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Penance is an interesting word simply
because in both Latin and in German,
there is one word, whereas
in English there are three
different words. So when you see the word
as a translator or as a historian in
the original documents, you have to
always ask the question, are they talking
about penitence - that is, sorrow for sin -
are they talking about the sacrament of
penance, which is a very important part
of indulgences, or are they talking about
repentance? The folks in the 16th century
didn't have that dilemma, because they
only had one word, whether they talked
German or Latin: it was paenitentia
or Buße in German. It's the only word
they had. So we always have to guess what
it means. But to understand indulgences
you have to understand the sacrament of
penance. As it develops
in the Middle Ages, the
Sacrament of Penance is God's second
gracious right given to the church to
rescue sinners. The first is baptism;
unfortunately when you get to be about 7
years old, and your will kicks in, you can
begin to commit sins that basically sin
away the grace in baptism. So imagine
the dilemma of somebody who has sinned
away their grace of baptism, and are now
in a state of sin: how do they get back
into a state of grace? The problem is so
deep because if you die in a state of
sin - mortal sin - you go directly to hell;
you do not pass go, you don't collect
$200, you're toast. So this
becomes really the center of
late medieval piety: how do I get back
into a state of grace, and the answer is
the sacrament of penance. Penance itself
as a sacrament consists of three parts:
the first is sorrow for sin, then the
second is that you confess your sins
privately to a priest, and thirdly,
finally, that you do works of
satisfaction. The works of satisfaction
can only be understood if you understand
what's happening in penance as
opposed to baptism. Sin according to
medieval theology has two consequences:
guilt and punishment. In baptism, all the
guilt and all the punishment of any sins
committed or for which we're responsible
up until the time of baptism are removed.
Both guilt and punishment. Punishment, by
the way: the word in Latin is poena, from
which you actually get paenitentia
which means a kind of self-punishment
for the sins you've committed. So the
three parts are: contrition, sorrow for
sin out of love of God, confession
(confessing to a priest); and the thing
about penance which is different from
baptism is that although it removes all
the guilt of sin, it only reduces the
punishment from an eternal one - die in a
state of sin, go to hell - to a temporal
one, what we might call chastisement or
discipline for the sins that we've
committed. And that temporal punishment
has to be satisfied. And so the third
part of penance is the satisfaction for
the temporal punishment remaining for
sin after one has confessed to a priest
and received absolution. It's that
satisfaction that begins to build up in
a person's life, because the rule of
thumb was, for each mortal sin you commit -
that is, a sin that you commit willingly,
knowingly, against God's law - you chalk up
seven years of satisfaction that needs
to be done. Now, that seven years can be
immediately reduced by certain good
works: almsgiving, prayer, fasting
particularly; they're mentioned in the
Sermon on the Mount by Jesus; and from
that then, comes all kinds of other good
works that a person can do to satisfy
the remaining punishment of sin. But at
seven years, a mortal sin - given the fact
that one commits mortal sins of thoughts
word and deed each day, and quite often
it means that that satisfaction, the
amount of satisfaction needed, multiplies
just astronomically, geometrically.
To understand what the 95 Theses is about,
what the sacrament of penance is about, we
have to understand purgatory. Now, the
word purgatory itself, a good Latin word,
purgatorium, means "place of purgation."
What happens for most Christians is
that they die before they've satisfied
all of the penalty that they owe for the
sins they've committed; they haven't
satisfied everything - 7 years per mortal
sin builds up into the hundreds of
thousands, if not millions of years of
punishment, depending on how good a
sinner you are. That, then: what God has
done in God's mercy according to late
medieval theology is to establish a
place of purgation where you're purged
of the remaining sin in your lives and
where you satisfy the remaining
punishment for those sins that had not
been taken care of during your life.
Purgatory, unlike what
many Protestants imagine,
purgatory has only one exit, and that's
to Heaven: you are purged of your sin and
then you go to Heaven. You cannot go
from purgatory to hell; there's just no
way you can do it. The trouble is that
the least punishment or purgation that
you undergo in purgatory is a hundred
times worse than the worst
suffering that you might endure here on
Earth; it's not a place you sign up for;
although in his 95 Theses, Luther
actually mentions two saints that he
knows of who wanted to stay longer in
purgatory,
but the only reason they want to stay
longer in purgatory is so that they can get a
higher place in Heaven. In
any case, purgatory is not a
place you sign up for, and moreover, the
medieval theologians were pretty sure
that you didn't know once in
purgatory what your fate would be.
On Earth, because we understand theology,
these medieval theologians would say, you
do understand, there's only one exit. But
when you're actually in that state of
purgation, you don't know that,
because that would allow you to be
rather secure even under the worst
punishment, and say, well, I'm gonna end up
in Heaven anyway: I can endure this a
little bit longer. No, you actually don't
know what - the soul does not know what
its final disposition will be while it's
being punished in purgatory, and that
adds to the real terror that
purgatory represented. So there are two
pastoral issues, then, connected to the
sacrament of penance. The first one is,
you want to make sure you die in a state
of grace, not in a state of sin. And this
will mean that particularly the very end
of life matters will be very important,
for which there was then also an added
sacrament: the sacrament of last rites or
extreme unction, that would also help
move your soul from a state of sin to a
state of grace, and prepare you then for
the final judgment. So there's that
question: Am I in a state of sin, am I in
a state of grace; that's the one. But the
other is, have I really satisfied God's
punishment for the sins that I've
committed and confessed to a priest. It's
that uncertainty, then, that is answered
by the the practice of indulgences; so
one may ask - particularly a Protestant
would ask - well where is this in the
Bible? The idea of a place of purgation
really comes out of one of the
Beatitudes: "Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God."
Medieval theologians took that text
quite literally, and said therefore if
you come with this punishment
that still needs to be satisfied for
your sin; if you come before God with
that, you're not yet pure in heart, you
have this burden of this satisfaction
that remains; and therefore purgatory is
a place where you in fact become pure so
that, once purified, you then are pure in
heart, and can see God and have that
beatific vision for all eternity. Luther
doesn't really focus on purgatory in his
comments,
I think for a couple of reasons. The
first is, once you begin to refocus the
role of grace and God's mercy in a
Christian's life, the question of
purgatory simply becomes moot. It's not
that important. So if you look at most of
Luther's life, occasionally he'll
make some snide comments about purgatory,
but it really falls by the wayside; it's
not that important. And already in his
explanation to the 95 Theses written in
1518 - so, about a year after the theses
themselves (his defense of statements in
the 95 Theses), it becomes clear that he
thinks that at the end of life when a
person is faced again thinking about
their sins, faced with death and so on,
that they experience hell, purgatory, and
suffering on earth all wrapped into one.
