what were luther's 95 theses mainly about

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This Day In History : October 31

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Martin Luther posts 95 theses

On October 31, 1517, legend has it that the priest and scholar Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation .

In his theses, Luther condemned the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the papal practice of asking payment—called “indulgences”—for the forgiveness of sins. At the time, a Dominican priest named Johann Tetzel, commissioned by the Archbishop of Mainz and Pope Leo X, was in the midst of a major fundraising campaign in Germany to finance the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Though Prince Frederick III the Wise had banned the sale of indulgences in Wittenberg, many church members traveled to purchase them. When they returned, they showed the pardons they had bought to Luther, claiming they no longer had to repent for their sins.

Luther’s frustration with this practice led him to write the 95 Theses, which were quickly snapped up, translated from Latin into German and distributed widely. A copy made its way to Rome, and efforts began to convince Luther to change his tune. He refused to keep silent, however, and in 1521 Pope Leo X formally excommunicated Luther from the Catholic Church. That same year, Luther again refused to recant his writings before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Germany, who issued the famous Edict of Worms declaring Luther an outlaw and a heretic and giving permission for anyone to kill him without consequence. Protected by Prince Frederick, Luther began working on a German translation of the Bible, a task that took 10 years to complete.

The term “Protestant” first appeared in 1529, when Charles V revoked a provision that allowed the ruler of each German state to choose whether they would enforce the Edict of Worms. A number of princes and other supporters of Luther issued a protest, declaring that their allegiance to God trumped their allegiance to the emperor. They became known to their opponents as Protestants; gradually this name came to apply to all who believed the Church should be reformed, even those outside Germany. By the time Luther died, of natural causes, in 1546, his revolutionary beliefs had formed the basis for the Protestant Reformation, which would over the next three centuries revolutionize Western civilization.

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What was the significance of the 95 theses.

What were the 95 Theses?

According to historic legend, Martin Luther posted a document on the door of the Wittenberg Church on the 31 st October 1517; a document later referred to as the 95 Theses. This document was questioning rather than accusatory, seeking to inform the Archbishop of Mainz that the selling of indulgences had become corrupt, with the sellers seeking solely to line their own pockets. It questioned the idea that the indulgences trade perpetuated – that buying a trinket could shave time off the stay of one’s loved ones in purgatory, sending them to a glorious Heaven.

It is important, however, to recognise that this was not the action of a man wanting to break away from the Catholic Church. When writing the 95 Theses, Luther simply intended to bring reform to the centre of the agenda for the Church Council once again; it cannot be stressed enough that he wanted to reform, rather than abandon, the Church.

Nonetheless, the 95 Theses were undoubtedly provocative, leading to debates across the German Lands about what it meant to be a true Christian, with some historians considering the document to be the start of the lengthy process of the Reformation. But why did Luther write them?

Why did Luther write the 95 Theses?

In particular, Luther was horrified by the fact that a large portion of the profits from this trade were being used to renovate St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. His outrage at this is evident from the 86 th thesis: ‘Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St Peter with the money of the poor rather than with his own money?’ Perhaps this is indicative of Luther’s opinion as opposing the financial extortion indulgences pressed upon the poor, rather than the theology which lay behind the process of freeing one’s loved ones from purgatory.

It is interesting to note that Luther also sent a copy of his 95 Theses directly to Archbishop Albrecht von Brandenburg. It appears that he legitimately believed that the Archbishop was not aware of the corruption inherent in the indulgence trade led by Tetzel. This is something which can be considered important later on, for it indicates that Luther did not consider the Church hierarchy redundant at this point.

Why were the 95 Theses significant?

Though the document itself has a debateable significance, the events which occurred because of its publication were paramount in Luther’s ideological and religious development. Almost immediately there was outrage at the ‘heresy’ which the Church viewed as implicit within the document. Despite the pressure upon Luther to immediately recant his position, he did not. This in part led to the Leipzig debate in summer 1519 with Johann Eck.

This debate forced Luther to clarify some of his theories and doctrinal stances against the representative of the Catholic Church. The debate focused largely on doctrine; in fact, the debate regarding indulgences was only briefly mentioned in the discussions between the two men. This seems surprising; Luther’s primary purpose in writing the 95 Theses was to protest the selling of indulgences. Why was this therefore not the primary purpose of the debate?

Ultimately the debate served to further Luther’s development of doctrine which opposed the traditional view of the Catholic Church. In the debate he was forced to conclude that Church Councils had the potential to be erroneous in their judgements. This therefore threw into dispute the papal hierarchy’s authority, and set him on his path towards evangelicalism and the formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Yet it is important to bear in mind that, had the pope offered a reconciliation, Luther would have returned to the doctrine of the established Church.

An interesting point to consider about the aftermath of the 95 Theses is the attitude of the Catholic Church. It immediately sought to identify Luther as someone who had strayed from the true way and was therefore a heretic; it refused to recognise that Luther had valid complaints which were shared by many across Western Christendom. The 95 Theses could have been taken at face value and used as an avenue to reform, as Luther intended. Instead, the papal hierarchy sought to discredit Luther, and keep to the status quo.

What made the 95 Theses significant?

A document written in Latin and posted on a door like most other academic debates, it does not seem obvious when considering the 95 Theses alone to see just how they became as significant as they did.

The translation of the Latin text into German also helped make the document significant. Translated in early 1518 by reformist friends of Luther, this widened the debate’s appeal simply because it made the subject matter accessible to a greater number of people. ‘Common’ folk who could read would have been able to read in German, rather than Latin. This therefore meant that they would be able to read the article for themselves and realise just how many of the arguments they identified with (or did not identify with, for that matter). The translation also meant that these literate folk could read the Theses aloud to a large audience; Bob Scribner argued that we should not forget the oral nature of the Reformation, beginning with one of the most divisive documents in history.

Finally, the 95 Theses can be considered significant because they were expressing sentiments that many ordinary folk felt themselves at the time. There had been a disillusionment with the Church and corruption within it for a great deal of time; the Reformatio Sigismundi  of 1439 is a prime early example of a series of lists detailing the concerns of the people about the state of the Church. By the time of the Imperial Diet of Worms in 1521, there were 102 grievances with the Church, something overshadowed due to Martin Luther’s presence at this Diet. Many of the issues Luther highlighted were shared among the populace; it was due to the contextual factors of the printing press and the use of the German language that made this expression so significant.

It would not be surprising if, when posting his 95 Theses on the door of the chapel on the 31 st October 1517, Luther did not expect a great deal to change. At the time, he did not know what such an act would lead to. The events which occurred due to the Theses led to Luther clarifying his doctrinal position in a manner which led to his eventual repudiation of the decadence and corruption within the Catholic Church and his excommunication.

Yet we must remember that whilst the 95 Theses can be considered to constitute an extraordinary shift in the mentality of a disillusioned Christian, they are very unlikely to have achieved the same significance without the printing press. If the 95 Theses had been posted on the 31 st October 1417 , would the result have been the same?

Written by Victoria Bettney

Bibliography

Dixon, Scott C. The Reformation in Germany . Oxford  : Blackwell, 2002.

Dixon, Scott C ed. The German Reformation: The Essential Readings . Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

Lau, Franz and Bizer, Ernst. A History of the Reformation in Germany To 1555 . Translated by Brian Hardy. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1969.

Lindberg, Carter. The European Reformations . Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

McGrath, Alister. Christian Theology: An Introduction . Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

McGrath, Alister. Reformation Thought: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998.

Scribner, Robert. ‘Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas,’ History of European Ideas 5, no. 3 (1984): 237-256.

“The 95 Theses,” http://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html , accessed 29.10.15

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Post navigation, 3 thoughts on “ what was the significance of the 95 theses ”.

Interesting article! You rightly argue that the Theses were not the finished product but just a step in Luther’s theological development. That makes you think; should we really be celebrating 31 October 2017 as the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, or should we be remembering a different date?

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hit the griddy

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Luther’s Ninety-five Theses: What You May Not Know and Why They Matter Today

More By Justin Holcomb

For more accessible overviews of key moments in church history, purchase Justin Holcomb’s new book, Know the Creeds and Councils (Zondervan, 2014) [ interview ]. Additionally, Holcomb has made available to TGC readers an exclusive bonus chapter, which can be accessed here . This article is a shortened version of the chapter.

If people know only one thing about the Protestant Reformation, it is the famous event on October 31, 1517, when the Ninety-five Theses of Martin Luther (1483–1586) were nailed on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg in protest against the Roman Catholic Church. Within a few years of this event, the church had splintered into not just the “church’s camp” or “Luther’s camp” but also the camps of churches led by theologians of all different stripes.

Luther is known mostly for his teachings about Scripture and justification. Regarding Scripture, he argued the Bible alone ( sola scriptura ) is our ultimate authority for faith and practice. Regarding justification, he taught we are saved solely through faith in Jesus Christ because of God’s grace and Christ’s merit. We are neither saved by our merits nor declared righteous by our good works. Additionally, we need to fully trust in God to save us from our sins, rather than relying partly on our own self-improvement.

Forgiveness with a Price Tag

These teachings were radical departures from the Catholic orthodoxy of Luther’s day. But you might be surprised to learn that the Ninety-five Theses, even though this document that sparked the Reformation, was not about these issues. Instead, Luther objected to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church was offering to sell certificates of forgiveness, and that by doing so it was substituting a false hope (that forgiveness can be earned or purchased) for the true hope of the gospel (that we receive forgiveness solely via the riches of God’s grace).

The Roman Catholic Church claimed it had been placed in charge of a “treasury of merits” of all of the good deeds that saints had done (not to mention the deeds of Christ, who made the treasury infinitely deep). For those trapped by their own sinfulness, the church could write a certificate transferring to the sinner some of the merits of the saints. The catch? These “indulgences” had a price tag.

This much needs to be understood to make sense of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses: the selling of indulgences for full remission of sins intersected perfectly with the long, intense struggle Luther himself had experienced over the issues of salvation and assurance. At this point of collision between one man’s gospel hope and the church’s denial of that hope the Ninety-five Theses can be properly understood.

Theses Themselves

Luther’s Ninety-five Theses focuses on three main issues: selling forgiveness (via indulgences) to build a cathedral, the pope’s claimed power to distribute forgiveness, and the damage indulgences caused to grieving sinners. That his concern was pastoral (rather than trying to push a private agenda) is apparent from the document. He didn’t believe (at this point) that indulgences were altogether a bad idea; he just believed they were misleading Christians regarding their spiritual state:

41. Papal indulgences must be preached with caution, lest people erroneously think that they are preferable to other good works of love.

