Or read a summary of the 95 theses. Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and ordinary lecturer therein at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. And the word "penance" neither can, nor may, be understood as referring to the Sacrament of Penance, that is, to confession and atonement as exercised under the priest's ministry.
Nevertheless He does not think of inward penance only: rather is inward penance worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh. Therefore mortification continues as long as hatred of oneself continues, that is to say, true inward penance lasts until entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Pope will not, and cannot, remit other punishments than those which he has imposed by his own decree or according to the canons. The Pope can forgive sins only in the sense, that he declares and confirms what may be forgiven of God; or that he doth it in those cases which he hath reserved to himself; be this contemned, the sin remains unremitted. God forgives none his sin without at the same time casting him penitent and humbled before the priest His vicar.
The canons concerning penance are imposed only on the living; they ought not by any means, following the same canons, to be imposed on the dying. Therefore, the Holy Spirit, acting in the Pope, does well for us, when the latter in his decrees entirely removes the article of death and extreme necessity.
Those priests act unreasonably and ill who reserve for Purgatory the penance imposed on the dying. This abuse of changing canonical penalty into the penalty of Purgatory seems to have arisen when the bishops were asleep. In times of yore, canonical penalties were imposed, not after, but before, absolution, as tests of true repentance and affliction.
The dying pay all penalties by their death, are already dead to the canons, and rightly have exemption from them. Imperfect spiritual health or love in the dying person necessarily brings with it great fear; and the less this love is, the greater the fear it brings.
This fear and horror - to say nothing of other things - are sufficient in themselves to produce the punishment of Purgatory, because they approximate to the horror of despair. Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven seem to differ as perfect despair, imperfect despair, and security of salvation differ.
It does not seem to be proved either by arguments or by the Holy Writ that they are outside the state of merit and demerit, or increase of love.
This, too, seems not to be proved, that they are all sure and confident of their salvation, though we may be quite sure of it. Therefore the Pope, in speaking of the perfect remission of all punishments, does not mean that all penalties in general be forgiven, but only those imposed by himself. Therefore, those preachers of indulgences err who say that, by the Pope's indulgence, a man may be exempt from all punishments, and be saved.
Yea, the Pope remits the souls in Purgatory no penalty which they, according to the canons, would have had to pay in this life. If to anybody complete remission of all penalties may be granted, it is certain that it is granted only to those most approaching perfection, that is, to very few. Therefore the multitude is misled by the boastful promise of the paid penalty, whereby no manner of distinction is made.
The same power that the Pope has over Purgatory, such has also every bishop in his diocese, and every curate in his parish. The Pope acts most rightly in granting remission to souls, not by the power of the keys - which in Purgatory he does not possess - but by way of intercession.
Luther spent his early years in relative anonymity as a monk and scholar. Although these ideas had been advanced before, Martin Luther codified them at a moment in history ripe for religious reformation.
His writings changed the course of religious and cultural history in the West. At age five, Luther began his education at a local school where he learned reading, writing and Latin. But Hans Luther had other plans for young Martin—he wanted him to become a lawyer—so he withdrew him from the school in Magdeburg and sent him to new school in Eisenach. Then, in , Luther enrolled at the University of Erfurt, the premiere university in Germany at the time.
In July of that year, Luther got caught in a violent thunderstorm, in which a bolt of lightning nearly struck him down. He considered the incident a sign from God and vowed to become a monk if he survived the storm.
The storm subsided, Luther emerged unscathed and, true to his promise, Luther turned his back on his study of the law days later on July 17, Instead, he entered an Augustinian monastery. Luther began to live the spartan and rigorous life of a monk but did not abandon his studies. Between and , Luther studied at the University of Erfurt and at a university in Wittenberg. In —, he took a break from his education to serve as a representative in Rome for the German Augustinian monasteries.
In , Luther received his doctorate and became a professor of biblical studies. In early 16th-century Europe, some theologians and scholars were beginning to question the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
It was also around this time that translations of original texts—namely, the Bible and the writings of the early church philosopher Augustine—became more widely available. Augustine — had emphasized the primacy of the Bible rather than Church officials as the ultimate religious authority. He also believed that humans could not reach salvation by their own acts, but that only God could bestow salvation by his divine grace.
It knows everything about us — our movements, our thoughts, our desires, our fears, our secrets, who our friends are, our financial status, even how well we sleep at night. We tell it things that we would not whisper to another human being. It shapes our politics, stokes our appetites, loosens our tongues, heightens our moral panics, keeps us entertained and therefore passive.
We engage with it times or more every day, and with every moment of contact we add to the unfathomable wealth of its priesthood. And we worship it because we are, somehow, mesmerised by it. In other words, we are all members of the Church of Technopoly , and what we worship is digital technology. Most of us are so happy in our obeisance to this new power that we spend an average of 50 minutes on our daily devotion to Facebook alone without a flicker of concern.
It makes us feel modern, connected, empowered, sophisticated and informed. Suppose, though, you were one of a minority who was becoming assailed by doubt — stumbling towards the conclusion that what you once thought of as liberating might actually be malign and dangerous.
But yet everywhere you look you see only happy-clappy believers. How would you go about convincing the world that it was in the grip of a power that was deeply hypocritical and corrupt? Especially when that power apparently offers salvation and self-realisation for those who worship at its sites? It would be a tough assignment. But take heart: there once was a man who had similar doubts about the dominant power of his time. His name was Martin Luther and years ago on Tuesday he pinned a long screed on to the church door in Wittenberg, which was then a small and relatively obscure town in Saxony.
This rebellious stunt by an obscure monk must have seemed at the time like a flea bite on an elephant. But it was the event that triggered a revolution in religious belief, undermined the authority of the Roman church, unleashed ferocious wars in Europe and shaped the world in which most of us at least in the west grew up. Some flea bite. In posting his theses Luther was conforming to an established tradition of scholastic discourse.
In those days, challenging either would not have been a good career move for an Augustinian monk. Challenging both was suicidal. To understand the significance of this, some theological background helps. A central part of Catholic theology revolved around sin and the consequences thereof. Sins were divided into three grades — original, venial and mortal. The second category consisted of peccadillos. The third — mortal — were grievous sins. 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.
Luther very consciously sought a fresh, vigorous idiom. 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 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. Michael Knoche. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear.
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 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. She was the one who proposed. One crucial factor was her skill in household management. One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on.
It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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 , 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. One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies. 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. We will both probably let go of each other soon. And then you want to congratulate him on the sheer zest, the proto-surrealist nuttiness, of his metaphor. The group on which Luther expended his most notorious denunciations was not the Roman Catholic clergy but the Jews. His sentiments were widely shared. 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.
It is the fact that the country of which he is a national hero did indeed, quite recently, exterminate six million Jews. As scholars have been able to show, Luther was gentler early on because he was hoping to persuade the Jews to convert.
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