So he no longer sees that there's much
difference in terms of how a person
experiences the end of life as a sinner,
so that one really is in that moment
purified of all their sins, satisfies all
the punishment, really in an instant: that
this sense of terror for one sin is
experienced existentially. So it simply
doesn't - because it's so closely related
to a medieval understanding of the
sacrament of penance,
and to indulgences, purgatory really
becomes...is simply not that important for
Luther, and he never really spends much
time talking about it. And furthermore,
the debates that they begin to have
after the 95 Theses are posted with the
people that object to them quickly
focus on other matters, particularly the
question of authority of the Pope.
To understand an indulgence, you have to
realize that it's related to our English
word, to be "indulgent." If a person...so,
back up for a moment, and we have to
talk a little bit about where this all
comes from in the early church. If you
were a fifth century Christian and you
committed a heinous public sin that
everyone knew about, something that would
break the community of that particular
Christian congregation, they would
practice a form of excommunication that
would ban you from the Lord's Supper and
sometimes even from the community itself
for a period of time - for really heinous
sins that were known in the community
that broke the unity of that
community would be around 7 years.
And in some cases we know in the early
church a person would then sit at the
door of the church on a Sunday begging
all of the members of that congregation
for forgiveness, for the deed
that they had committed. Now, such
excommunication didn't really affect a
person's relationship to God, but rather
to the community. If that person
begging for forgiveness and for being
allowed back into fellowship with
that Christian congregation; if they
became mortally ill; or if they showed
true deep sorrow for their sin, the
bishop, or pastor, we would call them now,
but the bishop of that congregation
could be indulgent and shorten the
amount of time, reconcile the sinner to
this congregation earlier than that
7 years that was prescribed. And that
indulgence had to do with reintegrating
a person into a Christian community.
In the Middle Ages, the whole
notion of that penitential
attitude of that sinner really becomes
different, because they now begin to
define mortal sin not simply as those
public sins, but any sin of thought, word
and deed that is done willfully by the
believer against the law of God, and
these mortal sins then each could rack
up 7 years. And they are not simply
public heinous sins that everyone knows
about, but it's all the sin that you
commit. And the result is that of course
you then rack up these hundreds of
thousands of years. But in the
process, in the Middle Ages, they also
realize that this is a burden to these
Christians as well, and therefore the
church continues to be indulgent by
saying, well, it's true that if you fast
or if you pray or if you give alms, you
really satisfy a certain amount of the
sin that you've committed; not all of it,
but quite a bit of it. But then the
church can be indulgent: that is to say,
allow a particular prayer or your
attendance at a worship service, or a
particular other religious act, to have
far more effect. And thereby, they are
being indulgent, and allowing, say,
attendance of a Christian at the
anniversary of the dedication of a
church to be worth two hundred times as
much as the normal amount that
would be satisfied by that religious act.
In the 11th century, the Pope then begins -
the Bishop of Rome begins to
promulgate plenary indulgences; that
is to say, an indulgence that wipes away
all the satisfaction that would be
demanded for all of the sins that you've
committed up to a certain point. The
plenary indulgence is first proclaimed for
those who participate in the Crusades
for religious reasons. But that's in the
11th century; by the 12th or 13th century,
you begin to get indulgences for visiting
the tombs of the apostles in Rome, or at
St. James Compostela in Spain, which was
thought to be the burial place
of Saint James. In any case, if you
suddenly go every 25 years - starts in, say,
1300, 1325, and so on - you get a jubilee
indulgence, and there too, if you go to
Rome, pray at these various places, you
get a full or plenary indulgence for all
of the satisfaction. In the 15th century,
this visiting of the Apostles' tombs in
Rome or St. James Compostela suddenly
comes to you, in the form of letters of
indulgences. It's meant to be - and we need
to understand this - is to be a really
quite remarkable grace that is being
offered by these indulgence
commissioners or preachers of
indulgences in the 15th century. Then,
however, there is a change that takes
place in 1476. Pope Sixtus, after whom the
Sistine Chapel is named - one of the
interesting things is, the art of
this period from Rome in part is being
paid for by the indulgences people are
buying north of the Alps. In any case, he
proclaims for a church in Saintes, France,
that if you buy that indulgence, you can
buy it not only for yourself, but also
for your dead relatives, particularly
father and mother. Well, you know that
they were sinners, if you're their child,
and you know that they've racked up a
lot of sin, and you know now that they're
dead that their souls are suffering in
purgatory. So starting in 1476 in Saintes,
France, you can begin to purchase letters
of indulgence not simply for yourself
but also for the souls of those in
purgatory.
Johann Tetzel was a Dominican. He was a commissioner
of indulgences, which means he had preached some other
indulgences earlier on in his career. I
think to understand what Luther was
objecting to - the specific Peter's
indulgences - you have to know a little
bit about the background. And the
background has to do with Albrecht, who
was from Brandenburg. He became at a very
young age a bishop, but it was illegal
according to church law to hold two
archbishoprics, and when the
archbishopric of Mainz became vacant, he
then was selected to be the archbishop
there; and rather than giving up his
other archbishopric of Magdeburg, he then
paid a fee to the Vatican to allow him
to hold these two sees - as well as, there
was money involved anytime one of these
large bishoprics, which was also a
political entity in the Holy Roman
Empire, became available - you always had
to pay a certain fee. In order to pay
that, he took out a loan from the largest
banking firm in the Holy Roman Empire in
Augsburg - the Fuggers had more money than
than anyone at the time; all of the
powerful and rich people borrowed
money from them - and so he had to pay
back this loan. And the way it was
arranged for him to do this, was to take
some of the money raised by a
Peters indulgence. The ostensible reason
for this indulgence, where about 50%
of the money was supposed to go, was
actually to Rome to help to build the
Basilica of St. Peter's and Paul in Rome;
the results of which, although it took
them almost the entire 16th century to
finally build it, can be seen today every
time Pope Francis presides at
something in Rome, it is at St. Peter's.
