by one bell, one pageant, or one ceremony, the gospel (a very great matter) should be preached to the accompaniment of a hundred bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies.

THESIS 56. The treasures of the church, out of which the pope dispenses indulgences, are not sufficiently spoken of or known among the people of Christ.

THESIS 57. That these treasures are not temporal are clear from the fact that many of the merchants do not grant them freely, but only collect them.

THESIS 58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the saints, because, even apart from the pope, these merits are always working grace in the inner man, and working the cross, death, and hell in the outer man.

THESIS 59. St. Laurence said that the poor were the treasures of the church, but he used the term in accordance with the custom of his own time.

the poor were the treasures of the church . This was a noble thing for Laurence to say. And for it, Emperor Valerian executed him.

THESIS 60. We do not speak rashly in saying that the treasures of the church are the keys of the church, and are bestowed by the merits of Christ.

THESIS 61. For it is clear that the power of the pope suffices, by itself, for the remission of penalties and reserved cases.

THESIS 62. The true treasure of the church is the Holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God.

the Holy gospel . This is the greatest thing that we Christians have: the Good News of the Lord Jesus Christ.

THESIS 63. It is right to regard this treasure as most odious, for it makes the first to be the last.

THESIS 64. On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is most acceptable, for it makes the last to be the first.

THESIS 65. Therefore the treasures of the gospel are nets which, in former times, they used to fish for men of wealth.

men of wealth . Only those who are wealthy enough to purchase an indulgence could be saved.

THESIS 66. The treasures of the indulgences are the nets which to-day they use to fish for the wealth of men.

THESIS 67. The indulgences, which the merchants extol as the greatest of favours, are seen to be, in fact, a favourite means for money-getting.

THESIS 68. Nevertheless, they are not to be compared with the grace of God and the compassion shown in the Cross.

THESIS 69. Bishops and curates, in duty bound, must receive the commissaries of the papal indulgences with all reverence.

THESIS 70. But they are under a much greater obligation to watch closely and attend carefully lest these men preach their own fancies instead of what the pope commissioned.

THESIS 71. Let him be anathema and accursed who denies the apostolic character of the indulgences.

THESIS 72. On the other hand, let him be blessed who is on his guard against the wantonness and license of the pardon-merchant’s words.

THESIS 73. In the same way, the pope rightly excommunicates those who make any plans to the detriment of the trade in indulgences.

THESIS 74. It is much more in keeping with his views to excommunicate those who use the pretext of indulgences to plot anything to the detriment of holy love and truth.

THESIS 75. It is foolish to think that papal indulgences have so much power that they can absolve a man even if he has done the impossible and violated the mother of God.

THESIS 76. We assert the contrary, and say that the pope’s pardons are not able to remove the least venial of sins as far as their guilt is concerned.

are not able to remove the least . God is the one who forgives of sins.

THESIS 77. When it is said that not even St. Peter, if he were now pope, could grant a greater grace, it is blasphemy against St. Peter and the pope.

THESIS 78. We assert the contrary, and say that he, and any pope whatever, possesses greater graces, viz., the gospel, spiritual powers, gifts of healing, etc., as is declared in I Corinthians 12:28.

I Corinthians 12:28 . God has set some in the assembly: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracle workers, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, and various kinds of languages.

THESIS 79. It is blasphemy to say that the insignia of the cross with the papal arms are of equal value to the cross on which Christ died.

equal value to the cross . How could people imagine such a thing?

THESIS 80. The bishops, curates, and theologians, who permit assertions of that kind to be made to the people without let or hindrance, will have to answer for it.

THESIS 81. This unbridled preaching of indulgences makes it difficult for learned men to guard the respect due to the pope against false accusations, or at least from the keen criticisms of the laity.

THESIS 82. They ask, e.g.: Why does not the pope liberate everyone from purgatory for the sake of love (a most holy thing) and because of the supreme necessity of their souls? This would be morally the best of all reasons. Meanwhile he redeems innumerable souls for money, a most perishable thing, with which to build St. Peter’s church, a very minor purpose.

for the sake of love . Love would motivate the pope to liberate people from Purgatory without them needing to PAY FOR IT.

he redeems innumerable souls for money . Instead, the pope only liberated people from Purgatory if they would PAY FOR IT.

THESIS 83. Again: Why should funeral and anniversary masses for the dead continue to be said? And why does not the pope repay, or permit to be repaid, the benefactions instituted for these purposes, since it is wrong to pray for those souls who are now redeemed?

THESIS 84. Again: Surely this is a new sort of compassion, on the part of God and the pope, when an impious man, an enemy of God, is allowed to pay money to redeem a devout soul, a friend of God; while yet that devout and beloved soul is not allowed to be redeemed without payment, for love’s sake, and just because of its need of redemption.