As well as their duty to others:

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.

44. Because love grows by works of love, man thereby becomes better. Man does not, however, become better by means of indulgences but is merely freed from penalties. [Notice that Luther is not yet wholly against the theology of indulgences.]

And even financial well-being:

46. Christians are to be taught that, unless they have more than they need, they must reserve enough for their family needs and by no means squander it on indulgences.

Luther’s attitude toward the pope is also surprisingly ambivalent. In later years he called the pope “the Antichrist” and burned his writings, but here his tone is merely cautionary, hoping the pope will come to his senses. For instance, in this passage he appears to be defending the pope against detractors, albeit in a backhanded way:

51. Christians are to be taught that the pope would and should wish to give of his own money, even though he had to sell the basilica of St. Peter, to many of those from whom certain hawkers of indulgences cajole money.

Obviously, since Leo X had begun the indulgences campaign in order to build the basilica, he did not “wish to give of his own money” to victims. However, Luther phrased his criticism to suggest that the pope might be ignorant of the abuses and at any rate should be given the benefit of the doubt. It provided Leo a graceful exit from the indulgences campaign if he wished to take it.

So what made this document so controversial? Luther’s Ninety-five Theses hit a nerve in the depths of the authority structure of the medieval church. Luther was calling the pope and those in power to repent—on no authority but the convictions he’d gained from Scripture—and urged the leaders of the indulgences movement to direct their gaze to Christ, the only one able to pay the penalty due for sin.

Of all the portions of the document, Luther’s closing is perhaps the most memorable for its exhortation to look to Christ rather than to the church’s power:

92. Away, then, with those prophets who say to Christ’s people, “Peace, peace,” where in there is no peace.

93. Hail, hail to all those prophets who say to Christ’s people, “The cross, the cross,” where there is no cross.

94. Christians should be exhorted to be zealous to follow Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hells.

95. And let them thus be more confident of entering heaven through many tribulations rather than through a false assurance of peace.

In the years following his initial posting of the theses, Luther became emboldened in his resolve and strengthened his arguments with Scripture. At the same time, the church became more and more uncomfortable with the radical Luther and, in the following decades, the spark that he made grew into a flame of reformation that spread across Europe. Luther was ordered by the church to recant in 1520 and was eventually exiled in 1521.

Ongoing Relevance

Although the Ninety-five Theses doesn’t explicitly lay out a Protestant theology or agenda, it contains the seeds of the most important beliefs of the movement, especially the priority of grasping and applying the gospel. Luther developed his critique of the Roman Catholic Church out of his struggle with doubt and guilt as well as his pastoral concern for his parishioners. He longed for the hope and security that only the good news can bring, and he was frustrated with the structures that were using Christ to take advantage of people and prevent them from saving union with God. Further, Luther’s focus on the teaching of Scripture is significant, since it provided the foundation on which the great doctrines of the Reformation found their origin.

Indeed, Luther developed a robust notion of justification by faith and rejected the notion of purgatory as unbiblical; he argued that indulgences and even hierarchical penance cannot lead to salvation; and, perhaps most notably, he rebelled against the authority of the pope. All of these critiques were driven by Luther’s commitment, above all else, to Christ and the Scriptures that testify about him. The outspoken courage Luther demonstrated in writing and publishing the Ninety-five Theses also spread to other influential leaders of the young Protestant Reformation.

Today, the Ninety-five Theses may stand as the most well-known document from the Reformation era. Luther’s courage and his willingness to confront what he deemed to be clear error is just as important today as it was then. One of the greatest ways in which Luther’s theses affect us today—in addition to the wonderful inheritance of the five Reformation solas (Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, glory to God alone)—is that it calls us to thoroughly examine the inherited practices of the church against the standard set forth in the Scriptures. Luther saw an abuse, was not afraid to address it, and was exiled as a result of his faithfulness to the Bible in the midst of harsh opposition.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

Justin Holcomb is an Episcopal priest and a theology professor at Reformed Theological Seminary and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is author with his wife, Lindsey, of God Made All of Me , Is It My Fault? , and Rid of My Disgrace: Hope and Healing for Victims of Sexual Assault . Justin also has written or edited numerous other books on historical theology and biblical studies. You can find him on Facebook , Twitter , and at JustinHolcomb.com .

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Davenant Institute

Introduction to Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses

Josiah Roberts

This article appeared in Ad Fontes Vol II, Issue 2. Excerpted from Davenant’s forthcoming Reformation Theology volume.

Few documents in Christian history have become as iconic as Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses , the ringing denunciation of the corruptions of the late medieval church that was to spark the Protestant Reformation. Luther may or may not have posted them on the church door in Wittenberg (he almost certainly did not nail them, in any case, as later legend would have it), but his dissemination of them on October 31, 1517 marked a turning point not only in Luther’s life but in the life of the whole Christian church.

The document itself, however, is an unlikely candidate for the role of revolutionary text or Protestant manifesto: composed chiefly for an academic disputation on a practice now long-forgotten and scarce understood, the theses are a bit bewildering to the modern reader looking for familiar Reformation slogans. Indeed, neither of Luther’s two great principles—justification by faith alone and the authority of Scripture alone—are to be found in these pages, even though the former had already begun to influence Luther’s thinking and underlies several of his concerns in the Theses .

Judged by the standard of Luther’s later work (even his writings from two or three years later), the Theses are fairly conservative, and Luther hardly expected them to unleash a full-scale reconception of Christian theology and division of the church. Luther here is not so much interested in overthrowing the whole penitential system of the Catholic Church as he is in purifying it from obvious abuses, and he continues to accept many of the Pope’s claims of authority. Indeed, in Theses 80-90 he says that one of his chief concerns is to defend the honor of the Pope against the easy attacks to which the careless teaching of the indulgence preachers had exposed him.

On the other hand, it is easy to downplay too much the significance of the Theses . Luther was not, after all, just a random and inconsequential monk, as the Pope and his advisors were to try and dismiss him; he was at this time one of the highest-ranking leaders of the Augustinian Order in Germany and an increasingly renowned professor at one of its leading universities. Moreover, Luther did not compose the Theses on a whim; he had been long wrestling over the indulgences issue and was well aware that by attacking the practice, he would likely be earning himself some very powerful enemies. Finally, although theses were normally composed for academic disputations only, Luther seems to have intended these at the outset for a wider audience. As scholar Timothy J. Wengert notes, the Theses are full of rhetorical flourishes that suggest Luther wanted to reach and persuade many educated readers, and very unusually for such theses, Luther from the first invited scholars from around Germany to respond to the theses in writing. Indeed, there does not ever seem to have been an academic disputation in Wittenberg as would normally have followed the proposal of such theses. Most striking of all, Luther took the extraordinary step of sending the Theses to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, the leading church authority in Germany, and exhorting him in no uncertain terms to restrain the indulgence preachers.

So who were these indulgence preachers and why was Luther so upset about them? The answer sheds light both on the astonishing depth of the corruption in the late medieval church and on the often misunderstood heart of Luther’s protest against it.

The theology and practice of indulgences had been around for centuries, although it had gotten increasingly out of hand in the decades leading up to 1517. At its root lay a long medieval distinction between guilt and punishment: although true repentance of sins and confession to a priest could give the believer absolution from guilt and therefore from hellfire, sin still demanded some kind of temporal punishment. Some of this punishment could be handled by taking penitential actions prescribed by the priest, but much of it would remain to be exacted after death. Accordingly, the medieval church came to increasingly teach the doctrine of purgatory, a place where the faithful must undergo a term (perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years) of purifying torment before they could enter heaven. But, there was some good news. By doing certain holy acts, like participating in or helping pay for a Crusade, Christians could receive an “indulgence” from the Pope, shortening their time in purgatory or perhaps even skipping it altogether. Eventually, recognizing in indulgences a potentially immense source of revenue, later popes began offering them for money more often than for good deeds, and needing to continue to expand the market to keep the revenues flowing, they started allowing the faithful to buy indulgences for their dead relatives already in purgatory.

Johann Tetzel’s indulgence campaign that prompted Luther’s protest in 1517, though, was an extraordinary illustration of the corruption that came from mixing such absolute spiritual power with the wide-reaching worldly power of the late medieval church. Ostensibly ordered to help finance the construction of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, much of the money actually went into the coffers of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. Albrecht needed it in order to repay the Fugger banking family for the immense debts he had contracted from them in order to buy from the Pope the most powerful church office in Germany at the age of 23. Since the most enthusiastic buyers of indulgences were the uneducated and gullible poor, Tetzel’s indulgence campaign constituted an extraordinary redistribution of wealth upward from the poorest to the richest in Christendom.

Such exploitation of the poor infuriated Luther, and in thesis 45, he decries those who, instead of helping the needy, as Christ commanded for the truly penitent, spent all their spare money on indulgences. More fundamentally, though, Luther worried that indulgences were a form of cheap grace, a way for people to purchase false security for their souls without truly facing the depth of their sin and repenting from the heart. The earlier distinction between guilt and punishment had been thoroughly blurred so that indulgences had in the minds of the public, encouraged by salesmen like Tetzel, become a substitute for true repentance, purchasing freedom from guilt as well as punishment. This point is key to grasp, given how readily Luther’s gospel of salvation by faith alone is often distorted. Luther’s concern with the late medieval church was less that it had made salvation too hard (by endless works rather than simple faith) and more that it had made salvation too easy (by thoughtless outward works or transactions rather than heartfelt repentance, being crucified with Christ). The real gospel of Christ, charged Luther, was both much more serious, more frightening, and more liberating than the spiritual economy the popes had created to fill their own coffers.

Dr. Bradford Littlejohn is the President of the Davenant Institute and teaches philosophy at Moody Bible Institute. He is the author of two books on Richard Hooker as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Reformation theology and Christian ethics.

