Historical commentary on Martin Luther and indulgences

spiritually mordant Jews in Rome. His message was among the simplest and most compact and personal possible: The transmission of faith requires nothing more and nothing less than faith itself. Romans teaches us that believing in God, which is faith, is enough for access to all the riches of heaven: God’s righteousness, an afterlife, forgiveness. By Luther’s age, however, access to those riches was not so simple. Among other things, spiritual control had become a source of lucre for the church. The glory of the Catholic Church, her magnificent cathedrals and clothes, and her insidious habits of selling passes to heaven in the form of indulgences - this was a deployment of faith and power marked by a venality that grated against Luther’s from-faith-to-faith sensibility. When he saw his own congregation increasingly slipping away to churches with priests who would do what he would not, which was to market and sell indulgences, he saw a rank, strange hypocrisy: The Church as an economic instrument. His rage boiled over in the summer of 1517, and he summarized his case against the Church in the 95 Theses that he nailed to the door of his local church on October 31s". Papa non vult nec potest ullas penas remittere preter eas, quas arbitrio vel suo vel canonum imposuit, he wrote in Thesis Five: No matter what you might pay him, the Pope can’t influence what happens to you after you die. Or, Thesis 78, Euangelici rhetia sunt, quibus olim piscabantur viros divitiarum. Indulgences are nets with which one fishes for the riches of men. As much as Luther was crying for a restoration of Saint Paul’s sense of a personal faith, he was also starting a difficult and - for the Church - unpleasant argument about power. Our relation to God, Luther meant, is our relation. It’s not something to be brokered or sold or negotiated. It does not require fancy clothes or cathedrals or hierarchies. For Luther, this new logic had engendered a profound spiritual crisis. He recalled, later in life, the very first time he’d encountered the possibility of direct access to God, in the pages of Saint Augustine, probably around 1508. “When I came to the words ‘thee, most merciful father,” he wrote, “the thought that I had to speak to God without a mediator almost made me flee.”?! Who was he, Martin Luther, to speak directly to God? But from then on, Luther’s experience of God, his own sense of power honestly passing from faith to faith - and not from faith to church to faith - embodied an extremely heretical idea about power: faith without a middleman. Such a concept undid much of what had been taken as inarguable doctrine. The Church immediately understood the danger. They rushed to label Luther as heretical and, later, crazy. In arguing that the Catholic Church, with all of its magnificent trappings of faith, was really a useless toll gate, Luther was picking at a still larger, more significant question: How should power be split? If Luther was right, and God should be accessible directly to each of us, then some other questions tumbled after that one. Should we have direct access to political power? To ideas? To money and land and control of our own economic destiny? Could “from faith to faith,” be recast as “from idea to idea” or “truth to truth” or - and this turned out to be the really 91 “When I came to the words”: Preserved Smith, The Life and Letters of Martin Luther, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911) Introduction 67 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018299