And that's the building that was built
in the 16th century. The money was
supposed to go, and publicly was
designated to go, there. People didn't
know about the backroom dealings of
Albrecht; namely, that half of the money
went to pay for his loan
from the Fuggers in order
for him to have gotten these offices
that he then held, as one of the most
powerful - in fact, the primate of Germany
was Albrecht of Mainz. Luther didn't even
know about that when he criticizes
indulgences; he only found out later that
kind of sordid side. To promulgate this
indulgence, Albrecht wanted to use
Franciscans. They refused: we know already
before the Reformation, before the 95
Theses, that indulgence preaching was not
bringing in as much money as it once had.
There really was a law of diminishing
returns. People were very skeptical about
these indulgences, and so they weren't
giving money. So he turned instead from
the Franciscans to the Dominicans, and
the head commissioner of indulgences was
in fact Johann Tetzel. Most likely the
things that he said went far beyond the
instructions that he had received from
the theologians at the Archbishop's
court. Every time they preached an
indulgence, there was an
instruction booklet that was made that
laid out what the benefits of this
particular indulgence were, and also the
limitations: what these
indulgence preachers couldn't say. Tetzel
clearly said things beyond that. The
famous one, which was probably also
already being said before Tetzel came
along, is this little ditty, "As soon as
money is thrown in the chest and the
cash bell rings, the soul flies out of
purgatory and sings!" There were different
versions of that; and sure enough, I mean
he probably said that. He said worse
things: he said that an indulgence took
care of all of not only the satisfaction
due to sin, which is what an indulgence
was supposed to do, but it also
eliminated the grounds for sorrow
for sin, contrition, which meant that the
first part of the sacrament of
penance was being affected by this
indulgence. It also was
clear that the indulgence
allowed you to choose your confessor at
the end of your life. This is as
important as what most students do in
college where they know there's a tough
professor and an easy professor: well,
this allows you to get the easy
professor so you know you get an A. You
get the very indulgent, nice
confessor for your sins at the end of
your life so that you can be assured
that your time in purgatory will be much
less than if you got the strict fella to
do it. Well, Tetzel went
around preaching: the
descriptions of how he would
arrive in a town, all the bells would
ring, all the organs in all the churches
would be playing, the mayor and other
city officials and the clerics would
meet Tetzel at the door; the Papal coat
of arms would be processed and hung in
the main church along with the
indulgence bull itself that would sit on
a satin cushion - this proclamation
of this particular indulgence - and all
other preaching then was banned, so that
only preaching would be held in the main
church by Tetzel for this indulgence. The
indulgences themselves were individually
crafted; we have a couple that have come
down to us where specific sins would be
mentioned. There is one father who had
accidentally killed his son while trying
to butcher a pig, and that apparently
caused deep pain for the father,
and so it's written out specifically
that this sin is now completely forgiven
and that all satisfaction is wiped out.
Those kinds of things were going on. The
indulgence letters themselves were
printed up ahead of time with blanks
where you then could write in the name
of the person and the date, and sealed
then with a specific wax seal for these
letters; it was really quite a big deal
in the towns in which Tetzel then came.
In Wittenberg in those days there were
four or five, maybe a few more churches
and chapels. The Franciscan monastery had
a church, the Augustinian monastery where
Luther lived and worked also had a
church, and then there was the main
Church for most of its citizens of
Wittenberg - a small city, really - and
that was St. Mary's in the center of
town. But there was also then the Castle
Church. The Castle Church had been
re-dedicated, as I mentioned, by Raymond
Peraudi on January 17, 1503, and at that
time he proclaimed on behalf of the Pope
that anyone worshiping at the
anniversary of this dedication would
receive a 200-day indulgence. This is the
Castle Church, which means it's in
some ways the private chapel of the
Prince of Saxony, Frederick the Elector.
Within a year there would be at least
6,000 masses that would be said for the
souls of those dead Electors and
Electress that were set up by this
foundation. The elector had also wanted a
university, and that started then in 1502
so that they didn't have to send him to
his cousin in Leipzig who had the
University of Leipzig, much older. So
Peraudi dedicates it, and sure enough, lo
and behold, on January 17, 1517, according
to my re-dating of a sermon of Martin
Luther, Martin Luther himself is now
preaching at this anniversary of the
dedication. So he's preaching an
indulgence himself. It's not just that
Tetzel is preaching at about the same
time in January 1517, in the town where
Luther was born - in Eisleben - and then in
some other towns 30 or 40, 50 miles from
Wittenberg, but Luther himself is
preaching a much more limited 200-day
indulgence. But in the middle of the
sermon, Luther begins to question
indulgences. He can't figure out how he
can get people to be serious about their
sins and contrite, sorry for the sins
they've committed on the one hand, and
yet preach this indulgence
which really removes the need
for sorrow for sin on the other hand. How
can he do both at the same time? We know
from lLuther's later
recollections that the Elector is
hopping mad that Luther would pose these
questions in a sermon where the Elector
is hoping to get a 200-day indulgence. I
think that that questioning, as much as
Tetzel's preaching then, motivates
Luther to do more research into indulgences.
So, what Luther does between January
1517 and the 31st of October 1517, is he
does his homework. He discovers the
origins of indulgences which were really
means of pastoral care in the ancient
church, means of reconciling
excommunicated sinners with the church
early and - being indulgent in terms of
their ecclesiastical punishment - that it
had nothing originally to do with God's
punishment of our sin, or God's
chastisement of us as sinners. He also is
reading Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus a
very important figure in the time. He
publishes, a year before the 95 Theses in
1516, for the first time a Greek New
Testament. Luther we know uses that Greek
New Testament immediately in his
lectures on Romans, but he's also reading
then the annotations or corrections that
Erasmus is suggesting for some of the
texts. Erasmus questions among other
things the translation from the standard
Latin version of the New Testament of
Matthew 4:17, where Jesus stands up and
says and preaches - and it says
in the standard Latin version,
"do penance." Erasmus notes that the Greek
word metanoiate doesn't mean "do
penance" at all, but rather, have a change
of mind or a change of heart. And he also
comments on the fact that mistakenly,
people in the Middle Ages - theologians -
had used that text as a proof text for
the sacrament of penance, and Erasmus
notes that it doesn't have anything to
do with penance, and that in the ancient
church penance in any case was just this
ecclesiastical right that would
excommunicate sinners - blatant sinners -
for a particular amount of time. That's
in Erasmus already a year before Luther.