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by Dr. Martin Luther, 1517

Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences by Dr. Martin Luther (1517)

Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter. In the Name our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. 1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance. 2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance, i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by the priests. 3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh. 4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven. 5. The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons. 6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God's remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven. 7. God remits guilt to no one whom He does not, at the same time, humble in all things and bring into subjection to His vicar, the priest. 8. The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and, according to them, nothing should be imposed on the dying. 9. Therefore the Holy Spirit in the pope is kind to us, because in his decrees he always makes exception of the article of death and of necessity. 10. Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for purgatory. 11. This changing of the canonical penalty to the penalty of purgatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while the bishops slept. 12. In former times the canonical penalties were imposed not after, but before absolution, as tests of true contrition. 13. The dying are freed by death from all penalties; they are already dead to canonical rules, and have a right to be released from them. 14. The imperfect health [of soul], that is to say, the imperfect love, of the dying brings with it, of necessity, great fear; and the smaller the love, the greater is the fear. 15. This fear and horror is sufficient of itself alone (to say nothing of other things) to constitute the penalty of purgatory, since it is very near to the horror of despair. 16. Hell, purgatory, and heaven seem to differ as do despair, almost-despair, and the assurance of safety. 17. With souls in purgatory it seems necessary that horror should grow less and love increase. 18. It seems unproved, either by reason or Scripture, that they are outside the state of merit, that is to say, of increasing love. 19. Again, it seems unproved that they, or at least that all of them, are certain or assured of their own blessedness, though we may be quite certain of it. 20. Therefore by "full remission of all penalties" the pope means not actually "of all," but only of those imposed by himself. 21. Therefore those preachers of indulgences are in error, who say that by the pope's indulgences a man is freed from every penalty, and saved; 22. Whereas he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which, according to the canons, they would have had to pay in this life. 23. If it is at all possible to grant to any one the remission of all penalties whatsoever, it is certain that this remission can be granted only to the most perfect, that is, to the very fewest. 24. It must needs be, therefore, that the greater part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and highsounding promise of release from penalty. 25. The power which the pope has, in a general way, over purgatory, is just like the power which any bishop or curate has, in a special way, within his own diocese or parish. 26. The pope does well when he grants remission to souls [in purgatory], not by the power of the keys (which he does not possess), but by way of intercession. 27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory]. 28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone. 29. Who knows whether all the souls in purgatory wish to be bought out of it, as in the legend of Sts. Severinus and Paschal. 30. No one is sure that his own contrition is sincere; much less that he has attained full remission. 31. Rare as is the man that is truly penitent, so rare is also the man who truly buys indulgences, i.e., such men are most rare. 32. They will be condemned eternally, together with their teachers, who believe themselves sure of their salvation because they have letters of pardon. 33. Men must be on their guard against those who say that the pope's pardons are that inestimable gift of God by which man is reconciled to Him; 34. For these "graces of pardon" concern only the penalties of sacramental satisfaction, and these are appointed by man. 35. They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that contrition is not necessary in those who intend to buy souls out of purgatory or to buy confessionalia. 36. Every truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without letters of pardon. 37. Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ and the Church; and this is granted him by God, even without letters of pardon. 38. Nevertheless, the remission and participation [in the blessings of the Church] which are granted by the pope are in no way to be despised, for they are, as I have said, the declaration of divine remission. 39. It is most difficult, even for the very keenest theologians, at one and the same time to commend to the people the abundance of pardons and [the need of] true contrition. 40. True contrition seeks and loves penalties, but liberal pardons only relax penalties and cause them to be hated, or at least, furnish an occasion [for hating them]. 41. Apostolic pardons are to be preached with caution, lest the people may falsely think them preferable to other good works of love. 42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend the buying of pardons to be compared in any way to works of mercy. 43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons; 44. Because love grows by works of love, and man becomes better; but by pardons man does not grow better, only more free from penalty. 45. 45. Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God. 46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons. 47. Christians are to be taught that the buying of pardons is a matter of free will, and not of commandment. 48. Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting pardons, needs, and therefore desires, their devout prayer for him more than the money they bring. 49. Christians are to be taught that the pope's pardons are useful, if they do not put their trust in them; but altogether harmful, if through them they lose their fear of God. 50. Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter's church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep. 51. Christians are to be taught that it would be the pope's wish, as it is his duty, to give of his own money to very many of those from whom certain hawkers of pardons cajole money, even though the church of St. Peter might have to be sold. 52. The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain, even though the commissary, nay, even though the pope himself, were to stake his soul upon it. 53. They are enemies of Christ and of the pope, who bid the Word of God be altogether silent in some Churches, in order that pardons may be preached in others. 54. Injury is done the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or a longer time is spent on pardons than on this Word. 55. It must be the intention of the pope that if pardons, which are a very small thing, are celebrated with one bell, with single processions and ceremonies, then the Gospel, which is the very greatest thing, should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies. 56. The "treasures of the Church," out of which the pope. grants indulgences, are not sufficiently named or known among the people of Christ. 57. That they are not temporal treasures is certainly evident, for many of the vendors do not pour out such treasures so easily, but only gather them. 58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the Saints, for even without the pope, these always work grace for the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell for the outward man. 59. St. Lawrence said that the treasures of the Church were the Church's poor, but he spoke according to the usage of the word in his own time. 60. Without rashness we say that the keys of the Church, given by Christ's merit, are that treasure; 61. For it is clear that for the remission of penalties and of reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient. 62. The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God. 63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last. 64. On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is naturally most acceptable, for it makes the last to be first. 65. Therefore the treasures of the Gospel are nets with which they formerly were wont to fish for men of riches. 66. The treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men. 67. The indulgences which the preachers cry as the "greatest graces" are known to be truly such, in so far as they promote gain. 68. Yet they are in truth the very smallest graces compared with the grace of God and the piety of the Cross. 69. Bishops and curates are bound to admit the commissaries of apostolic pardons, with all reverence. 70. But still more are they bound to strain all their eyes and attend with all their ears, lest these men preach their own dreams instead of the commission of the pope. 71. He who speaks against the truth of apostolic pardons, let him be anathema and accursed! 72. But he who guards against the lust and license of the pardon-preachers, let him be blessed! 73. The pope justly thunders against those who, by any art, contrive the injury of the traffic in pardons. 74. But much more does he intend to thunder against those who use the pretext of pardons to contrive the injury of holy love and truth. 75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God -- this is madness. 76. We say, on the contrary, that the papal pardons are not able to remove the very least of venial sins, so far as its guilt is concerned. 77. It is said that even St. Peter, if he were now Pope, could not bestow greater graces; this is blasphemy against St. Peter and against the pope. 78. We say, on the contrary, that even the present pope, and any pope at all, has greater graces at his disposal; to wit, the Gospel, powers, gifts of healing, etc., as it is written in I. Corinthians xii. 79. To say that the cross, emblazoned with the papal arms, which is set up [by the preachers of indulgences], is of equal worth with the Cross of Christ, is blasphemy. 80. The bishops, curates and theologians who allow such talk to be spread among the people, will have an account to render. 81. This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due to the pope from slander, or even from the shrewd questionings of the laity. 82. To wit: -- "Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a Church? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial." 83. Again: -- "Why are mortuary and anniversary masses for the dead continued, and why does he not return or permit the withdrawal of the endowments founded on their behalf, since it is wrong to pray for the redeemed?" 84. Again: -- "What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul's own need, free it for pure love's sake?" 85. Again: -- "Why are the penitential canons long since in actual fact and through disuse abrogated and dead, now satisfied by the granting of indulgences, as though they were still alive and in force?" 86. Again: -- "Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?" 87. Again: -- "What is it that the pope remits, and what participation does he grant to those who, by perfect contrition, have a right to full remission and participation?" 88. Again: -- "What greater blessing could come to the Church than if the pope were to do a hundred times a day what he now does once, and bestow on every believer these remissions and participations?" 89. "Since the pope, by his pardons, seeks the salvation of souls rather than money, why does he suspend the indulgences and pardons granted heretofore, since these have equal efficacy?" 90. To repress these arguments and scruples of the laity by force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to expose the Church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christians unhappy. 91. If, therefore, pardons were preached according to the spirit and mind of the pope, all these doubts would be readily resolved; nay, they would not exist. 92. Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Peace, peace," and there is no peace! 93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Cross, cross," and there is no cross! 94. Christians are to be exhorted that they be diligent in following Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hell; 95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven rather through many tribulations, than through the assurance of peace.

This text was converted to ASCII text for Project Wittenberg by Allen Mulvey, and is in the public domain. You may freely distribute, copy or print this text. Please direct any comments or suggestions to:

Rev. Robert E. Smith Walther Library Concordia Theological Seminary.

E-mail: [email protected] Surface Mail: 6600 N. Clinton St., Ft. Wayne, IN 46825 USA Phone: (260) 452-3149 - Fax: (260) 452-2126

Thinking Kids

Teach Your Kids the Bible and Christian History

Martin Luther and the 95 Theses

September 23, 2023 By Danika 97 Comments

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Teach your teen about Martin Luther and The 95 Theses — A pivotal moment in time during the Reformation that changed the world!

On October 31st, 1517, a German monk by the name of Martin Luther protested the Roman Catholic practice of selling plenary indulgences (a slip of paper that excused the purchaser from paying the debt owed for all of their sins) by writing out a list of 95 concerns. In Latin. This monk, who was also a priest, a district vicar, and a professor, happened to be a student of Scripture and a brilliant man. He took his list to a printer to have copies made and then nailed it to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church.

It was like posting an issue for debate on the university bulletin board. Luther didn’t expect that anyone other than Church officials and university professors would see his list. The document wasn’t a secret–he sent a copy to Albert, the Archbishop of Mainz. He truly wanted to open a debate and inspire change. Martin Luther was certain that if Church officials knew what was happening in his little area of Saxony in Germany, they’d fix it. Immediately.

The thing is, the Church did know. Selling plenary indulgences in Germany was a scheme that Albert of Mainz and Pope Leo X cooked up. They split the money earned to pay for the ongoing work on Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome–and Albert owed Leo X some money after he purchased his archbishopric. It seems Leo X had spent quite a bit of the Church’s treasury in a big party when he was elected. Neither Albert nor Leo X had an issue with a little simony, either, it seemed.

Martin Luther, of course, knew none of that. He just knew that Scripture is clear–we don’t pay for our salvation.

We are saved by grace through faith.

Martin Luther and the 95 Theses would have been a small local issue, or perhaps a broader academic debate among scholars, had it not been for the printer. That sneaky printer.

He translated Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses into German. That document was distributed throughout Germany, then across Europe–translated into the languages of the local common people by printers along the way.