THESIS 85. Again: Why are the penitential canon laws, which in fact, if not in practice, have long been obsolete and dead in themselves,—why are they, to-day, still used in imposing fines in money, through the granting of indulgences, as if all the penitential canons were fully operative?

THESIS 86. Again: since the pope’s income to-day is larger than that of the wealthiest of wealthy men, why does he not build this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of indigent believers?

the pope’s income … is larger than that of the wealthiest . The pope misused the millions of Catholics around the world as his own income stream.

THESIS 87. Again: What does the pope remit or dispense to people who, by their perfect repentance, have a right to plenary remission or dispensation?

THESIS 88. Again: Surely a greater good could be done to the church if the pope were to bestow these remissions and dispensations, not once, as now, but a hundred times a day, for the benefit of any believer whatever.

THESIS 89. What the pope seeks by indulgences is not money, but rather the salvation of souls; why then does he suspend the letters and indulgences formerly conceded, and still as efficacious as ever?

THESIS 90. These questions are serious matters of conscience to the laity. To suppress them by force alone, and not to refute them by giving reasons, is to expose the church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christian people unhappy.

THESIS 91. If therefore, indulgences were preached in accordance with the spirit and mind of the pope, all these difficulties would be easily overcome, and indeed, cease to exist.

THESIS 92. Away, then, with those prophets who say to Christ’s people, “Peace, peace,” where in there is no peace.

THESIS 93. Hail, hail to all those prophets who say to Christ’s people, “The cross, the cross,” where there is no cross.

THESIS 94. Christians should be exhorted to be zealous to follow Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hells.

be zealous to follow Christ . This is the goal for any Christian: to wholeheartedly follow Jesus Christ.

THESIS 95. And let them thus be more confident of entering heaven through many tribulations rather than through a false assurance of peace.

This text of “The 95 Theses by Dr. Martin Luther” courtesy of Senn High School. There are no stated copyright restrictions and the translation is assumed to be in the Public Domain.

Unless otherwise noted, all Bible quotations on this page are from the  World English Bible  and the  World Messianic Edition . These translations have no copyright restrictions. They are in the Public Domain.

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Divinity School professor considers the man and his 95 Theses 500 years later

On Oct. 31, 1517, the German priest and professor of theology Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a Wittenberg church, protesting all that he saw wrong with the late-Renaissance Roman Catholic power structure. Outraged by the church’s practice of selling indulgences to fund the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, he challenged papal authority and church doctrine, eventually asserting the primacy of scripture and faith over priests and good works. Aided by the era’s most revolutionary innovation — the printing press — and protected by a sympathetic local prince, Luther sparked the massive religious upheaval that came to be known as the Protestant Reformation. We asked Harvard Divinity School Assistant Professor Michelle C. Sanchez about his life and legacy.

GAZETTE: What about Luther might surprise people?

SANCHEZ: One of my favorite aspects of Luther’s thinking is how he understands the devil. But it’s also underappreciated — no doubt because modern people don’t talk a lot about the devil. I find Luther’s interpretation of the devil to be insightful. For Luther, the devil doesn’t do his mischief by tempting human beings to bodily excess. It’s not sex or gluttony that we most need to fear. The devil works by tempting us to use our minds in ways that flatter us into thinking that we can find satisfaction, certainty, and happiness by mental domination, or by trying to think our way to mastery. But this only leads to more uncertainty, more fear, and most of all to melancholy. The devil operates this way because the devil is jealous of Jesus. Unlike the devil, Christ actually became human. So Christ can relate to human beings in a way that the devil can’t. The devil has to do his work by luring our minds away from the places where love and joy are found, and Christ is our most powerful helper precisely because Christ lived, ate, drank, and suffered right along with us.

GAZETTE: Did Luther cause the Protestant Reformation, or was the Reformation inevitable? In other words, had Luther not nailed his 95 Theses to the church door, would someone else have initiated a major split in the church?

SANCHEZ: It’s always tough to talk about historical developments in terms of inevitability, because social systems are vastly complicated and human actors are notoriously unpredictable. But it’s a fact that “reform” had been a common watchword in the church for at least two centuries before Luther, and many strategies of reform had been tried and tested before Luther’s 95 Theses appeared at All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg on Oct. 31, 1517.

Jan Hus was active in Prague in the early 1400s, drawing on ideas about an invisible church of the predestined in order to reimagine what the true church consisted of. He wanted to reimagine the church as a spiritual body in which true teaching and moral purity lined up, and to use this as a kind of Archimedean point from which to oppose what he saw as the obvious moral failings and greed of the church establishment at the time. Hus’ thinking was directly informed by his readings of Oxford scholar and dissident John Wycliffe , who had died in 1384 and shared many of the same concerns. Hus was ultimately burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415, which is interesting in retrospect because the third stated purpose of the council was to “reform the corrupt morals of the church.”