Luther reads that among other things. He
reads in canon law that this whole
idea of the sacrament of penance and
of indulgences had a completely
different origin than the way in which
it was being used. Plus his conversations
with the canon lawyers, the
church law lawyers - he discovers that
things just aren't right in terms of the
preaching that's going on about
indulgences, the teaching that had
surrounded indulgences. And so he begins
to formulate theses.
So what do we know about the 95 Theses?
In medieval university life, the way you
got a degree was by defending theses
that your professor had written. If you
want a Bachelor of Arts degree, a Master
of Arts, a Bachelor a Bible, a Licentiate
in Theology, a Doctor of Theology, or
Medicine or Law or any of those degrees,
you would publicly defend theses written
by your teacher. For example, in
September 1517, Martin Luther writes out
97 theses that are defended by a student
who is getting a degree of Bachelor of
Bible. They are printed, and it was the
rules of the University of Wittenberg
that all theses that were posed for
public debate at the University had to
be posted on the doors of the churches.
They functioned as the the bulletin
board, as what you might say, the
website, the official Facebook page of
the university. So the fact that Luther
posted then a month later the 95
theses instead of the 97 that he had
done earlier which attacked scholastic
theology, this was part and parcel of
medieval university life. It was not
Luther trying to attack anybody; it was
just him following the regulations of
the school. In fact, those regulations
continued after the Reformation. They
continued to have theses, and they posted
them - they posted other things as well. So
Luther then, as a doctor of theology, as a
professor at the University, had the
right not only to post theses that would
be defended by students, but he could
post theses that he himself would
defend in what were called quodlibetal
debates: that is, debates about anything
whatsoever. Luther by this
time was so concerned
about this misinformation regarding
indulgences, that he wanted to start a
conversation among the intelligencia,
among the theologians,
about indulgences and about, to a lesser
degree, the sacrament of penance itself.
For that, he wrote up these 95 statements
which he then probably posted on the
door of the castle church on the 31st of
October 1517. Now, there are some scholars
to this day who question whether they
were posted at all. The first reference
to the posting comes after Luther's
death by Philip Melanchthon, one of
Luther's colleagues, who wasn't there in
1517. So we don't have necessarily an
eyewitness to this. But Melanchthon knew
they were theses, and if they weren't
posted, figured they were simply because
you posted all theses. If Luther did post
them, as I believe, it was simply because
that's what you did with theses in a
medieval university setting. Luther, if he
posted them, in my opinion didn't use
nails or hammer; that first comes out in
in depictions from the 18th and 19th
century, that they used hammer and nails.
One picture in the 19th century has a
little boy on a ladder actually posting
the theses on the door and Luther is
standing in front pointing back to the
theses. That's because they didn't think
that German professors could really
understand how to use a hammer and nails
by the 19th century. In the 16th century,
however, they most likely used wax or
paste; that's the way they posted these
notices. Just think about it: if you used
nails for all of the things that got
posted - and there were hundreds upon
hundreds of things posted in a year -
the door would have fallen apart
eventually. In the 19th century, the
Castle Church is refurbished by the
Prussian King; later the Kaiser, he was
called. They took the 95 Theses and cast
them in bronze, and that is now the
door of the Castle Church. Far more
important than the posting on the door
is the posting in the mail.
Because we have the letter from the
Swedish archive in Luther's hand, dated
the 31st of October 1517, to Archbishop
Albrecht saying, you really have to rein
in Tetzel and these other indulgences
preachers for your own sake, because this
is not good pastoral care of your flock,
who are getting misled by these people.
A very good way to understand what it was
that Luther was doing in modern parlance
is that Luther sent an email to the
archbishop and he attached as an email
attachment then the 95 Theses. The email
itself was received, and we even know the
date on which it was received - or this
this cover letter: on the back of the
letter, the clerk who received it writes
the date 11th of November 1517, when in
fact that came into the archives in the
city of Halle which was one of the
central cities of the archbishop.
The theses themselves when you first
look at them just seem so random.
What we've discovered recently is that
there is a certain kind of organization
to them. It begins with a kind of an
appeal to the reader, you know, to listen
to them and to respond if they're able.
Then the first four theses which Luther
says later in his explanations are not
up for debate really reflect his reading
of Erasmus and canon law, in saying, you know,
if you want to understand penitence, it's
a life-long thing; there is not a, "for a
while you're penitent while you're in
sin, and then you're in a state of grace
and then you no longer have to be sorry
for your sin" - no, the entire life of the
Christian, Luther says in Thesis One, is
one of penitence. Then comes the central
thesis that Luther then will prove in
the rest of the theses, and that's number
five where he says the Pope doesn't have
the kind of authority that these
indulgence preachers claim that the
Pope has. He has authority over
ecclesiastical penalties, but not
over the penalties for sin imposed by
God. The rest of the theses, numbers
6 through 80, are really just a confirmation
or a proof of that, and then Luther
imagines objections to the way in which
indulgences are being preached and so on,
which comes in theses 81 to 91; and
then finally the last four theses are
highly charged rhetorically, and are much
more like a kind of conclusion to a
speech that you might imagine that
Luther gives. So basically, in
those 6 through 80 you have
different sections where he is proving
different parts of his argument to make
it clear that the standard
theological arguments for indulgences
are simply not - they don't hold any water.
That's all he wants to prove, is that
they're questionable.
If I were to take of the 95 the most
important, I would say first of all it's
the first one: "Our Lord and Master Jesus
Christ in saying 'do penance' (Matthew 4:17)
wanted the entire life of the faithful
to be one of penitence." What this
represents is Martin Luther saying,
our Christian life doesn't go anywhere -
it doesn't get better and better every
day in every way - but we stay always
a sinner before God, always justified by
God's grace alone.