And that changed everything.

Make your own Martin Luther and the Ninety-Five Theses!

Listen to me read the first chapter of  When Lightning Struck! .

Martin Luther and the Reformation

The Roman Catholic Church had been in need of reform for quite some time. Church officials had long complained of issues of simony, corruption, broken celibacy vows at all levels of the Church leadership, and plenary indulgences.

Martin Luther’s study of Scripture led him to take issue with more and more teachings of the Church. A prolific writer, he taught Scriptural concepts in books, pamphlets, and sermons. The response was an all out battle. Reformers and adherents to the Roman Catholic Church chose sides and fought over who and what was supreme. It could either be the Pope or Scripture. But not both.

The Reformation of the Roman Catholic Church had been tamped down for about two hundred years before Martin Luther came on the scene. Reformers were often labeled heretics and publicly martyred. But Reformation could not be held back any longer by the time Martin Luther published The Ninety-Five Theses.

Martin Luther’s work and life led to both the eventual reform of the Roman Catholic Church, and the development of the Protestant Church. From there, Christians fought for a continued return to the teachings of Scripture.

Though Protestants don’t always agree on doctrinal issues, we do agree that we’re saved by the grace of God alone, through the faith that He gives us. We agree that Scripture is the Word of God, and the Bible can be trusted to reveal His will to us. We can have a personal relationship with God our Father through the atoning work of Jesus Christ our Savior and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Fun Reformation Resources!

When Lightning Struck!: The Story of Martin Luther

When Lightning Struck!: The Story of Martin Luther   is an historical novel for teens . In it, I tell Martin Luther’s story in an exciting narrative (written with my adventure-loving boys in mind!).

Teens will learn about the important theological debates and central events of the Reformation, and be introduced to a number of the key players. They’ll come to know Martin Luther, the Father of the Reformation. By the time they finish the book, your teens will understand how God used Martin Luther to change the world. His fight for Scriptural truth reverberated across all areas of life–political, religious, and personal. Teens will also recognize that Martin Luther was a man like all other men–imperfect and a sinner. Martin Luther clung desperately to the truth that he was saved by God’s grace through faith.

When Lightning Struck!: The Story of Martin Luther is written for a teen audience, / it makes a great family read-aloud .

Martin Luther and the Reformation Lapbooks!

The When Lightning Struck! Discussion Guide is perfect for:

• Youth Groups
• Sunday School Classes
• Family Read-Alouds
• Homeschool Christian History

Each chapter has discussion questions and timeline dates to add to the 4-page timeline I’ve included at the back of the guide. There are also short biographies of important figures, and relevant Scripture passages to consider with discussion questions.

Want to download that Discussion Guide? It’s free! Just check out through the store.

Martin Luther Unit Study

• Martin Luther’s life
• Timeline dates
• Biographies of important people
• Relevant Scripture
• Art history

The 12-week unit study for middle and high school students is ideal for use in homeschools or co-ops. Each week covers discussion questions on the biography chapters, timeline dates (there’s a timeline included at the back of the unit study), related Scripture to study with discussion questions, and a short biography on an important figure.

The assignment schedule page for each weeks tells students what to study or write in each subject. In addition to the timeline, there are also vocabulary worksheets and maps at the back of the unit study. Each subject includes book suggestions that should be available at most libraries. Students can also just research subject matter online. There is no purchase in addition to When Lightning Struck! required to use the unit study.

There are notebooking pages available for the history and science subjects. These include both subject-related notebooking pages and biographical pages.

The art history section for each week’s study includes a biography page for an artist, and three notebooking pages with five art pieces by that artist. Students will be able to write about how each piece impacts them, how they feel about the work, and why.

Each week, students will have a writing assignment. There are two pages available for this assignment. Students will also have weekly copywork, either from Scripture (both ESV and KJV are cited so you may choose the version you prefer), or a quote from Martin Luther.

Learn more about the Who What Why series   and get your FREE Abolition Lapbooks here.

Bible Resources for Your Kids

Teach your teens about Martin Luther and the Reformation in an exciting, new way with  When Lightning Struck!: The Story of Martin Luther ! The book also makes a wonderful family read-aloud.

As Luther’s understanding of the spiritual corruption within the Church grew, and he despaired of true salvation, Luther (now a scholar and priest) sought the Bible for answers. Following his discovery of the true gospel in Scripture, Luther began to preach spiritual freedom to his congregation, and to teach biblical (rather than philosophical) theology at the University of Wittenberg.

It was on October 31, 1517 that Martin Luther penned his Ninety-Five Theses  in Latin in response to the abusive indulgence sales practices of the monk Johann Tetzel in a nearby town. Luther nailed the Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, the scholarly bulletin board of his day, and mailed a copy to the Archbishop of Mainz. Luther hoped to start a scholarly debate about the practice of selling salvation through plenary indulgences. The response he received was greater–and more dangerous–than he imagined it would be.

Luther’s story is exciting. There are death defying moments, epic spiritual battles, narrow escapes, a kidnapping, revolution, and war. As the “Father of the Reformation”, Luther is a vital figure in Church history. His sacrifice and willingness to wage battle against the spiritual, religious, and political powers of his medieval world allowed Christians throughout time to embrace the truth of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone as explained by Scripture alone once again. May all glory be to God alone!

Read portions of the first eight chapters of When Lightning Struck! :

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September 1, 2017 at 4:37 am

I’ve been looking for a read-aloud for my 1st and 7th graders to lead up to the 500th anniversary! This will be perfect! (Even better if we win the Playmobil Martin Luther for the 1st grader to play with while we read! 😀 )

September 1, 2017 at 4:41 am

Can’t wait to read When Lightning Struck! We so appreciate your quality products.

September 1, 2017 at 4:55 am

I’m so excited to read this! I’m looking at new class options to teach at my kids co-op, and a class on this book would be amazing!

September 1, 2017 at 4:56 am

I would love to use this as a read-aloud for my crew of four.

September 1, 2017 at 5:11 am

We love Luther too for speaking out when he saw something that wasn’t right.

September 1, 2017 at 5:41 am

Wwe are studying the Renaissance and Reformation this year in our homeschool and this would be perfect to go along with it! Thank you for sharing your passion for Christian history, Danika!

September 1, 2017 at 5:50 am

We just read about Martin Luther and his 95 theses in our Mystery of History lesson yesterday. This would be great to read for a more in depth study!

We studied Martin Luther last year in history, and I cannot believe I didn’t connect the timeline for myself! 500 years! That’s will be great to discuss this year on Halloween along with our sin/pumpkin carving.

September 1, 2017 at 6:04 am

I think my older two kids would love this – and honestly I would too 🙂

September 1, 2017 at 6:07 am

I have been planning to purchase your book to read next month with my boys. How fun it would be to win it & that delightful little toy!

September 1, 2017 at 6:22 am

We are celebrating this this year, and our year’s history studies revolve around this!

September 1, 2017 at 6:28 am

My lo is very little, but I’ve been contemplating purchasing this book for myself. I’d love to win and use them as she grows.

September 1, 2017 at 6:36 am

So great to be able to focus on this pivotal point in history!

September 1, 2017 at 6:40 am

we haven’t covered MLKJ yet and would love this resource in order to do so

September 1, 2017 at 7:25 am

I am excited to teach my kids more about the Reformation

September 1, 2017 at 7:27 am

I’m excited to share the details of the story and Luther’s passion for truth with my kids.

September 1, 2017 at 7:42 am

Last year was the first time we learned about Reformation day, and I’m excited to celebrate this year for the 500th anniversary!!

September 1, 2017 at 7:47 am

Thank you again Danika for a great giveaway and for all the wonderful resources that you have reviewed on church history. We have purchased many of them and have not been disappointed. It is a precious gift to learn church history alongside my children and be inspired by the saints who have gone before us. Blessings on you and your family.

September 1, 2017 at 8:47 am

This book looks great!

September 1, 2017 at 9:46 am

I love living history books, and church history is even more exciting! I don’t have teens yet, but I would love to start this as a read aloud.

September 1, 2017 at 9:52 am

We are just so excited to celebrate the anniversary of the reformation! Our church has been talking about it a lot, and I would love this resource to continue the conversation at home.

September 1, 2017 at 10:38 am

I’m so excited about this!!!! Church history is something that I didn’t study much of growing up but I have been now for a while. I want my kids to know the importance of the Reformation as well as the kids I teach at our Church. 500 years!!!!!

September 1, 2017 at 10:55 am

This book looks great! We want to read it up till October 31st and celebrate a real holiday

September 1, 2017 at 2:46 pm

We love Martin Luther and how he took a huge stand to defend our faith and tell the truth. We also love his hyms, writings, and commentaries. This looks like a great resource and great timing for the 500th anniversary!

September 1, 2017 at 6:24 pm

What an engaging resource

September 1, 2017 at 6:58 pm

This book sounds wonderful! Looking forward to reading it!

September 1, 2017 at 7:20 pm

Would be an awesome way to begin our school year!

September 1, 2017 at 7:40 pm

I like books about Martin Luther, so this would be great. Would love to have a Playmobil Luther as well.

September 1, 2017 at 8:46 pm

Playmobil is such a great way to help children bring learning to life and what better way to celebrate Oct 31st than learning about those who went before us. I hope we win!

September 1, 2017 at 9:33 pm

Martin Luther is someone that I want my family to know about and the changes that came about in part because he read his Bible. Someone will be blessed with this, so thank you for the give away.

September 1, 2017 at 10:58 pm

Looking forward to having a 500th anniversary party!!

September 3, 2017 at 11:52 am

I’m excited about this important anniversary. Thank you for the chance.

September 3, 2017 at 5:29 pm

Martin Luther is a really important person in church history so a good biography of him would be great.

September 3, 2017 at 10:09 pm

500 years! I didn’t even know that.

September 4, 2017 at 4:46 am

Looks like such a wonderful book in which we could learn a lot 🙂

September 4, 2017 at 5:08 am

I would love to read this book! I also want to use it to teach my kids how important it is to think for themselves and not simply accept what the leadership says.

September 4, 2017 at 5:36 am

I need all the help I can get when it comes to teaching History so this would be a great addition!

September 4, 2017 at 6:25 am

I have been hunting for reformation resources! We are planning a big party on Oct 31 to celebrate this historic event, and I need all the help/ideas I can get!