So, in the two centuries prior to Luther, there was a general consensus that corruption was a problem and that reform needed to happen, yet there were radically different views on how to reform. The radicals began to appeal more strongly to biblical authority, but this was only one strategy alongside others. And when Luther came along a century later, he reinhabited many of these strategies.

GAZETTE: What were his key differences with the Roman Catholic Church?

SANCHEZ: Luther seems to have been driven, fundamentally, by his anxiety over whether and how you could know that you were, in fact, pleasing to God. Biographical accounts suggest that Luther never felt good enough, but he also never felt like he could make himself good enough by following the practices the church prescribed, such as confession and penance. So when he latched onto St. Paul’s claim that we are justified before God “by faith, not works,” this was deeply personal. It meant that God loves us not because we’ve achieved anything, but merely because God decided to love us. God decided to be “for us,” and proved it through the incarnation, when Jesus Christ was born as a human being to proclaim divine love, and to live and die on our behalf. So we’re assured that God loves us simply by believing God’s promise to love us, and this frees us up to follow Christ in acts of love to our neighbors and enemies.

Of course, this whole vision has another side — one that entails a passionate rebuttal of church practices designed to give one confidence before God. For Luther, the pursuit of righteousness is an asymptote: You can approach it, but you’ll never get there on your own. So when priests would preach, on the pope’s authority, that the purchase of an indulgence could remit a sin, Luther saw this as a fundamental deception misleading ordinary people away from the true source of salvation by faith.

GAZETTE: Others had protested church practices before, without making much of an impact. Why did Luther succeed where others had not?

SANCHEZ: This is where the question of historical inevitability gets complicated, because there are a lot of complicated reasons tying the Reformation to Luther rather than someone else. Some of these reasons are fundamentally political. Luther enjoyed the protection of his prince, Frederick the Wise, who was the elector of Saxony and a major political player in the Holy Roman Empire. So, unlike Wycliffe, Luther was operating closer to the center of ecclesial and political power; and unlike Hus, Luther did not meet an untimely death. These factors surely contributed to his success. Add to this the fact that Luther’s teachings proved friendly to German princes and the rising middle class, and you can begin to see why his reforms gained traction.

And there’s no doubt that Luther’s fame was aided by the economics of printing. Printers were cropping up all over German-speaking areas at the time, and Luther was really good at expressing himself in simple, everyday terms. So even though many ordinary people couldn’t read, Luther’s tracts — and the controversy they stirred up — proved to be really good for the bottom lines of printing entrepreneurs.

There’s also the fact that Luther’s way of understanding salvation — the emphasis he gave to faith in the promises of God — was really compelling, and downright inspiring to many, then and now.

GAZETTE: Can you summarize Luther’s legacy?

SANCHEZ: I find that Luther’s ongoing impact is most felt in the challenge his life poses to us; the way in which it’s both frustrating and inspiring, both embarrassing and revealing. Luther is a helpful conversation partner not because he’s some kind of reforming hero, but because he’s a mirror for our contradictions and struggles, for all the ways our society and our religious establishments continue to try and fail.

And yet, in some strange way, Luther remains important because he was wise to this very dynamic. He deeply got both the joy and the tragedy of the human condition. He didn’t try to explain away human flaws. He knew he was full of them. Instead, he called for us to learn to think of life in this world as a constant practice of critique, a constant practice of meeting the limitations of our own thinking. And he called on us to look for insight outside of ourselves, and especially in those places that seem most unlikely, most humble, because that’s where Jesus went. For Luther, we cannot forget that the highest form of divinity is revealed in the body of a criminal who was condemned by the state to death on a cross.

Interview was edited and condensed.

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Luther's 97 Theses

Martin Luther's 95 Theses , credited with sparking the Protestant Reformation in Europe , have become a cultural touchstone since he posted them 31 October 1517, but the little-known 97 Theses , posted only a month earlier, are equally significant in the development of Luther's (l. 1483-1546) vision and theology.

The 97 Theses are a series of disputations written to invite debate on the topic of scholastic theology and are also referred to as his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology . Scholastic theology was the accepted method of interpreting scripture and defining the nature of humanity in relation to God as well as the attributes of the divine itself.

This theological system was drawn from Aristotle (l. 384-322 BCE) and established by the Church Father Thomas Aquinas (l. 1225-1274) following the precepts and example of Saint Augustine of Hippo (l. 354-430). Aquinas' translation and use of Aristotle inspired the scholastic tradition in the medieval Church which was still central to the training of the clergy in Luther's time.