The second thesis that I think is
really wonderful is kind of the flip
side of that, if you will: it's Thesis 62,
where he says, "The true treasure of the
church is the most holy gospel of the
glory and grace of God." Underneath what
Luther is concerned about is not only
that in fact we are sinners, but that
God's grace and not an indulgence
purchase is what actually rids us of
our sin; that God declares us righteous
for the sake of Christ alone. And the
final thesis comes at the end; it's one
of these rhetorically charged theses, and
it again reflects his main point
where he says, "Christians must be
encouraged diligently to follow Christ
their head through penalties death and
hell." And then 95 continues, "And in
this way they may be confident of
entering heaven through many
tribulations rather than through the
false security of peace" (that is, the
peace of indulgence buying). You know that
old gospel hymn "Blessed Assurance, Jesus
is Mine"? What I used to tell my students
was that that hymn could not have been
written without the Reformation. The
notion that we have assurance from
Christ's lips
about our forgiveness, about our standing
before God, comes really from Luther's
discovery or rediscovery of this gospel
of the glory and grace of God.
So I mentioned that I think it's
more important that the theses were
mailed than that they were nailed, and
let me say a little bit about who they
were mailed to and why that's so
important. Albrecht was the
Archbishop of Mainz, which was the
central archbishopric in the Holy Roman
Empire. Here's just an excerpt from that
letter; he says to the archbishop, "Under
your most distinguished name and title,
papal indulgences are being disseminated
among the people for the construction of
St. Peter's in Rome. In these matters, I
don't find so much fault with the cries
of the preachers, which I haven't heard,
but I do bewail the people's completely
false understanding gleaned from these
fellows, which they spread everywhere
among the common folk."
Luther is concerned about what people
are hearing in preaching. That really is
his worry; he's not really worried
about the authority of the Pope, he
doesn't really question it, he just
assumes there are limitations.
Unfortunately his opponents who are much
more papalist in their understanding, or
curialists as they're called, who
understand that the Popes have a really
almost unlimited authority in the church -
they don't agree with him at all.
But Luther himself thinks, no, if the Pope
hears about this, he'll say, "Oh my
goodness gracious, this is terrible what
they're saying that I can do; of course
the Pope can't have this authority over
purgatory that people say I have, or
can't have authority over God's
chastisement for sin." Luther thinks that
about the Pope; but what he wants to do
is have the archbishop rein in these
indulgence preachers not simply for
theology's sake, but also because of bad
preaching.
I think if Luther were alive today,
if he were to write 95 Theses,
they would be to attack bad preaching in
our day. There are these charlatans
who in the name of Christianity are
preaching what it is now called a
prosperity gospel, and there is quite
frankly nothing worse or
more the opposite of true
Christianity than what is being belched
out on the airwaves and by these
prosperity preachers in these
church-growth McChurches! That is bad
preaching that misleads the people by
imagining that somehow our economic
well-being is connected to our
standing before God. That simply isn't
true now, and that's what Luther goes
after in his day. Do you know what Luther
says in the middle of the 95 Theses - and
he says it also in the letter to
Albrecht - he says one of the consequences
of this kind of preaching of indulgences,
that people should buy these letters of
indulgences, is that the poor are
neglected. And another one of my favorite
theses actually is precisely those from
45 onwards for about five or six theses
where Luther says, if you pass by a poor
person on your way to buy an indulgence,
you are not buying God's mercy, but God's
wrath. You're not buying an indulgence at
all. The same thing he says then in the
95 Theses, and it's one of Luther's
continual themes, that he's worried about
the poor in our world, and what should be
done in his world, and what should be
done for them. And I would say the same
ought to be true today: that if Luther
were there, he would attack the way in
which we have, in our own society
and around the world, abandoned the
poor for the sake of economic gain. The
prosperity gospel is not something that
is limited to Joel Olsteen
and some few mega churches here and
there. In my travels around the world
talking about the Reformation and
teaching people, I have found and
discovered pastors who have been
negatively affected by the prosperity
preacher down the street in Brazil, in
South Africa, in parts of Asia, all over
the place, people that I know who are
faithful preachers of the gospel who are
being drowned out by this kind of
preaching. And in some ways that's
what Luther was worried about, that the
gospel itself was being drowned out by
these false claims of these indulgence
preachers. So I think it's all over the
place, particularly the prosperity gospel
is a very alluring message in a world
where we more and more measure our
well-being, and actually our being, by
what we have, what we own, how we are able
to use our economic power to do this
that or the other. And when people see
this in poor countries, they want to
actually emulate this kind of message, I
think, in many places. So I would say that
that is one thing that Luther for sure
would react against. I think
there's another way, though: that many in
the church have lost the ability to name
sin as sin. That we tend to think of
of sin as a mere blemish; that
if we just use the right kind of
Clearasil or whatever the latest
product is, we can kind of get rid of
these blemishes we call sin. What Luther
realizes, and it's reflected in that
first thesis of the 95 Theses, is that
we're stuck in sin. The way I would say
it is, that we're addicted to sin. Worse
than being addicted to sin, however - and
Luther also says this later on when he
confronts Erasmus in 1525, he says, not
only are we addicted to sin, but we're
heavy into denial. We imagine that things
are going well, that sin is not really a
big problem, and one of the reasons that
the church's message falls on deaf ears
is because our ears in a sense have been
filled with the lie that everything is
okay - that I'm okay and you're okay, as
that book from the 70s proclaimed, and
that we're all just getting better and
better every day in every way. What
Luther reminds us of, what he would
remind us of if he were a preacher in
today's world, is precisely
that we're enthralled,
captive to sin and evil, that we
can't get out of it by ourselves, and
that's where Christ's mercy and grace
comes. Not only are we in denial
about sin, we're also heavy
into denial about death,
just like the alcoholic is in denial
about his or her alcoholism. There was a
book written a generation ago by Carl
Becker called "The Denial of Death,"
a sociologist describing Western -
in particular, American society -
and its ability to deny that people
actually are dying. We're still heavy
into denial about those things; heavy
into denial about evil in the world; and
how evil actually lurks in not only
every human heart, but in every human
society and culture. All of those things
are the very things that Luther is
beginning to attack in his 95 Theses as
he sees bad preaching really blind
people or make people deaf to the real
situation in their lives. On the flip
side of that, of course, is that we also
are in denial about the nature of God's
grace: that God really does want to
forgive us, to proclaim us righteous, and
that's why he says in that Thesis 62, you
know, the real treasure of the church is
that glorious gospel of God's grace.
