From the Indulgence Chest to the Burning Bull: Luther, Romans 3 and the Break with Rome

In 1517 the church of western Europe was one body under the pope at Rome. Its Mass, its monasteries and its courts reached every village, and its bishops were also princes. The Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork of several hundred territories, had an emperor and seven electors, three of them archbishops: Mainz, Trier and Cologne.

The wider world was shifting. Constantinople had fallen to the Ottomans in 1453. In 1517 Sultan Selim I took Cairo and ended the Mamluk sultanate, and Ottoman armies were moving up the Danube. Portuguese ships had reached India in 1498 and Goa in 1510, and a Portuguese embassy reached the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia in 1520. Western Christendom was anxious about the Turks and only beginning to learn how large the world was.

Piety in Germany had turned heavily toward the fate of the dead. Believers paid for masses for souls in purgatory, went on pilgrimage and venerated relics. Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony kept many thousands of relics in the Castle Church at Wittenberg, his university town. Calls for reform were old: Jan Hus in Bohemia had been burned at the Council of Constance in 1415. In 1516 Erasmus of Rotterdam published the first printed Greek New Testament. Printing with movable type, in use at Mainz since about 1450, let an argument cross the empire in weeks.

The immediate cause was money. Catholic teaching held that when a sin was forgiven, a debt of temporal punishment might remain, to be paid by penance in this life or in purgatory. An indulgence was the church's remission of that debt, drawn from the 'treasury of merits' of Christ and the saints. In principle it required contrition and confession. By 1500 it was issued as a printed letter, often for a payment, and since the 1470s popes had said it could help the dead. In 1506 Pope Julius II began rebuilding Saint Peter's in Rome, and in 1515 Pope Leo X renewed an indulgence to fund it. Albert of Brandenburg, in his early twenties, already held the sees of Magdeburg and Halberstadt; in 1514 he was also elected archbishop of Mainz. Holding several sees needed a papal dispensation, and Rome set a high fee. Albert borrowed from the Fugger bank of Augsburg, and the pope let him preach the Saint Peter's indulgence in his lands, with the proceeds shared between Rome and the repayment of the loan. The Dominican friar Johann Tetzel was one of its preachers.

The first question was how to read a phrase in Paul. Romans 1:17 says the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel, and quotes Habakkuk 2:4: the righteous shall live by faith. The Latin Bible of the western church, the Vulgate, rendered the phrase iustitia Dei, and Luther was taught to take it as God's own justice, the standard by which he judges sinners. Augustine, in On the Spirit and the Letter (412), had read it as the righteousness God gives, and Luther found this reading a release. Romans 3:21-22 says the righteousness of God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, and 3:24 that believers are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus. The Latin verb iustificare could mean 'to make righteous'. Luther and Melanchthon stressed 'to declare righteous', a verdict given on the ground of Christ; Catholic theologians kept the sense of being made righteous as well. In his German New Testament of 1522 Luther added the word 'alone' to Romans 3:28. He defended it as the sense of Paul's argument; critics said it was not in the Greek.

The second question was a word in Matthew 4:17. The Vulgate had Jesus say 'do penance', which supported the church's system of confession, satisfaction and indulgence. Erasmus's Greek text and notes of 1516 showed that the Greek word means a change of mind. Luther's first thesis rests on that: when Jesus said 'Repent', he meant the whole life of believers to be repentance.

The third question was who decides what Scripture means. At Leipzig, Eck argued that Scripture is read inside the church, whose councils and popes interpret it, and appealed to texts such as Matthew 16:18-19 and John 20:23. Luther answered that popes and councils can err and that Scripture is the final court; he added that the Greek church had lived for centuries without papal supremacy. Catholic readers also cited James 2:24, that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone, and 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 as a text about purification after death. Both quoted the Bible, and the test between them is the text.