Rejection of Scholastic Theology

Although Luther was originally drawn to the works of Aristotle and those of the great medieval scholastic theologians, he began to feel they confused matters far more than they clarified. Once Luther became convinced that humans were justified by faith alone, and could do nothing to earn God's grace, he rejected scholasticism as a means toward knowledge of God and emphasized prayerful reading of the Bible as one's direct route toward communion with the divine.

The 97 Theses present Luther's theology based on the precepts of scripture alone and faith alone as the means of knowing God's will while dismissing the scholastic tradition as counterproductive and even unbiblical. The scholars he cites below in his arguments – William of Ockham (l. c. 1287-1347), Duns Scotus (l. c. 1265-1308), and Gabriel Biel (l. c. 1425-1495) – were among the most highly regarded scholastic theologians of their times who had helped shape church doctrine and vision.

The works of Aristotle, which formed the basis of the Catholic Church's theological approach, were understood by the Church as essential in developing a sound, rational theology, and these were required reading for any clergy. In taking issue with the works of these men, Luther was challenging church policy, but his careful phrasing kept his critiques soundly within the confines of the very system he was arguing against.

Scholar Lyndal Roper expresses the opinion of most modern-day scholars that the 97 Theses "are in many ways more radical and shocking than the Ninety-Five Theses" (81) in that the latter took aim at the church policy of selling indulgences and the authority of the pope while the former is an attack on the whole theological system of the Church including the concept of free will. Roper continues:

The theses are an extraordinarily confident set of propositions, which are ordered as though they follow from one another, but their sequence is emotional as much as logical. Briskly, Luther labels one after another of his statements as "contrary to common opinion" or "in opposition to the scholastics." They capture his rejection of the whole tradition of medieval theology in all its passionate fury as he concludes: "No one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle." (81)

His rejection of Aristotelian logic is not a rejection of reason, however, nor of rational discourse. Luther had simply come to realize that one cannot rely on human reason to apprehend the divine. His revelation upon reading the line from Romans 1:17 – "the just shall live by faith” – convinced him that God provided humanity with the grace to know God's will and no system devised by humans could improve upon that.

The 97 Theses

The following comes from Martin Luther 's Basic Theological Writings , edited by Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell, pp. 3-7. They are presented without commentary:

1. To say that Augustine exaggerates in speaking against heretics is to say that Augustine tells lies almost everywhere. This is contrary to common knowledge. 2. This is the same as permitting Pelagians and all heretics to triumph , indeed, the same as conceding victory to them. 3. It is the same as making sport of the authority of all doctors of theology. 4. It is therefore true that man, being a bad tree, can only will and do evil [Cf. Matt. 7:17-18]. 5. It is false to state that man's inclination is free to choose between either of two opposites. Indeed, the inclination is not free, but captive. Tiffs is said in opposition to common opinion. 6. It is false to state that the will can by nature conform to correct precept. This is said in opposition to Scotus and Gabriel. 7. As a matter of fact, without the grace of God the will produces an act that is perverse and evil. Remove Ads Advertisement 8. It does not, however, follow that the will is by nature evil, that is, essentially evil, as the Manichaeans maintain. 9. It is nevertheless innately and inevitably evil and corrupt. 10. One must concede that the will is not free to strive toward whatever is declared good. This in opposition to Scotus and Gabriel. 11. Nor is it able to will or not to will whatever is prescribed. 12. Nor does one contradict St. Augustine when one says that nothing is so much in the power of the will as the will itself. Love History? Sign up for our free weekly email newsletter! 13. It is absurd to conclude that erring man can love the creature above all things, therefore also God. This in opposition to Scotus and Gabriel. 14. Nor is it surprising that the will can conform to erroneous and not to correct precept. 15. Indeed, it is peculiar to it that it can only conform to erroneous and not to correct precept. 16. One ought rather to conclude: since erring man is able to love the creature it is impossible for him to love God. 17. Man is by nature unable to want God to be God. Indeed, he himself wants to be God, and does not want God to be God. 18. To love God above all things by nature is a fictitious term, a chimera, as it were. This is contrary to common teaching. 19. Nor can we apply the reasoning of Scotus concerning the brave citizen who loves his country more than himself. 20. An act of friendship is done, not according to nature, but according to prevenient grace. This in opposition to Gabriel. 21. No act is done according to nature that is not an act of concupiscence against God. 22. Every act of concupiscence against God is evil and a fornication of the spirit. 23. Nor is it true that an act of concupiscence can be set aright by the virtue of hope. This in opposition to Gabriel. 24. For hope is not contrary to charity, which seeks and desires only that which is of God. 25. Hope does not grow out of merits, but out of suffering which destroys merits. This in opposition to the opinion of many. 26. An act of friendship is not the most perfect means for accomplishing that which is in one. Nor is it the most perfect means for obtaining the grace of God or turning toward and approaching God. 27. But it is an act of conversion already perfected, following grace both in time and by nature. 28. If it is said of the Scripture passages, "Return to me,…and I will return to you" [Zechariah 1:3], "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you" [James 4:8], "Seek and you will find" [Matthew 7:7], "You will seek me and find me" [Jeremiah 29:13], and the like, that one is by nature, the other by grace, this is no different from asserting what the Pelagians have said. 29. The best and infallible preparation for grace and the sole disposition toward grace is the eternal election and predestination of God. 30. On the part of man, however, nothing precedes grace except indisposition and even rebellion against grace. 31. It is said with the idlest demonstrations that the predestined can be damned individually but not collectively. This in opposition to the scholastics. 32. Moreover, nothing is achieved by the following saying: Predestination is necessary by virtue of the consequence of God's willing, but not of what actually followed, namely, that God had to elect a certain person. 33. And this is false, that doing all that one is able to do can remove the obstacles to grace. This in opposition to several authorities. 34. In brief, man by nature has neither correct precept nor good will. 35. It is not true that an invincible ignorance excuses one completely (all scholastics notwithstanding); 36. For ignorance of God and oneself and good work is always invincible to nature. 37. Nature, moreover, inwardly and necessarily glories and takes pride in every work which is apparently and outwardly good. 38. There is no moral virtue without either pride or sorrow, that is, without sin. 39. We are not masters of our actions, from beginning to end, but servants. This in opposition to the philosophers. 40. We do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds. This in opposition to the philosophers. 41. Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace. This in opposition to the scholastics. 42. It is an error to maintain that Aristotle's statement concerning happiness does not contradict Catholic doctrine. This in opposition to the doctrine on morals. 43. It is an error to say that no man can become a theologian without Aristotle. This in opposition to common opinion. 44. Indeed, no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle. 45. To state that a theologian who is not a logician is a monstrous heretic—this is a monstrous and heretical statement. This in opposition to common opinion. 46. In vain does one fashion a logic of faith, a substitution brought about without regard for limit and measure. This in opposition to the new dialecticians. 47. No syllogistic form is valid when applied to divine terms. This in opposition to the Cardinal.  48. Nevertheless, it does not for that reason follow that the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity contradicts syllogistic forms. This in opposition to the same new dialecticians and to the Cardinal. 49. If a syllogistic form of reasoning holds in divine matters, then the doctrine of the Trinity is demonstrable and not the object of faith. 50. Briefly, the whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light. This in opposition to the scholastics. 51. It is very doubtful whether the Latins comprehended the correct meaning of Aristotle. 52. It would have been better for the church if Porphyry with his universals had not been born for the use of theologians. 53. Even the more useful definitions of Aristotle seem to beg the question. 54. For an act to be meritorious, either the presence of grace is sufficient, or its presence means nothing. This in opposition to Gabriel. 55. The grace of God is never present in such a way that it is inactive, but it is a living, active, and operative spirit; nor can it happen that through the absolute power of God an act of friendship may be present without the presence of the grace of God. This in opposition to Gabriel. 56. It is not true that God can accept man without his justifying grace. This in opposition to Ockham. 57. It is dangerous to say that the law commands that an act of obeying the commandment be done in the grace of God. This in opposition to the Cardinal and Gabriel. 58. From this it would follow that "to have the grace of God" is actually a new demand going beyond the law. 59. It would also follow that fulfilling the law can take place without the grace of God. 60. Likewise it follows that the grace of God would be more hateful than the law itself. 61. It does not follow that the law should be complied with and fulfilled in the grace of God. This in opposition to Gabriel. 62. And that therefore he who is outside the grace of God sins incessantly, even when he does not kill, commit adultery, or become angry. 63. But it follows that he sins because he does not spiritually fulfill the law. 64. Spiritually that person does not kill, does not do evil, does not become enraged when he neither becomes angry nor lusts. 65. Outside the grace of God it is indeed impossible not to become angry or lust, so that not even in grace is it possible to fulfill the law perfectly. 66. It is the righteousness of the hypocrite actually and outwardly not to kill, do evil, etc. 67. It is by the grace of God that one does not lust or become enraged. 68. Therefore it is impossible to fulfill the law in any way without the grace of God. 69. As a matter of fact, it is more accurate to say that the law is destroyed by nature without the grace of God. 70. A good law will of necessity be bad for the natural will. 71. Law and will are two implacable foes without the grace of God. 72. What the law wants, the will never wants, unless it pretends to want it out of fear or love. 73. The law, as taskmaster of the will, will not be overcome except by the "child, who has been born to us" [Isaiah 9:6]. 74. The law makes sin abound because it irritates and repels the will [Romans 7:13]. 75. The grace of God, however, makes justice abound through Jesus Christ because it causes one to be pleased with the law. 76. Every deed of the law without the grace of God appears good outwardly, but inwardly it is sin. This in opposition to the scholastics. 77. The will is always averse to, and the hands inclined toward, the law of the Lord without the grace of God. 78. The will which is inclined toward the law without the grace of God is so inclined by reason of its own advantage. 79. Condemned are all those who do the works of the law. 80. Blessed are all those who do the works of the grace of God. 81. Chapter Falsas concerning penance, dist. 5, 10 confirms the fact that works outside the realm of grace are not good, if this is not understood falsely. 82. Not only are the religious ceremonials not the good law and the precepts in which one does not live (in opposition to many teachers). 83. But even the Decalogue itself and all that can be taught and prescribed inwardly and outwardly is not good law either. 84. The good law and that in which one lives is the love of God, spread abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. 85. Anyone's will would prefer, if it were possible, that there would be no law and to be entirely free. 86. Anyone's will hates it that the law should be imposed upon it; if, however, the will desires imposition of the law it does so out of love of self. 87. Since the law is good, the will, which is hostile to it, cannot be good. 88. And from this it is clear that everyone's natural will is iniquitous and bad. 89. Grace as a mediator is necessary to reconcile the law with the will. 90. The grace of God is given for the purpose of directing the will, lest it err even in loving God. In opposition to Gabriel. 91. It is not given so that good deeds might be induced more frequently and readily, but because without it no act of love is performed. In opposition to Gabriel. 92. It cannot be denied that love is superfluous if man is by nature able to do an act of friendship. In opposition to Gabriel. 93. There is a kind of subtle evil in the argument that an act is at the same time the fruit and the use of the fruit. In opposition to Ockham, the Cardinal, Gabriel. 94. This holds true also of the saying that the love of God may continue alongside an intense love of the creature. 95. To love God is at the same time to hate oneself and to know nothing but God. 96. We must make our will conform in every respect to the will of God (in opposition to the Cardinal). 97. So that we not only will what God wills, but also ought to will whatever God wills. In these statements we wanted to say and believe we have said nothing that is not in agreement with the Catholic church and the teachers of the church. [year] 1517