One imagines that the 95 Theses suddenly
made Luther a household name. It didn't.
It was written in Latin; there may have
been a translation, but as far as we know
there was never a printing of a German
version of the 95 Theses until after
Luther's death. In fact when Luther hears
that a translation has been made, he
writes back to a friend of his in
Nürnberg and says, don't bother with the
translation, I'll write something else.
And lo and behold, he did: in March or
April, he publishes from the Wittenberg
press a very simple document called a
sermon; you'd almost call it an essay on
indulgences and grace. It's written in
German. It immediately makes Luther a
household name, because it is republished
within two years about 20 times. It's all
over the place, it's in German, and it's
being read to - perhaps 10% of the
people read and could read in those days -
but it's being read aloud in
the pubs and on the street
corner and in families and homes; you'd
get the one reader to come. It's all over
the place, and it turned Luther into the
first living best-selling author the
world had ever seen. We think about
Luther and the printing press, and think
Gutenberg invented the printing press,
and then you wonder why it takes 60, 70
years for somebody like Luther to arise.
Part of it is that there are
improvements in printing that are taking
place at the very time that Luther is
beginning to teach and publish. But the
other thing is that the phenomenon of a
best-selling author is absolutely new;
nobody knew what to make of this. Luther
didn't know he had done this; he just
publishes something. Tetzel reads this
thing, writes his own rebuttal in German:
it's never republished. And that tells
you the difference: it is, you have to
imagine Luther like the story of
the Emperor's New Clothes;
suddenly a little boy
in the crowd says, "He has no
clothes!" And everybody says,
my goodness gracious, the emperor has no
clothes. Luther says what so many people
had been thinking, worrying about, didn't
know - what do we make of these
indulgences? Is this really
what the Christian life
is all about? Is this how we go about
receiving God's grace and mercy through
the indulgence of the Bishop of Rome?
Luther blows that all out of the water,
so that in this essay at one point he
even says: "So you may ask, should I even
bother buying indulgences? I say to you,
flee from them, run from them as quickly
as your little legs will carry you!" I
mean, these are radical kinds of things to
say, and it's very clear that Luther
suddenly via the printing press - but the
German printing press (the 95 Theses
written in Latin for scholars, yeah they
were talking about it but nobody else
was until this sermon is published), and
then Luther becomes, just...well, he is the
best-selling author for the next 10-15 years
Not only did this happen by accident,
but Luther really is a kind of
genius. As soon as he realizes the power
of publishing and his own ability to
communicate - after all, by this time, 1518,
he'd been a parish pastor/preacher for
at least four or five years, he'd been a
professor, he knew how to use not only
the Latin language but also German -
and he just falls into this, and he
understands how to use this material. But
he also at the same time begins a
friendship with Lucas Cranach, Sr.
who lives in Wittenberg.
Clearly they eat together often, he's
invited over to Cranach's house; they
become really best friends in many ways.
And Cranach is this amazing artist, and he
begins then, first of all, to depict
Luther. One of his famous depictions is
of Luther as a monk in 1519 or so, 1520,
so you can see his tonsor - but over the
top of his head is a dove. And so you get
this idea of Luther being directly
inspired by the Holy Spirit. In the
same period of time as the fight
really becomes not over indulgences but
over papal authority and power, you begin
to see some very negative depictions of
the Pope. One that comes out that Philip
Melanchthon and Martin Luther provided
then the captions for is called "The
Passion of Christ and Antichrist." By this
time then the papacy in Rome is
understood as the Antichrist, and so you
have in one side by side woodcut Jesus
washing the feet of the of the disciples,
and then the Pope's foot being kissed by
a king, as the contrast between these two.
It's that kind of thing that allows
a visual depiction of these differences.
Another really great example of how then
visual art becomes part of the
developing Reformation comes much later
and I think it's done then by Cranach's
son, Lucas Cranach, Jr., and you have on
the one side Luther depicted in the
pulpit in Wittenberg preaching,
pointing to Christ like John the Baptist
("behold the lamb of God who takes away
the sin of the world") on half of the
woodcut, and on the other half of the
woodcut, you have this very plump
Dominican in the pulpit also preaching
but preaching indulgences, and you see a
parade of the indulgence cross with the
papal arms and so on. And on the one side
it's Christ who is showing his wounds to
the Father, that's where Luther is
preaching about the Lamb of God; on the
other side you have St. Francis showing
his wounds and the wrath of God coming
down upon the indulgence preachers.
I mean, that clearly is a later depiction
of how they understood what
Luther was doing in his preaching
and teaching: on the one side, preaching
the cross of Christ and the salvation
through the Lamb of God, and then this
false indulgence preaching on the other.