September 4, 2017 at 6:32 am

I enjoyed learning about Luther when I was a kid. I’m excited to teach my kids about him and all he did.

September 4, 2017 at 6:44 am

What an awesome read aloud to explain the Reformation. Thank you for the chance!

September 4, 2017 at 8:18 am

We love learning more about church history. Martin Luther’s life is very interesting. We love reading your book.

September 4, 2017 at 8:57 am

Good article above. I was always under the impression that Martin Luther wanted to break away from the catholic church and not that he wanted them to fix the problems and stay catholic. You truly do learn something new every day, thank you. Thanks for the chance at winning your book, it would make a great read aloud for anyone’s home.

September 4, 2017 at 9:05 am

Love to learn more about our Christian history and am very interested in learning the whole story behind Luther and the break from the Church— thank you for this opportunity!!

September 4, 2017 at 9:46 am

My middle baby is in love with learning things that happened before she was born so this is perfect for her. It’s hard to find anything engaging for her but history is a favorite of hers.

September 4, 2017 at 12:21 pm

I have been wanting to have a chance to read this book. I love hearing about Christian history.

September 4, 2017 at 1:24 pm

I am looking forward to this because I love any kind of history. This book “When Lightning Struck” is going to be interesting and educational to read. Thank you Danika for all these great and generous giveaways. Marion

September 4, 2017 at 2:06 pm

What a great time to learn about Martin Luther and celebrate the 500 year anniversary.

September 4, 2017 at 5:16 pm

Thank you for this giveaway and for the lesson. I had no idea about this at all.

September 5, 2017 at 4:34 am

This would be a great help. After reading, I feel like what we have studied of Martin Luther has only sratched the surface and we should study more for the coming days. We need to understand his prompting and timing for doing such as he did.

September 5, 2017 at 5:58 am

I want to teach my children about the reformation and about Martin Luther.

September 5, 2017 at 8:28 am

What a neat giveaway. My husband and I have been wishing each other a Happy Reformation Day on Halloween for years but I thought we were just odd! How fun that other people do it too! I love that there is a Playmobil Luther too! Thanks for this giveaway.

September 5, 2017 at 9:20 am

I would love to use your resource to teach my children about the reformation. Thank you for taking the time to write about Martin Luther to help us to better teach our children!

September 5, 2017 at 9:34 am

As a born, baptized, and confirmed Lutheran, there is still more that I can learn. I find that even as I get older, I want to get more and more information. My daughter is in the 7th grade at a Lutheran School, and I work part time at our church. I think this would be a great asset to her school and/or our church library. Thanks! 🙂

September 5, 2017 at 10:10 am

Books sounds engaging for a range of ages! Always in need of a book that all my children can learn from.

September 5, 2017 at 6:16 pm

Such an important figure in history! We’d love to read this!

September 5, 2017 at 8:00 pm

This looks like a great resource!

September 6, 2017 at 1:56 am

My 5 year old is in Classical Conversations and one of his favorite parts of his history timeline song is about the Protestant Reformation. It’s a bit odd to have a 5 year old who sings about Martin Luther in the grocery store, but I love it! LOL. This would be a great supplement as he gets older and a the play mobile is a fun way to strengthen his natural curiosity sparked by his timeline song!

September 6, 2017 at 4:26 am

Oh, I’d love to win this resource! It looks like a fun yet thorough way to introduce my kids to a major faith based historical event.

September 6, 2017 at 5:31 am

This would go well with our TOG studies 🙂

September 6, 2017 at 6:08 am

I would love to cover this with my daughters!

September 6, 2017 at 8:01 am

I have your book as an e-book (and thought it quite good when I read it last year — planning to reread it for the 500th anniversary again!) and would love a hard copy that I could share with friends! 🙂 And the playmobil figurine would be lots of fun for my daughter, who is also interested in history and has read several simpler books about Luther — and might be ready for yours, soon, too.

September 6, 2017 at 4:51 pm

I would love to use this information with my 3rd-6th grade Sunday School class.

September 6, 2017 at 4:56 pm

I’m excited that my library will be ordering this book. Looking forward to reading with my daughter!

September 7, 2017 at 7:53 am

Thank you for the fun giveaway!

September 7, 2017 at 1:46 pm

I am so excited for this giveaway.

September 8, 2017 at 5:17 am

This is perfect! We just started a study of Martin Luther yesterday.

September 8, 2017 at 5:18 am

My family and I love learning about history especially church history.

September 8, 2017 at 6:11 am

Great giveaway!

September 8, 2017 at 9:52 pm

I’m excited to know more about the life of Martin Luther!

September 9, 2017 at 10:38 am

Wonderful! I haven’t seen this before, but I am going to have to explore!

September 9, 2017 at 10:40 pm

This would be great for our lessons on Martin Luther! 🙂

September 10, 2017 at 2:53 pm

This is the History time period we are studying this year and wanted to dig into Martin Luther as our in depth person to study! Can’t wait to read this book and add to our lessons!

September 11, 2017 at 4:15 am

This looks amazing. I’d love to have my whole family listenas a read aloud to prepare for the 500th anniversary. And little ones would enjoy the Pplaymobil figure to go along with it.

September 11, 2017 at 4:16 am

I’m excited about When Lighting Strikes because I don’t know much about Martin Luther myself and would love to learn right along with my children!

September 11, 2017 at 4:30 am

Great idea! I’d love to give this to my 11 year old son to read. We are celebrating the 500 anniversary as a family – a great way to add to that celebration

September 11, 2017 at 6:14 am

We are new to your site, and I had not heard of the book: When Lightning Strikes! Kids are excited to hopefully win, so we can add that this year to our study. Thank you so much for the free Reformation materials too!!!

September 11, 2017 at 7:39 am

I would love to win this to use in my homeschool. I recommend your resources to others and love your website!

September 11, 2017 at 7:41 am

I have a great love for truth. This book looks intriguing!

September 11, 2017 at 7:44 am

Teaching history in storybook format is the best! And my son would love the little Martin Luther!!!

September 11, 2017 at 8:17 am

Great idea, thanks for sharing! I will probably get the book even if I don’t win

September 11, 2017 at 8:57 am

I thought I entered! I hope I win! My mom was raised Catholic and I was raised Lutheran. 🙂

September 11, 2017 at 2:21 pm

seriously Playmobil has a Martin Luther figure??? Wow!!! I meant I’d love to win it to give to you are faster who’s actually teaching a weekly course on Martin Luther up to the Reformation anniversary and we’d love to have this book as part of our Bible course for kids

September 12, 2017 at 1:13 pm

My Kids would love this book. We’ve been studying different missionaries and people in church history this year.

September 12, 2017 at 7:59 pm

It sounds really interesting and I don’t know much about the details of the story.

September 13, 2017 at 10:48 am

Great book! Read it with my daughter this summer. We both enjoyed it!

September 13, 2017 at 10:59 am

I don’t know much about the story, but we are always excited to learn new things and play with Playmobil!

September 13, 2017 at 11:20 am

September 13, 2017 at 1:17 pm

It seems like a nice book

September 13, 2017 at 1:37 pm

500 YEARS!!! We need to celebrate!!

September 13, 2017 at 3:33 pm

We have been studying about Martin Luther and the Reformation this year. So excited to find a new book.

September 13, 2017 at 4:00 pm

This looks amazing! What a fun way to learn.

September 14, 2017 at 4:27 am

I have eyed this resource for a long time and I know my children would love it!!

September 14, 2017 at 9:19 am

We study the Reformation this year! Would love this book!

September 14, 2017 at 8:24 pm

We can’t wait to read this book.

September 15, 2017 at 8:45 am

Can’t wait to read it with my grandkids.

September 15, 2017 at 8:46 am

Cant wait to read it.

September 15, 2017 at 8:42 pm

We are just coming to this time period in our studies!

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How to go to Heaven

How to get right with god.

What are the 95 Theses of Martin Luther?

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8 Myths about Martin Luther and The Reformation

Joe Heschmeyer picks apart a popular 101 video on Martin Luther’s revolt, pointing out many painfully common factual inaccuracies.

Transcription:

Okay, now what if I told you every single sentence of that was false, that there are factual errors in every sentence I just said, but that we’ve been fed basically 500 years of propaganda from both Protestants and secularists, fascinatingly telling us the kind of version of this story that historians know isn’t actually true. Now, as I’ve just alluded to, this isn’t just a Protestant thing. Plenty of people who aren’t religious have seized upon Luther as kind of the victor of free thought, the radical individual against the forces of tradition and hierarchy in the church, which is great for people who, for instance, reject Christianity outright on those same grounds. And so there’s a very popular kind of narrative around Luther, but as I hope to show today, it’s largely a mythological one that isn’t rooted in history, isn’t rooted in reality. And to show this, I want to look at a short five minute video that National Geographic of all places put out. I mean, the place we just got our kids Butterfly farm from also has weighed in on the reformation and it’s called inaccurately enough, a most precise and nuanced look into the life of the man, legend and visionary Martin Luther. And it’s kind of tongue in cheek, it’s kind of fun, but it’s intended to be a sort of 1 0 1 primer telling the basic story of Martin Luther. And in this five minute video, there are at least six major factual errors,

A most precise and nuanced look into the life of the band legend and visionary Martin Ruth. Sir, one day when Luther is 21 years old, the most and nuanced look into the life of the band legend and visionary Martin Luther, sir.

Now you might be wondering why pick on this video? Well, hopefully I’m not picking on it because it’s true. You can find more bias, more radical, more extreme, more inaccurate versions of the story of Luther. But usually when people are watching those, they know what they’re getting. They want to hear someone tell you Catholicism is bad and evil, and as long as you’re saying that they don’t really care if what you’re saying is true or historically accurate, but this is National Geographic and a lot of the people watching this believe they’re getting something like a neutral, objective, accurate sort of history. And it’s not a few people, right? National Geographic has 23.1 million subscribers on YouTube. This video alone had 1.4 million. And when you read the comments, it’s people saying things like, who else is here? Because their teacher assigned this for class. That comment has 1800 likes and 289 replies. So lots of people are learning about Martin Luther in the Reformation from videos like this one. So what does it get wrong? Now, I’m going to skip the very first part of the video, which is about how Luther becomes a monk because that’s not really important for this conversation. And turn to the very next thing they look at, which is the posting of the 95 these and what kind of causes Luther to begin the reformation in the first place.