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Bibliography

• Bainton, R. H. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Abingdon Press, 2013.
• Lull, T. F & Russell, W.R. Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings. Fortress Press, 2012.
• Roper, L. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2018.
• Rublack, U. The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations . Oxford University Press, 2019.

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Nailed It? The Truth About Martin Luther, the Ninety-Five Theses, and the Castle Church Door

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther strode confidently to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church, nailed up his Ninety-five Theses, and in one swing of his hammer started what later became known as the Protestant Reformation. The defiant monk, enraged by the sale of indulgences that promised forgiveness apart from repentance, sought to overthrow the Roman Catholic Church with his teaching of justification by grace through faith alone.

Or so the story goes.

This story, however, is not without its holes. Consider the “nail,” the theses themselves, and Luther’s intention.

The “Nail”

The image of Luther nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the door of Castle Church is powerful, and as Protestant heirs of his theological convictions, we appreciate the sense of confidence and finality the image carries.

Unfortunately, this story first shows up over a hundred years after the event. The first image of Luther with a hammer appeared in 1697.

The first image of Luther with a hammer came in 1697.

By contrast, the first historical accounts of the theses-posting date to the 1540s, and they say nothing about Luther nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the door. Peter Marshall* quotes Philip Melanchthon , Luther’s chosen successor, who recounted that the German monk, “burning with eagerness and piety, issued Propositions concerning Indulgences, which are recorded in the first volume of his works, and these he publicly affixed to the church next to the castle in Wittenberg, on the eve of the Feast of All Saints in the year 1517.”

Melanchthon didn’t report that Luther specifically nailed the theses, but affixed them.

Practically speaking, nails were tremendously valuable prior to the industrial revolution. A blacksmith had to make each one individually. Moreover, from other publicly posted documents that have survived, we know documents were typically glued up. Daniel Jütte recounts how in 1521, officials in Antwerp forbade the posting of anti-Catholic material in public places, and they were specific about how things were typically posted: “Slanderous libel, rondels, or ballads directed against those who are not followers of Luther shall not be written, distributed, or pinned and pasted to church doors or any archways.”

For these reasons, it’s unlikely Luther used a hammer and nail. But that’s the picture that survived. Why? Because an image of the reformer marching through town with a glue pot doesn’t seem as world defining.

Why does this matter? Understanding how Luther affixed the Ninety-five Thesis helps us to make sense of what Luther intended that day 505 years ago. And to answer that question fully, we ought to turn to the source in question: the theses themselves.