When I think of analogies between the
16th century, what happened in the
in the Reformation with the publishing
of and distribution of the 95 Theses
and the Sermon on Indulgences and
Grace in our own day, I think of one
positive example that is very
close to what happened in the 16th
century: the so-called Arab Spring, where
people are suddenly tweeting and
Facebooking and doing all of this stuff
that causes changes in government across
northern Africa. And nobody knew this
could happen, would happen - but suddenly
you have all of this kind of thing
happen just overnight. It's very similar
to this publication of this Sermon on
Indulgences and Grace. Nobody knew: Luther
didn't, the Pope didn't, the archbishop -
nobody knew that this was going to
happen, and suddenly you had
really the creation of a public, of
people that were interested in what was
going on and eager for the next thing to
roll off the printing presses. That kind
of sense. And that's very similar to what
we saw happen in that so-called Arab
Spring. What is very different even in
that Arab Spring but certainly in other
kinds of modern media matters, are the
fact that Luther always thought
collectively. He never thought
individualistically. This is one of the
mistaken ways that the Reformation is
understood, that it's kind of the
revolution of the individual against all
of these darkened powers of the dark
ages, you know, these church
ecclesiastical powers or other powers -
and so, you know, you have this
call to individuals. Luther - if somebody
had told him that's what the Reformation
was going to be, he would have probably
become apoplectic. I can only imagine,
given his harsh language that he
sometimes used, the kind of language he
would use to describe that. Luther never
thought that way; he never thought
Christianity was an individualistic
thing at all. It always took place in
community. One great example of this is
when Luther is writing a little tract
about prayer, and he describes his own
prayers. Now, he prayed alone, individually
in his study probably
morning and evening; but he
mentions, he says, "If I have time when I
want to pray, I go to the church where
there are other people." This is so
different from the way we imagine
prayer. We imagine, well, if I'm gonna pray,
I get into my closet and shut my door
and pray to the Father in secret. Luther
prayed that way, but he thought prayer
was far more effective to be in
community with other people. This had
been his whole life of prayer. He
understood the Psalms and the Lord's
Prayer to not simply be individualistic
things at all. In fact, he even makes the
comment, "We pray not my father in Heaven
but our Father in Heaven." And so the one
fundamental difference between our own
society and our own age, particularly
Western culture, is this notion of
individualism, as if our relationship to
God is simply a matter of what I
think or what I decide, and whether
I'm going to have this relationship - and
well and good if occasionally I show up
where there's some other people,
like-minded people, in a building
somewhere - Luther couldn't imagine that
kind of individualistic, individualizing
of Christianity. In fact, one of his
favorite verses, which we really didn't
notice until quite recently, one of his
favorite verses from the Bible is
Colossians 2:23 where Paul goes after
what Luther translated as self-chosen
spirituality: that sense that the self
chooses what spiritual, does its own
thing, you know, meditates on its own
apart from other people.
No, Luther couldn't imagine that kind of
a Christian life. Christian life is
lived in community; it's lived around the
the Lord's table as we participate
together as Christians
in the Lord's Supper,
in worship together
praying for one another.
Luther thought that was the greatest
thing about prayer in church, is that we're
not only just praying to God for our
own things, but that we looked around
and saw other people and prayed for them,
and we prayed in common. Having never
Tweeted, I don't know what a Tweet from
Martin Luther would look like very well!
Maybe one of those theses that I
mentioned, "The entire life of the
Christian is one of penitence." I think
one of the things that really threatens
Christianity today is the notion of a
before and after in Christianity. I think
it's what was threatening
the Christian faith in
Luther's day: that we kind of once were
sinners, and now we're done being sinners,
and now we can be saints. That is a
recipe for Pharisee-ism of the worst
kind, of hypocrisy, of boasting in your
own faith. St. Paul says over and over
again, let the one who boasts, boast
in the Lord. See, I think the problem
really comes with individualism, because
individualism is just a pretty word for
selfishness. I think that's where our
real problem lies today, and it
did in Luther's day in a way too - the
difference being that there it was the
self trying to find a way into God's
graces by one's own works, and so on, and
today we imagine that we can do the same -
you know, even if we don't believe in God
we can at least make everything better
here on Earth. It denies a basic problem
with the human being. Luther called it
that we are curved in upon ourselves.
That really we do all things, and
then if we work communally, then we
communally do things for ourselves so
that it becomes for our nation or for
this particular group of people or that
particular group of people. Individualism
as it's understood in our world today, I
think, is selling people a mess of
pottage to use that old biblical term.
It's selling people a bridge in Brooklyn.
Because finally we are not alone; we are
in this together; we cannot get away and
just have our own way: it's a myth
that we have created for ourselves. And
even the charge that, well, certain
freedoms for women, for example, or
minorities; the movement away from
slavery (although there still are people
that are enslaved in our own land) - all of
these things, we say, well, we've made
advances there. But I think, of all people to
quote, I think that Emerson was right:
that society advances as much in one
place as it recedes in another, rather
like the waves crashing on a beach.
And this means that we
may say, look at all the things that
we've accomplished; look at that things
are better for people - and then ask
ourselves the question, why was it then
that in the 20th century there were more
people who died in the name of autocracy and
in the name of all kinds of racial
theories and so on, than ever before. The
facts are that our notions of freedom
and individualism don't always help our
neighbor, and we're put on earth not to serve
ourselves but to actually serve our neighbor.
One of the problems we have with Martin
Luther is that often we say too many
good things about him and we make him
into this plaster saint, which has to be, I
mean, Luther could not have imagined a
worse thing. He loved to mention the fact
that he was a sinner, that he was mortal.
He rather sometimes, he reveled
too much in some of his sins, actually. He
even wrote to one of his colleagues in a
private letter, "sin boldly," because he
thought that this colleague was trying
too hard to pretend he wasn't a sinner, you
know, that kind of thing. No, Luther was
truly a human being: he enjoyed
this life as much as he realized his own
sin in this life. There are several
places where Luther said and did things
that later historians and theologians -
human beings - have held him accountable
for. As a Lutheran, I never have to worry
about making Luther into a saint: he was
a sinner, he said wrong things that I
don't agree with, that Lutheran
churches have actually rejected outright.
