The 95 Theses

The intensity of Martin Luther’s search for peace naturally made the doctrine of justification by faith especially important to him. Nevertheless, he might never have challenged the church on the matter if not for one thing—indulgences.

In the early years of the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church was beginning work on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In a complicated arrangement to help finance the construction, Pope Leo X authorized the sale of indulgences in parts of Germany. An indulgence was a withdrawal by the church from the “treasury of merit,” the theoretical storehouse of the surplus merit of the apostles and saints, to be applied to the account of another, giving him or her sufficient merit to enter heaven either from earth or from purgatory. Delegates went out among the people to announce that any donations toward the work on St. Peter’s would bring an indulgence. One of the vendors, Johann Tetzel, was particularly unscrupulous. He played on peasants’ concerns for their dead relatives who might be suffering the trials of purgatory, and he assured them that they could send their loved ones on to heaven by giving liberally. Tetzel would say, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

Luther already had become concerned about the practice of indulgences, and had begun to speak out about his doubts. But the sale of indulgences to finance St. Peter’s and the gross abuses of Tetzel drove him to take more decisive action. On October 31, 1517, he nailed 95 “theses” to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. By doing so, he was inviting debate among the faculty of the university. His theses, or statements of his opinion, questioned, among other things, the doctrine of the treasury of merit and the pope’s power to grant remission for sins. Clearly Luther’s new understanding of justification was influencing his view of church teachings.

Even then, however, Luther’s complaints and concerns might not have created more than a local stir had not his students translated the 95 theses from Latin to German, printed them, and distributed them around the nation. Because they did so, Luther’s protests became a national issue and came to the attention of powerful men in the church hierarchy.