From the start, Luther didn’t intend to rend the Catholic Church. His goal was to be a faithful Catholic theologian and to clarify Catholic teaching on an issue he saw within the Church. In 1545, reflecting on his life, Luther stated that in 1517, he was a faithful Catholic who would have murdered in the name of the Pope.

It’s fascinating that the Ninety-five Theses are as famous as they are, as the publication of theses like these was tremendously common. But for reasons Luther never really understood, the Theses became wildly popular, propelling him to international fame. Nevertheless, the theology contained in the Theses ought not to be celebrated as beacons of Protestant light.

It’s at least problematic to date the Protestant Reformation as starting on October 31, 1517, because the theses themselves contain no distinctively Protestant doctrine. Michael Reeves writes : “If the ninety-five theses were meant to be a Reformation manifesto, they were a pretty poor effort: they contain not a mention of justification by faith alone, the authority of the Bible, or, indeed, any core Reformation thought.”

An image of the reformer marching through town with a glue pot doesn’t seem as world defining.

Before Luther, other reform-minded Catholics existed throughout medieval Europe: Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, and others. Bernard of Clairvaux sought to encourage reform in his own day, as did Thomas Aquinas and Anselm of Canterbury. It was common for theologians within the church to be frustrated with its leadership and to call the church to holiness. So, we must conclude that a reformation movement began within the Catholic Church in 1517, but it was later that this movement brought about the Protestant split.

By my judgment, April 26, 1518, was the day Protestantism began. On that date, Luther presented the Heidelberg Disputation , writing,

He is not righteous who does much, but he who, without work, believes much in Christ. For the righteousness of God is not acquired by means of acts frequently repeated, as Aristotle taught, but it is imparted by faith. . . . The law says, “do this,” and it is never done. Grace says, “believe in this,” and everything is already done.

Only then was the heart of salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone clearly seen.

Luther’s Intention

Luther certainly posted the Ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s church. Yet no evidence from his era implies he nailed them. “Nail, glue, pin—these are minor differences in the historical narrative,” we might say. Why does this question even matter?

Ultimately, getting the details right matters because this guards us against highlighting the wrong parts of the story. By the end of his life, Luther was a valiant defender of the truth. But in 1517, he was an obscure monk who was striving to be faithful to Catholic teaching.

It’s easy for those of us who are sympathetic to Luther, myself chief among them, to think his posting the Ninety-five Theses was intended from the start to be revolutionary. But it wasn’t. The chapel door was nothing more than the community noticeboard. There was likely no fanfare or gathered audience. Posting a series of disputations was the normal course of events for professors in German universities to make the public aware of points of debate he intended to address. Luther simply made use of a common practice.

Painting Luther in 1517 as more heroic than he was does him a disservice. To say he considered the Ninety-five Theses as his great rejection of Catholic teaching doesn’t do justice to how revolutionary his later teaching actually was.

It was when he was forced into a corner after posting the Ninety-five Theses that he found confidence in the gospel. The theology of the theses didn’t bring him that confidence. Rather, the beautiful truth of being justified by faith in Christ alone, as he stated in the Heidelberg Disputation, made him into the reformer we remember. That truth is worth its weight in nails.

*I disagree with Peter Marshall’s conclusion that Luther did not post the theses on October 31.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

Forrest Strickland (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is an adjunct professor of church history at Boyce College and a member of Hunsinger Lane Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Fresh Breeze

Luther’s top ten theses, although it is hard to believe, only a very small portion of evangelicals have actually read them. here are number 1, number number 27, number 36, and seven more..

14 OCTOBER 2017 · 15:00 CET

Let me start today by asking a question.

Have you read Luther’s 95 theses?

Although it is hard to believe, only a very small portion of evangelicals have actually read them. However, I confess that this fact is not all that surprising. After all, it is quite a tedious theological document with a few moments of intellectual and spiritual brilliance.

The 95 theses are nothing in comparison with Luther’s later masterpieces such as ‘The Bondage of the Will’ (1525) or ‘The Minor Catechism’ (1529).

All I want to do in this week’s article is to quote my top ten theses from Luther’s list of ninety-five. I hope it may go some way to helping you all to sitting down to read them yourselves.

So, let me hand you over to my friend, Martin. Enjoy!

TOP TEN THESES

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said: Repent (Matthew 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Thesis # 27

They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.

Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters.

Thesis # 37

Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church and this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.

Thesis # 54

Injury is done to the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or larger amount of time is devoted to indulgences than to the Word.

Thesis # 62

The true treasure of the church is the most holy Gospel of the glory and grace of God.

Thesis # 72

Let him who guards against lust and licence of the indulgence preachers be blessed.

Thesis # 82

Why does the Pope not empty Purgatory for the sake of holy love and 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? The former reason would be most just; the latter is most trivial.