He said some things about the peasants
during the Peasants War of 1525 that
were clearly not very helpful,
encouraging the princes to stab,
smite, and slay them, as he put it. But
worse yet, he said some very
terrible things about the Jews. To be
sure, his own culture, the Christian
culture of this time: he wasn't saying
many things that were very different
from what others had said. But there was
a tinge of triumphalism in some of
those later things that he said. In 1523,
on the contrary, Martin Luther
wrote a tract called,
"That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew," that
got him into trouble because he said Jesus
Christ was born a Jew; and in there, he
chastised the church for having
persecuted Jews. He said, no wonder they
won't believe in Christ, because of the
way we've treated them, and therefore we
need to treat them much better. That
positive statement that he said,
however, is matched unfortunately by
some horrendous things that he said near
the end of his life. He published three
tracts in 1543 specifically aimed at
Jewish exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures
but also aimed at Jews. Luther had very
little contact with Jews, but what he
said was simply horrendous, because he
counseled the politicians, the princes of
his day, to burn down their synagogues, to
confiscate their books, and to drive them
out of the land. This horrific thing was
not taken as gospel truth by later
Lutherans, even by current Lutherans
at the time: several of them
objected to what he said, some
of them agreed. Luther
would be quoted both for and against
relationships to Jews in the later 16th
into the 17th century: his early tract
quoted by some people who were in favor
of giving the Jewish people more rights
in the Holy Roman Empire, and his
negative ones of course by those who
wanted to give them less rights. By the
19th century, those comments on the Jews
had been pretty much forgotten by the
church. Then along comes the propaganda
machine of the Nazis in the 1930s. They
accused the Lutheran Church of having
suppressed these ideas of Luther, and
they republish particularly "On the Jews
and Their Lies." And therein lies the
problem, because clearly the Nazis used
Luther's tract as an excuse for the
Holocaust, and that's where then later
Lutheran churches both in
Germany, the United States, and other places
have rejected completely Luther's
statements on the Jews as being not just
unhelpful but wrong - and in the wrong
hands, such as in the Nazis' hands, then
used for horrendous crimes. And for that,
we cannot justify what Luther said. Heiko
Oberman wrote this brilliant biography of
Luther called, "Luther: Man Between God and
the Devil." And when he gets to this
problem of Luther's reaction to the Jews,
what he says is, what you have here
is an example of Protestant triumphalism:
that Luther up until the 1540s has a
sense that he too is a sinner, but in
these tracts not only against the Jews
but against the Pope and against the
Turks and so on, and just a whole host of
people, it's as if he's kind of crossed
over to the other side; as if he can
judge all things. And in a sense, the
success of the Reformation and his
unique role in it has gone to his head.
And so he thinks now that he can
actually act as judge, jury and
executioner.
Perhaps he is disappointed that the
Jewish people upon hearing his gospel
don't then convert in large numbers;
perhaps that. But certainly there is a
sense that Luther in Luther's own mind -
himself a sinner -
he gets caught up in himself, and he
thinks now that he can just write these
hateful tracts filled with filthy
language and vituperations of the
worst kind - that he can write this kind
of thing, because in a sense he knows
God's mind. And that, of course, is a
fatal flaw for any Christian.
To understand how deeply enmeshed in
anti-Jewish thought the people of
Luther's day were, one need only go to
St. Mary's in Wittenberg and see on the
side a medieval pre-Luther depiction of
Jews sucking from the teat of a sow.
Nothing could be more defamatory than
that. And above it, talking about the
so-called Shem HaMephorash, this
this special name of God that had
magical powers, and making fun of
Jews. Luther would have walked by that
almost every day of his life on his way
to St. Mary's Church. That's this evil,
awful side of Christianity in the Middle
Ages, and also before and after that,
that treated Jews in such spectacularly evil
ways. But when one looks at that, one must also
look on the ground in front of that very
horrific thing where the people of
Wittenberg decided not to take that
awful thing away, but to use it now as a
reminder of just how hateful human
beings can be to one another. And so, in
the mosaic down below, there really is an
expression of the deep guilt and
sorrow that the people of Germany after
the Holocaust and the people of
Wittenberg in particular felt as a
result of the kind of anti-Jewish and
then finally anti-Semitic feelings and
actions that took place.
Luther and music is a very interesting
thing. Now, as a student he would have
learned music. One of the contributions
that Luther makes to Christianity is his
revitalization of music and singing.
There always had been singing in the
church, but Luther finds a way to use all
kinds of musical forms to get the
message of the gospel across. For
example, in some of his early musical
writings, he uses the ballad, which was of
course the Meistersingers which we've
even heard of in other settings where
they had - I mean, that was all good German
culture. And he uses then the ballad
form to bring his message across.
Also it's a time of transition in
music at the time, where you're going
from these modal forms of singing
which to our ears sound minor, although
they didn't to their ears, to major keys:
and so at least two of his songs -
actually more than that - but at least two
of his famous pieces are written in the
key of C, in C Major, including
"A Mighty Fortress" which at the
end just goes down the scale - it's
just going down a C scale, which was a
rather new thing to do. And it shows an
interesting side to Luther: his music
shows that both sides of this, "I'm both a
sinner and I'm righteous," therefore I'm
both sorry for my sin - always
contrite, always penitent - and at
the same time always joyful because of
Christ. So on the one side he writes a
paraphrase of Psalm 130, "Out of the
Depths I Cry to You O Lord: O Lord, hear
my prayer, from depths of woe" is that one,
in a very somber kind of piece, where he
goes through Psalm 130. A few years later,
he writes "A Mighty Fortress" as a kind of
paraphrase of Psalm 46, but done in this
very positive light as he's celebrating
the resurrection. I've often told pastors
they should use it as an Easter hymn,
because it's really talking about Christ
defeating death and sin in his death and
resurrection. And so you have really both
sides, and music becomes the means by
which Luther then gets his message
across, because people are singing his
ballads, his songs, in bars or inns: as one
of his opponent says, "Luther's songs are
on the lips of all the people!" So you
have that kind of method that he uses: he
uses images, he uses music, he uses print
media, uses all of these things to get
the message of the gospel across. He even
says music is, next to theology, the
greatest gift of God.
Some people ask me then, well what's the
95 Theses all about? What's
really at the heart and soul of it all?
And like Luther, I have to say a both/and:
it's two things at once. The
one thing is very clear:
Luther wants people to understand we
cannot buy our way around our sin, and
God's judgment on sin, on the one side;
and on the other side - it's
kind of like the other side of the coin -
we cannot possibly buy our way into
God's grace, but rather Christ has done
that for us on our behalf. Those two
things. The one, what the human condition
is all about; and the other, what it is
that God's heart is all about: namely,
that God's heart wants to save us, wants
to have a relationship with us, wants to
speak to us, wants us as God's children.
Those are the two things, I think, that
rest underneath all of the other
theses, is that sense of who we are and
who God is. And in our own day and age,
frankly, as we commemorate
500 years of the Reformation,
that still is the message that
needs, and that can be and is being,
proclaimed from Christian pulpits all
across Christianity. Both the weight of
sin, the mess we're in; the problem of
the human condition on the one side, and
then the grace and mercy of God on the
other in Jesus Christ. Those two together,
I think, still make up the heart of the
Christian message to which Luther was a
witness, to which you and
I are a witness today.