Luther cannot understand it if God’s intention is really for poor people to spend all their money buying their way out of punishment so they can go to heaven. And why should it be easier for the rich to avoid a long time in purgatory than it is for the poor?

So let’s just analyze those two claims that the poor spent all of their money on indulgences or were the church was trying to get them to spend all their money on indulgences. And second, that indulgences were easy to get if you were rich and not if you were poor. Both of those are clearly demonstrably untrue, both generally and in the particular circumstances of Luther’s life. And we know this from several historical sources. I’m going to look first the historian, RN Swanson’s book, religion and Devotion in Europe. He’s looking at the period of 1215 to 1515. He’s purposely stopping right at the eve of the reformation two years later, but in there, Swanson, now as we go, it’s going to be confusing using medieval money and I’ll do my best to kind of explain it. This, by the way, was a part of the video that took the most time to make sense of in the research, which is unpacking pounds and shillings and pence in the middle ages and what those basically correspond to because all of that to a modern American seemed like meaningless currency.

So Swanson explains that the general level of four pence, so when you see the four D, D is for denari, which is what they’re calling pence, it’s confusing, but four pence per pardon in early 16th century England. He says, Swanson says it was still substantial for a craftsman. So perhaps the purchasers were mainly from the wealthier layers of society with artisans and people below them, content with the indulgences, which required effort but not money, like repetition of prayers or visits to churches. Okay, so the very first thing you should see here is the point of indulgences, and we’re going to get into a closer look at this in the next inaccuracy. The point of indulgences isn’t to take people’s money and many indulgences don’t involve money at all and never did. So particular prayerful devotions the church was trying to cultivate, stepping back. The idea of an indulgence is to help you grow in your Christian life and incentivizing you to become more Christian, to be more charitable, to be more loving to God and to your neighbor.

And there’s a bunch of ways that can look including charitable giving, but also including things like praying and going to church more. And those are important parts even of the indulgences that Luther’s protesting. So there’s two things you should notice from what Swanson has said. First, you didn’t have to pay anything for some of these indulgences and second, for the ones that did have money attached to them, it was often something like for Pence. Now he says this is somewhat still cost, but what does that actually look like? Well, let’s turn here to a concrete measure of money bunnies. Steve Rappaport is looking at this same time period in his book, worlds Within Worlds Structures of Life in 16th century London, and he explains that when Henry VIII becomes king in 1509, a bushel of flour costs three shillings that is 60 pence because there’s 20 pence to his shilling back then because the British hate base 10 and a rabbit cost roughly two PEs.

So if you want to put it in those terms, an indulgence is two rabbits. That’s not all of your life savings, even if you’re someone who is not wealthy. And so the idea that we’re taking all the money of the poor is factually inaccurate, and that’s just at the asset. That’s just a particular indulgence they’re looking at in early 16th century London. Now let’s go back to Swanson’s book because he says not all indulgences were so cheap, and then he gives the example of the plenary indulgence and the jubilee of 1500, but he says that the collector in England, Jasper Ponts set a sliding scale of charges varying with landed income or the value of movable goods. I’m going to warn you, it’s going to get mathy here for a second into make it a little easier. I’ve translated everything into pence, so I’m going to give it to you in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, and then the equivalent value in pence.

So you get a sense of the portion, what percentage of your assets is the church asking you to part ways with for this indulgence to make this more confusing, as you’ve already heard, there’s two different scales. One, if you have landed income, you’re a wealthy landowner and the other, if you have movable goods, maybe you’re a merchant or something, but you don’t own ’em like a fief dim or something. There’s two different sliding scales in use for the landowners. The top tier you’re making over 2000 pounds, that’s 480,000 pence. That’s what you’re worth, at least the cost for indulgence there is three pounds, six shillings, eight pence, or 792 out of your 480,000 pence. The lowest bracket is for those people who are landed and their worth is between 20 and 40 pounds. So 4,800 to 9,600 pence and they’re has to give 16 pence as you can see, in neither case at the top or the bottom, is this anything like the lion’s share or a crippling amount of what we’re not even close to something like a 10% tithes like they had in the Old Testament.

Now what about those with goods like movable goods? If you had a thousand pounds worth of movable goods, so 24,000 pence, you were asked to give two pounds, 480 pence, so two out of your thousand pounds, if you had less than that, let’s say you had 22, 200 pounds worth of movable goods, you’re asked to give a shilling, which is 12 pence out of your 4,800 to 48,000 pence worth of stuff. Again, this is not a lot. Now you might notice the bottom bracket in both of those cases is still someone who’s landed or still has a pretty sizable amount of money. Now we’ll get into what happens if you’re below that, but I want to just point something out here. One shilling the lowest tier. If you’re in that 20 to 200 pound range, that’s six rabbits. You’re someone who’s a merchant who’s making something in the pounds, not in the pence, not in the shilling category, in the pounds category, you has to part ways with six rabbits for a plenary indulgence.

The idea this is taking all of your money is just factually incorrect. But here’s the kicker, Swanson acknowledges people falling below 20 pounds paid whatever they felt able to contribute out of devotion. Now you might say, okay, Joe, that’s early 16th century England, which you used because you kind of understand pounds and shillings and pence. What about medieval Germany, which has an even more confusing system of currency, but it’s more relevant to Martin Luther because after all, he’s not living in early 16th century England. He’s living in early 16th century. So how do we know people like Johan Tetzel, the infamous preacher of indulgences wasn’t bilking people of all their worth? Well, because we have the instructions that the archbishop gave to Tsel in 1515 and in the instructions Archbishop Albert of Mons says, because the conditions of men are many and diverse, it is not possible to establish a general fee.

We have therefore fixed the following rates, and then he gives a confusing list of rates using medieval gilders, which is even more complicated. I don’t know how many bunnies you can get for a gilder, but the point there is the richer expected to give more than the poor. And there it’s very explicit that those who do not have any money should supply their contribution with prayer for the kingdom of heaven should be open to the poor, no less than to the rich. In other words, that’s not Luther’s like protest. That’s something that the Archbishop had said at the outset. So reading this as Luther’s a class warrior who’s upset that the poor are being expected to give all their money and it’s easier for the rich doesn’t understand the medieval system of indulgences and doesn’t understand particularly the fact that the poor were not expected to give in many cases at all, they were expected to pray instead straightforward, right? So let’s go back to the video and see the next mistake it makes.

He thinks it’s way too much about money and too little about God when priests sell letters of indulgence with slogans such as when the coin in the coff clings the soul from purgatory springs,

Okay, so did the indulgences of Luther’s day make it all about money rather than prayer? Well, we’ve already seen that’s not true because we know the poor we’re asked to pay in the form of prayer rather than money. But from that same instruction, everyone whether you’re giving a financial donation or not, is first required to do several other things. The instructions read as follows, everyone who is contrite in heart and has confessed with his mouth or at least has the intention of confessing, shall visit the designated seven churches in which the papal coast of arms is displayed. Pause for a second. Think about all the times you’ve heard about Martin Luther, the protests of indulgences and the like. How many times in your experience have you heard anyone mention that this wasn’t just give a bunch of money that you were supposed to go in a little mini pilgrimage in your own diocese in your own city to seven different churches?

That seems like a pretty important part of the story, that this isn’t just write a check and you’re going to get out of purgatory. You’re being asked to go on a mini spiritual pilgrimage and then when you get to those churches, you’re asked to pray in each church, five devout lord’s prayers, the our Father and five of Marias in the Hail Mary in honor of the five wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby our redemption took place or one misre, that’s Psalm 95, which psalm seems particularly appropriate to obtain forgiveness of sins. So several things are being asked of you. Number one, you have to be contrite for your sentence. Number two, you need to have gone to confession or at least be planning on going. Number three, you’ve got to go on this kind of mini pilgrimage to the seven churches. Now that one, if you are too sick to be able to go, the church will accommodate your confessor, can give you a substitute penance, a substitute kind of journey of some kind.

They can literally just bring you religious images if you’re home bound and then you’re supposed to pray there. That’s the fourth. And then really the fifth is that you then contribute to the building of St. Peter’s. Now I understand many people are going to say, well, whether it’s a lot or a little, that’s a problem, right? Why is money involved here at all? And there’s a good answer to that question. To understand this, you have to understand the biblical evidence, which you have to hold two things at the same time. On the one hand, you cannot buy spiritual rewards. You can’t just cut a check and get out of purgatory free card. You can’t just automatically go to heaven because you bought your way there. It doesn’t work like that. And we know this partly from the Bible in Acts chapter eight, there’s a guy named Simon who tries to buy the spiritual power of the laying on of hands and he’s told by St.

Peter, your silver per with you because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money. This is where the sin of Simon he comes from. On the other hand though, so you can’t buy spiritual rewards, you can’t buy the gift of God. On the other hand though, God does reward generosity and that’s also very clearly taught in the Bible. So for instance, in second Corinthians chapter nine, St. Paul says that he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You’ll be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God for the rendering of this service. Not only supplies the wants of the saints but also overflows in many Thanksgivings to God. So here’s the tension. It was the tension faced in Luther’s day.

It’s the tension faced by anyone who takes the biblical evidence seriously. You don’t want to say you can buy your way to heaven. You do want to say if you’re serious about going to heaven, you need to be generous with your money. You see the tension? It’s not a perfect analogy, but think about something like politics. It is okay to spend money supporting your candidate that’s considered good democratic action. It is bad to bribe a candidate and sometimes that line can seem a little fuzzy where you say, I’m going to give a lot of money to this candidate because I know they’re pro-life. That’s okay, that’s good. But if you say, I’m going to give a lot of money to this candidate to make sure that they vote pro-life, that starts to look more like bribery. And so in Luther’s day, the indulgences thing is more on the line than I think many Protestants understand.

Now the church realizes there are times it would cross the line, and so in response to it, the Council of Trent condemns the sale of indulgences. Don’t even get near the line, but it would be a mistake to take from that. That generosity was this was all just transactional. No, the whole point of this is if you are helping to build a church or a bridge or any of these things for the good of the church, the good of community, those are real areas of growth and generosity. Some people may be stone masons and amazing at physically building the church, wonderful, but if you’re not a stone mason but you’re someone who has a lot of money to hire a stone mason, you can contribute too. That’s not buying your way to heaven any more than it’s buying your way to heaven for the stone mason to work on building the church to glorify God. I hope that’s clear. So that’s actually going on. This isn’t just about, let’s just cut a check and we’ll go straight to heaven. The documents themselves, including the ones that the archbishop writes to tetzel, the one that the whole indulgences controversy that Luther is specifically arguing about, we can see quite clearly it is not as later descriptions would have it just rich people get out of purgatory free card or let’s just make this all about money. Alright, let’s turn now to the third major mistake.