Martin Luther was born at Eisleben on 10 November 1483. His father Hans was a miner who rose to part-own copper smelters and wanted his son to be a lawyer. Luther took his master's degree at Erfurt in 1505 and began law. On 2 July 1505, returning to Erfurt, he was caught in a thunderstorm near Stotternheim, cried out to Saint Anne, the patron saint of miners, and promised to become a monk. Two weeks later he entered the Augustinian friary at Erfurt, and was ordained in 1507. His superior, Johann von Staupitz, sent him to Wittenberg, where in 1512 he received his doctorate and the chair of Bible.

The German word for what he suffered in the cloister is Anfechtung, a spiritual assault of doubt and terror. He fasted, prayed and confessed for hours and still could not feel that he loved God enough to be forgiven. He later said he hated the phrase 'the righteousness of God'. Staupitz urged him to look to Christ, not to his sins. The turning point came while he studied Romans, in a room in the monastery tower, as he told it in a preface written in 1545, some thirty years afterward. He wrote that he came to see God's righteousness as the one by which the righteous live as God's gift, through faith. Historians call this the tower experience (Turmerlebnis) and disagree on its date. Some place it about 1513 or 1514, some in 1518 or 1519, and some think it was gradual. The only account is Luther's own, written late. All agree that by 1519 he taught that sinners are made right with God by faith in Christ.

The indulgence preaching reached him in the confessional. Frederick had forbidden Tetzel to enter electoral Saxony, but townspeople of Wittenberg crossed the border and came back with letters of indulgence, and some thought the letters made repentance unnecessary. Critics said Tetzel's preaching implied money alone could free a soul from purgatory; Catholic historians note that the official instruction required contrition and confession for the living, and debate how far Tetzel went. On 31 October 1517 Luther wrote to Archbishop Albert, enclosed a list of theses and called for a university debate on 'the power and efficacy of indulgences'. The list is in Latin, written for scholars, and many items are questions or proposals. It does not reject indulgences or purgatory outright. Thesis 5 says the pope can remit only penalties he has imposed himself. Thesis 27 reports the claim that a soul flies out of purgatory when the coin rings in the chest, and calls it a human invention. Thesis 62 says the true treasure of the church is the gospel.

Tradition says Luther nailed the Theses to the door of the Castle Church that day. The earliest account is by Philip Melanchthon, who reached Wittenberg in 1518 and wrote after Luther's death. Luther never mentions it. In 1961 the Catholic historian Erwin Iserloh argued the posting did not happen; others defend it, since the church door served as the university notice-board. A note by Luther's secretary Georg Rörer, found in 2006, supports posting, though it was written years later. What is certain is the letter to Albert and the printing. Within weeks the Latin text was reprinted in Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel and soon appeared in German. His German Sermon on Indulgences and Grace (1518), for lay readers, was reprinted many times. Albert sent the Theses to Rome, and in November 1518 Leo X restated the church's teaching on indulgences.

In April 1518 Luther set out at Heidelberg what he called a theology of the cross: God is found in the cross and in weakness, not in human achievement. In October he was examined at Augsburg, during the emperor's diet, by the papal legate Cardinal Cajetan, who demanded a retraction. Cajetan objected especially to Luther's claim that a person must believe himself forgiven when he receives a sacrament. Luther would not recant unless shown from Scripture to be wrong, and left Augsburg secretly. In June and July 1519 he and his colleague Andreas Karlstadt debated Johann Eck at Leipzig. Eck pressed him until Luther said some of Hus's teachings were Christian and that councils, Constance among them, had erred.

In 1520 Luther wrote three works that carried his message into public life. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (August) argued that all baptized believers are priests (1 Peter 2:9) and that the pope had built three walls around the church that should come down. On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (October), in Latin, argued that the church held the sacraments captive; he kept baptism and the Lord's Supper and opposed withholding the cup from the laity. On the Freedom of a Christian (November), with a letter to Leo X, described a believer as free from the law through faith and bound to serve the neighbour in love.