Thesis # 86

Why does not the Pope, whose wealth is greater today that the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this one basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?

Thesis # 94

Christians should be exhorted to be diligent in following Christ, their Head, through penalties, death and hell.

Will Graham

Published in: Evangelical Focus - Fresh Breeze - Luther’s Top Ten Theses

« No Insurance? Get Free Medical, Dental, Vision Services at Next Month’s Pop-Up Healthcare Clinic in Eureka

My in-box seems to be a magnet for myth debunking: Facts that I thought to be true regularly crumble into dust in the hard light of skepticism. Here are a few from the last few months.

The pharaoh let my people go

We have no historical records of Israelites being enslaved in Egypt, despite then Prime Minister of Israel Menahem Begin boasting, “We built the pyramids” during a visit to the National Museum in Cairo in 1977. The popular notion of two-to-three million people held in servitude by a barely larger Egyptian population and subsequently trekking across the parted Red Sea (yay Moses!) and trekking through the Sinai Desert just doesn’t compute. Eric Cline (history professor, author of the intriguing 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed ) figured that the escapees would have needed 1,500 tons of food and 11 million gallons of water…every day for 40 years. Nope, didn’t happen.

Sappho was gay

The greatest Greek lyric poet, Sappho was a beauty by all (i.e. both) contemporary accounts: “Violet-hair, pure and honey-smiling,” according to one. Also, she was married, with a daughter. She wrote Hymn to Aphrodite , the only complete work we have of hers, in which (especially if you’re male with our usual fantasies) you can find kinda-sorta hints of homosexuality. But really, the myth only arose late in the 19th century — until then, “Sapphic” and “Lesbian” had no such connotation.

Sappho and her lyre (Charles Mengin Sappho, 1877. Public domain)

Bankers plunged to their deaths in the 1929 Crash

Newspapers had a field day following the Wall Street Crash of October 24, 1929 (Black Thursday). Daily reports had financiers and bankers jumping from their high offices overlooking Wall Street, where pedestrians wended their way through the tangle of flattened bodies, presumably thinking, “Serves ‘em right, the bastards!” Nope. According to the New York Medical Examiner’s office, just four (of 100) actual or attempted suicides in the city could be attributed to the Crash, and not a single banker or financier.

This pic comes with the caption, “A solemn crowd gathers outside the Stock Exchange after the crash.” (SSA poster/US government)

John Scopes was an unwilling defendant

Dayton, Ohio was in poor financial shape (sound familiar?) in the mid-1920s, so a couple of movers-and-shakers cooked up a scheme to put the city on the map: Let’s prosecute a teacher in a show-trial for illegally teaching evolution, a felony according to the new Tenessessean Butler Act*. First, find a teacher who would be willing to play the role of martyred educator. Football coach John Scopes (he never did teach biology) enthusiastically agreed, and the trial proceeded, pitting William Bryan (politician-fundamentalist) against Clarence Darrow (atheist, say no more). Scopes was duly found guilty, although he never took the stand, which was probably for the best, since he’d been home sick on the date he was supposed to have corrupted the kids’ vulnerable minds, and fined $100…before the verdict was overturned on a technicality. No matter, the 11-day trial put Dayton on the map and it’s been known ever since as the Monkey Trial City. And, of course, the whole drama spawned the hit play and movie Inherit the Wind.

* The 1925 Butler Act prohibited Tennessee public school teachers from denying the Bible’s version of mankind’s origin in Genesis. It was repealed in 1967.

Kindly old Martin Luther brought tolerance to Europe

Misogynist, anti-Semite, xenophobe, hater of the poor: yes. Kind: no. Martin Luther (1483-1546) probably didn’t even nail his “95 Theses” which condemned Roman Catholic indulgences (sin now, pay later) to a church door, per the myth, but sent them to the appropriate church authorities. He hated, among others: The poor (“Let all who are able, cut them down, slaughter and stab them,” he advised when the peasants demanded better working conditions); Jews (“First set fire to their synagogues…Second raze and destroy their homes…”); Women (“a mind weaker than man…she did not equal the glory of the male creature”); not to mention Muslims and, of course, Catholics. All in all, a perfect role model for Nazi Germany.

1528 portrait of Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder. (Public domain via Wikimedia)

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The death of Alberta Williams King, mother of Martin Luther King, Jr.

On Saturday night, her daughter Christine and two of her grandchildren stopped by to bring some dinner, but she had been restless all night and had trouble sleeping. King Sr., known affectionately as “Daddy King,” was scheduled to fly to New Jersey that afternoon, and she always worried when he traveled. She begged him not to forget his topcoat. But she was also excited. The longtime musical director of Ebenezer Baptist Church, which her family built from the ground up, would be playing with the M.L. King Senior Choir. At...

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