Luther wants to discuss this with other monks and priests. So he writes 95 these and nails them to the church door in Denberg where he lives. The church door you see acts as a form of bulletin board and is a completely normal way to put things up for debate.

For some reason the video goes into a good deal of time explaining in a five minute video it spends like 15 seconds explaining why it was okay that he nailed the 95 these to the church door in Wittenberg when the crazy part is historians don’t believe he actually did that. So Joan Ella in an article for the New Yorker points out that modern scholars differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on that the hammering episode, so satisfyingly, symbolic, loud, metallic, violent, never occurred. Now why do they think it didn’t occur? There were no eyewitnesses. Luther himself ordinarily an enthusiastic self dramatize, as she says, was vague on what had happened. He remember drawing up a list of 95 theses around the date in question, but that’s what he did with it. All he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop.

That is I think, key to really pointing out how dramatically mythologized this whole thing is because the most kind of characteristic thing, that famous image of Luther nailing the 95 theses to the door is seemingly a work of legend, not a fact of history. Now we do know what the 95 theses were about. So while we’re talking about this, let’s just do a little bonus round here. Did Luther reject indulgences? Now in the video’s defense, it doesn’t claim that, but many people do claim that or believe that Luther was posting these 95 theses because he thought indulgences were wrong. The video certainly would give you that impression, but it stopped short of explicitly saying it. Luther actually does not deny indulgences. He has questions about the administration of indulgences and critiques and some of those critiques are perfectly valid as we’ve already heard. The Council of Trent basically sides with Luther against Tetzel in the way money is being treated in all of this.

But Luther is quite clear, beginning in the 69th thesis, he says, bishops and curates are bound to administer the commissaries of papal indulgences with all reverence. Did you catch that? He doesn’t say don’t comply with papal indulgences. He says the exact opposite, but then he says in the 70th, but they’re much more bound to strain their eyes and ears Les. These men preach their own dreams instead of what the pope has commissioned. Notice that he’s not saying the pope is wrong, he’s saying some of these preachers and he means hear people like tetzel are going beyond what they were ordered to do, that they were given a particular commission which is good and that they should be doing and they’re abusing it. That’s an important distinction because in one you’re complaining that the Catholic doctrine is bad and in the other you’re complaining that the local preacher isn’t preaching Catholicism correctly.

Catholics are constantly saying the local priest isn’t preaching the Catholic doctrine correctly on various issues sometimes correctly, right? So then thesis number 71, Luther says, let him who speaks against the truth concerning papal indulgences be anathema and a cursed. That is the only anathema clause in the 95 thesis and it’s against those who deny indulgences. So all that’s to say the history of the 95 thesis has three major errors in this and a fourth major error that isn’t in the video but is common enough that it felt appropriate to mention it. Now the video is going to jump from the 95 these to what’s called the Diet of verbs, where Luther is on trial defending his views and it’s a famous scene and a scene that is once again largely fictional.

Luther is allowed to defend himself at a trial in the city of Vs. The church hopes that Luther will withdraw what he said and wrote so that everything can return to normal, but Luther will not. He maintains that if no one can prove him wrong through arguments or quotes from the Bible, he must be right. I cannot and I will not regret what I have said. I cannot act against my conscience. Luther says, not many in the audience have heard the word conscience before, but they are in no doubt as to whether Luther stands firm on his beliefs or not. I

Was struck by how bizarre that depiction of the diet of Rems is. So let’s just ask the question, is it really true that most people had never heard of conscience at this time? The answer obviously it’s completely fictional and I would point you to several sources including Timothy PO’s book conscience and medieval philosophy. He makes the points that the medievals were more concerned about the idea of conscience and we’ll get into why. So he says conscience has been much neglected by philosophers. It is not directly treated in ancient philosophy. So go back to the ancient Greeks and then apart from Bishop Butler who is primarily interested in the aspect of self-deception, there’s scarcely a philosopher from Descartes to the present day who has touched upon it more than tangentially. So the ancients don’t really focus on it, the moderns don’t really focus on it, but in between there, that middle age, which is where we get the word medieval from, he says in the 13th and 14th centuries, however, a treatise upon conscience became a standard component of commentaries upon Peter Lombard’s judgments.

So quick word there, before you could do your own philosophy, you had to first show that you understood the philosophy that came before you. And so you were expected to do a commentary on a very influential work of St. Peter Lombard and in his writings he talks about conscience. And so you were expected to write about conscience before you were ready to do any of your own philosophy. From there, pot says it found its way into university, seminary written up as debated questions and in textbooks what are called summas or sume, so conscience, in other words, it’s all over the place. Now conscience is treated actually in a more nuanced way by medievals than it is by most of us. Today we have kind of a vague idea of what we mean by conscience. They were more precise. Then there said two aspects of conscience.

You have what’s called sinis, that’s the un erasable knowledge of the basic principles of morality. And according to medieval theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas, that’s infallible. You always know for instance that justice is better than injustice. But then second you have cia, which is where the English word conscience comes from, which is the application of arias and the application of moral principles to particular cases. Now there you can air there, you can go wrong. That’s going to be an important subtle distinction. I’ll get into why, because you might say, well, okay sure, back in Aquinas’s day, but there’s still a couple centuries until you get to Luther. So maybe by Luther’s time ordinary people had forgotten about what conscience was. So the Renaissance studies journal has an entire issue on the Renaissance conscience and in there Brian Cummings makes a point that conscience is not some early modern neologism like in other words, not a word created by the early moderns arising out of pre of reformation controversy.

That’s the fashionable cliche. He says. Instead it was a stapled topic in scholastic theologies. We already saw it was discussed in Peter Lombard’s sentences from there went into standard commentary as the university syllabi and there are elaborate treatments on conscience both in Bonaventure and Aquinas. But then he says that Alvaro de Silva has observed that St. Thomas Moore. So Moore is a contemporary of Martin Luther and he dies in 1535 that more uses the word conscience over a hundred times in the letters of the last year of his life. That’s pretty striking. If allegedly, no one has ever heard of this or most people don’t even know what this word is, conscience is all the rage because it raising a really important question and a regularly asked question for centuries, are you bound to follow an airing conscience? In other words, if your moral principles lead you to believe you should do an evil thing, a thing that you know the church forbids you to do, what should you do?

Should you listen to your conscience or should you listen to the church? That is a hotly debated issue for centuries. This is not some new thing that Martin Luther is coming up with. However, it is true that there are new movements about conscience, not a refocus on it, but maybe a redefinition of it. And so Cummings says that new instincts about conscience were stirring within theology and among the Protestant reformers in Germany, things were moving very quickly. And then he distinguishes here, he says, Peter Lombard discussed two different views on the issue of conscience, one that he accepts, which says that the spark of conscience is like a preparation for grace so that when grace comes, it is something to work on. The other view views that there is only one will, which defected by sin turns out only to want what is evil until grace comes by 1517, Luther has rejected the idea of a spark or scintilla of goodness left in man.

Okay, so why do I point out these subtle debates on conscience to say not only were the Catholics prior to Luther focused on conscience, they had a higher view of conscience that Luther takes a view that a man who is unredeemed doesn’t have anything good in him. And so if he has nothing good in him and he only wants evil, you don’t owe a great deal of respect to his conscience. This may sound like an academic debate. It is absolutely not. Why do I say that? Because in Luther’s life we see that he is no great herald of conscience except his own conscience. When other people try to use the same principles and follow them, he turns on them viciously. Matthew Baker in wild boar in the vineyard, Martin Luther at the birth of the modern world, he explains that the peasants war of 15, 24 to 1525, a series of violent uprising throughout Germany was the largest popular revolt in Europe for the French Revolution.

What does that have to do with Luther? What we’re going to see initially met with negotiation mediation. These revolts were eventually put down ruthlessly by the armies of the German nobility. And as many as a hundred thousand peasants were killed, some of the peasants demands drew heavily on Luther’s ideas and language such as Christian freedom and conscience and the supreme authority of the biblical word over temporal authorities. That makes sense. If Luther can say, I’m going to follow my own conscience rather than the church, why can’t the peasant say, I’m going to follow my own conscience rather than the secular Lord? It seems like the secular Lord has less authority over my conscience than does the church. Well what does Luther have to say about it? He writes in 1525, a treatise called against the robbing and murdering hoards of peasants. There’s other English translations equally delightfully provocative.

And in there he is absolutely ruthless. He encourages killing the peasants on moss. He says, therefore, let everyone who can smite slay and stab secretly or openly remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog. If you do not strike him, he will strike you in a whole land with you. So even if you’re not in the army, go murder your peasant neighbor. That’s what he’s actually telling you to do. And he explains, he says to the rulers they should go on unconcerned with a good conscience, lay about them as long as their hearts still beat. And he says that it’s to their advantage that the peasants have a bad conscience and an unjust cause and that any peasant who is killed is lost in body and soul and is eternally the devils very clear, right?

Luther’s views on conscience permit him to take the view that the people who disagree with him who rebelled not against the church but against the German lords and secular leaders deserve to all just be killed on moss and sent to hell because there’s nothing good in their conscience. So to turn him into this kind of a hero of conscience is strikingly bizarre. He’s not. He degrades conscience. He’s great defending his own right of conscience. He’s terrible defending the rights of conscience of those who disagree with him. Which leads me to another point that the video doesn’t get wrong, but which a lot of people do because there’s a very famous line at the diet of vers. If you’ve ever seen a movie about Luther or read a book about him, Luther gives a very impassioned speech, which is generally known as the, here I stand speech, here’s a little taste of it.

Unless I am convinced by scripture and by plain reason and not by popes and councils who have so often contradicted themselves, my conscience is captive to the word of God. To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. I cannot and I will not recant. Here I stand. I can do no other God help me.