Leo X's bull Exsurge Domine, dated 15 June 1520, takes its opening words from Psalm 74:22 ('Arise, O Lord') and says a wild boar has invaded the Lord's vineyard (Psalm 80:13). It condemned 41 statements from Luther's books, including, in proposition 34, his remark that making war on the Turks was resisting God. Eck and the legate Aleander brought the bull to Germany, with sixty days for Luther to submit. On 10 December 1520 Luther and his students burned a copy, together with books of canon law, outside Wittenberg's Elster Gate. On 3 January 1521 the pope excommunicated him by the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem. The Diet of Worms follows in the next class.

The same man wrote against the Jews. In 1523, in That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, Luther rebuked Christians for their cruelty to Jews and hoped to win them. In his last years he changed. In Against the Sabbatarians (1538) and On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) he called for synagogues and homes to be burned, prayer books taken and Jews expelled or put to forced labour. The views belonged to a long Christian hostility toward Jews, but the words were his own. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, Bishop Martin Sasse of Thuringia published extracts of them. Lutheran bodies have since repudiated them. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did so in a declaration to the Jewish community in 1994, and the Lutheran World Federation and Lutheran churches in Germany have made similar statements.

The first matter at stake was repentance and the cost of forgiveness. The church taught that Christ's death won forgiveness of guilt, and that penitents still owed temporal penalties, which indulgences could reduce. Luther's Theses answered that repentance is a lifelong turning (Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:15), that the pope cannot empty purgatory by the power of the keys (thesis 5), and that the gospel of the grace of God is the church's treasure (thesis 62). He appealed to the completeness of Christ's offering (Hebrews 10:14) and the cleansing of all sin by his blood (1 John 1:7). The church's defenders appealed to the power to bind and loose (Matthew 16:19; 18:18; John 20:23).

The second matter was justification. Paul's argument in Romans 3:21-28 is that no one is justified by works of the law, because all have sinned, but that God's righteousness is given freely through the redemption in Christ and received by faith. Luther joined this to Galatians 2:16 and Ephesians 2:8-9. His opponents did not teach that people earn salvation alone, but that faith works through love (Galatians 5:6), and they read James 2:24 as making works part of justification. The Council of Trent set out the Catholic position in 1547. In 1999 the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed a Joint Declaration stating a shared understanding of justification by grace through faith in Christ, and that the remaining differences do not bring the old condemnations against the other side.

The third matter was authority and ministry. In 1520 Luther argued from 1 Peter 2:9 that every baptized believer is a priest, from 1 Timothy 2:5 that there is one mediator between God and humanity, and from Matthew 26:27 against withholding the cup from the laity. Catholic and Orthodox theologians replied that the church's ordained ministry and councils are part of how Christ governs his people, and that Scripture itself was received within the church (compare 1 Timothy 3:15). This disagreement about authority still divides the traditions.

Luther's protest began with Christ's own word. The first thesis cites Jesus's call to repent. In On the Freedom of a Christian he described faith as uniting the soul to Christ as a bride to her husband, so that Christ takes the believer's sin and gives his righteousness in exchange. At Heidelberg he said God is known in the cross. Behind this lay a personal fear: he wrote that he had thought of Christ chiefly as a stern judge, a figure familiar from medieval church art.

The church's defenders did not deny Christ. The treasury of merits assumed that every indulgence drew on his merits, and Catholic theology held that his satisfaction was sufficient and was applied to people through the church and its sacraments. The question was how his finished work reaches a particular person: by faith alone, as Luther said, or by faith working through the sacramental life of the church. Orthodox tradition confesses the same Christ as the healer who unites humanity to God, and speaks less of satisfaction and merit.

The record has to be honest about the cost. Selling indulgences to build a church made forgiveness look like a purchase, and the poor paid first. Luther's rhetoric in later decades was often violent, and his writings against the Jews cannot be reconciled with the Messiah who was himself a Jew and prayed for those who killed him (Luke 23:34). Christ was confessed on every side of this story, and in practice denied on every side.