So did Luther really say here I stand? Well, the answer seems to be no. And fascinatingly in Lutheran quarterly, there’s a great article on this from the historian Samuel L. Young called How Luther Became the Mythical. Here I stand hero and it’s all about this creation of the mythical Luther that doesn’t really match what we have from the historical evidence, how the earliest sources don’t have him saying, here I stand, I can do no other. And

Young looks at the history of why this became popular. If this isn’t the true story, why is this fictional version of Luther so popular? Well, he says, this became the translation that dominated writings on Luther in the British and American press after 1840. So you’ll notice well after the time of Luther, and it became a compelling aspect of the Reformer’s biography precisely because its implications could be adapted for various kinds of universal meanings, meaning you didn’t have to be a Lutheran to be really moved by the here I stand speech as it’s been kind of invented modified universalized, disregarding the actual historical circumstances of the diet of firms. Luther could simultaneously be touted as the champion of democracy, evangelical religion, human rights, individualism of free thought, of progress, and of modernity, whatever your cause, you can draw on this language and be like Hurrah, we’re overthrowing the forces that are against us of tradition and the old fashioned people. And we are following conscience because we’re the good guys who believe in fill in the blank, democracy, progress, modernity, free thought.

And so young says, as the archetypical warrior against religious, political, and intellectual tyranny of any kind, Luther’s appearance at vers proved a malleable rhetorical weapon. Although here I stand, historical narratives could be employed toward different ends. All of these readings serve to reinforce a larger historiography to which both Protestants and free thinkers could subscribe. This by the way, is why I think National Geographic is wading into the waters of Martin Luther, not because they’re devoted Protestants, but because Luther has become a sort of hero for secularists. And young makes the same point because in all these narratives, Luther was interpreted as a figure of deep discontinuity with the medieval past all of these stories. Rather than having Luther be a person from the 16th century who was deeply formed by his medieval Catholic upbringing, who even while he is questioning one aspect is still very much swimming in those waters, the actual historical real life.

Martin Luther, they have a Luther who’s almost like a 19th, 20th, 21st century American Protestant or American liberal who’s just kind of plopped into the scene and says, oh, you battled medieval Catholic church. And that is just wildly anachronistic. That deep discontinuity to medieval past is the thing young is rightly critiquing. He says his piety, meaning here, Luthers piety, character, eloquence, ingenious, are in stark contrast to his Catholic context, making his stand that much more dramatic and poignant. Pinpointing the died of vers as the beginning of modernity or a renewed biblical piety assumes an anti-Catholic notion of progress and historical development. And then he concludes this thought by saying that there have been recent studies by a couple other scholars that have underscored the symbiotic relationship between Protestantism and secularism in the 19th and 20th centuries and a similar dynamic marks the development of here I stand historiography.

Let me put that in simpler language. At the time of Luther, the German peasant said, aha, this stuff Luther is saying can be used to justify our social revolution. And Luther’s horrified and says, the people doing this should be killed, murdered. Well, later Protestants and later secularists and free thinkers and liberals of all kinds do the exact same thing the German peasants do. They say, aha, we can draw on Luther as this kind of figure. I mean Adolf Hitler famously does this where he draws on Luther, one of the first writers in German to try to build an anti-Jewish German ethos and has things he can draw on. That’s the issue for another episode. But the point is people are using Luther in this way that in many cases is not actually accurately representing who Luther is. So the diet of worms isn’t this major turning point that many accounts treat it as including this National Geographic video.

And he doesn’t really have this here I stand speech almost certainly it’s not until much later they get these kind of ha geographies. There are eyewitnesses at the diet of vers who don’t record him saying this. So that’s a rough sketch of why we’ve got all of these historical rewritings that it fits the agenda of a lot of different people to make Luther into a person he wasn’t in real life. Alright, there’s two more errors I want to get into the first one’s about the Bible and the second is about the church. Let’s look at the Bible next.

Up until then, the Bible has only existed in Greek and Latin while hiding at Ford Book Luther Translates the entire New Testament into German. Luther wants people to have the opportunity to read the Bible in their own language. So they do not depend on the priests and the church’s interpretation because Luther sees the Bible as God speaking to all people.

So that’s a pretty straightforward question. Did Luther really create the first German language Bible as so many Protestants and secularists tell us, no, that’s not remotely true. And there are plenty of writings on this, including from non-Catholics like the Adventist scholar, Kenneth Strand, who has a work called German Bibles before Luther, the story of 14 high German editions. In the beginning of that book, he gives an overview of what the situation was at the time of Luther. He says, long before Luther’s day, Germans had taken an interest in having scripture in their own tongue. That’s the opposite of what National Geographic tells you. And vernacular translations had been laboriously copied out by hand. Remember the printing press didn’t exist and so you don’t have a ton of mass produced, well, any kind of Bible or any kind of document because you can’t mass produce things, but you do have people hand copying the Bible into German because that was the only thing available at the time with the advent of printing.

Additions of scripture in German as well as in Latin, began to multiply from various presses in the German lands by the time of Luther’s birth in 1483, no fewer than nine, such editions of the complete Bible in high German and two in low German had appeared. And then by the time of Luther’s own publication of the Bible, there were already 14 high German and four low German editions of the entire Bible to say nothing of additions, of portions of scripture and manuscript coffees. So Luther is maybe the 17th, or excuse me, maybe the 19th, to show up here, not the first. And that matters because the whole narrative is the Catholic church didn’t want ordinary German people to have the Bible in their language. And the evidence shows exactly the opposite of that. So that’s a pretty glaring sign that you’re being fed propaganda that is not consistent with the historical evidence. Alright, one final point I want to address from the video.

When people get access to reading the Bible themselves, they also begin to use the words of the Bible as an argument for all sorts of things. Luther has started something he cannot control. His news thoughts are used as arguments in the power struggles of princess in revolts and in the struggle between kings princess and the Pope about who actually decides what soon everyone is poring and fighting. Some even go to war. Luther had dreamt about changing the church. He knew, but his thoughts ended up splitting the church in two, the Catholic church and the Protestant church. And that soon becomes important for many other things than the church.

I find that last line really telling that this becomes important for other things than the church, which tells you their interest in the story isn’t really about the church, but fine. That’s okay. You can be interested in a religious topic for non-religious reasons, but it might be giving away the agenda behind why they’re making a video telling a fake history of Martin Luther. So the last question I have is, did Martin Luther really split the church in two? And the answer is not really. There isn’t a Protestant church. There are a bunch of different Protestant denominations, and this is true in the lifetime of Martin Luther. And the video actually points out he can’t control how other people are going to interpret the scriptures. If the whole point is Luther says, read the Bible for yourself and follow your own conscience. Other people aren’t going to agree with Luther’s interpretation.

We already saw it with the German peasants. This is true across the board. The historian Walter Osh probably butchering that, I apologize. In his studies in medieval and modern German history says that through Luther, the 16th century became a theologically determined age, witnessing the birth of other evangelical denominations. Without Luther’s breakthrough, the founding of churches by Swingley and Calvin would’ve been inconceivable. So by the time Luther dies, there are at least four major denominational families. The boundary of what a denomination is, it is notoriously kind of difficult to hammer out, but you’ve got the Lutheran, you’ve got the Calvinists or Reformed, you’ve got the Anabaptists, and you’ve got the Anglicans. And to say these are one church doesn’t really make any sense because on many of the issues that they’re debating about, they are just as likely to agree with the Catholic side as they’re to agree with one another.

So Luther famously said that he was closer to the Catholic position than he was to his wing’s position kind of reform. Well kind of the Anabaptist kind of the reform position on the Eucharist. So there’s any number of issues. So it really doesn’t make any sense to call these four disagreeing groups. One Protestant church, it’s not an existing body. There is no organizational continuity, there’s no doctrinal unity, nothing that would make it one body. These are at the bare minimum four denominations at the death of Luther. And the history of this isn’t that this creates two churches, a Protestant one and a Catholic one, but untold denominations splintering off after the death of each of these four major founders. Rudolph Hines, I’ve mentioned this book before, but in his book reform and in conflict looks the legacy both during their life and after. And he says that the failure of efforts to heal the schism between Protestants and Catholics is probably more understandable than the continuing breach among Protestants since the latters were agreed on the essentials of the faith, right?

They can have something like a belief in sola fide, but then it turns out they can’t agree on other stuff. All of the magisterial reformers, you’ll notice he’s excluding here the radical reformers because it’s too hard to even speak of all Protestants together. During the lifetime of Luther, all of the magisterial reformers were committed to a belief in still the script Torah as well as the rejection of Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. They were also largely agreed on the doctrines of justification and priesthood of all believers. So you’ll notice even in that description, he’s taking some Protestants who are largely agreed, this is not a unified church. And really that’s kind of the point he’s making. He says that the Protestants quickly discovered, this is again the subgroup of the subgroup of Protestants who kind of agree. They quickly discovered the commitment to the sole authority of scripture and belief in the ity. That’s the clarity of scripture, did not necessarily make it easy to agree on what scripture actually teaches. So they can all agree, scripture is really clear, we don’t need the church. But when you say, what does scripture say? What does it teach? They don’t know. They don’t agree with each other, which is the Catholic point by the way.

And then he gives the example that the Marlborough Colloquy was an attempt to create something like an ecumenical council for Protestants. And it was only the first of a number of unsuccessful attempts to heal the breach among Protestants. So there is no such thing as a Protestant church and there never has been. In all the attempts to create something like a unified statement of belief or creed or catechism that all Protestants could sign off to has utterly failed for 500 years. In no sense are Protestants a denomination. They just aren’t. It’s a loose category of a bunch of different denominations and we can’t even say how many. So that’s Luther’s actual legacy. He advances principles that he’s horrified when the German peasants use in ways he doesn’t like and that then give rise to untold denominations creating a future that he certainly didn’t intend. That’s the actual history.

The idea of Luther being this great defender of conscience, first modern in all of that, that’s a fictional version. He’s not nailing the thesis to the door. He’s not giving the hero I stand defense. He’s not doing any of the things popularly assumed, nor is the Catholic church doing the things popularly accused of doing, selling salvation or giving a special deal to the rich over the poor. Any of those things, those things are just propaganda. They were sometimes national propaganda, England versus Spain. They were sometimes religious propaganda, Protestant versus Catholic. And there’s sometimes religious propaganda of atheists and secularists against Christianity. But the point is a lot of what you know or think you know about Martin Luther or hopefully knew or thought you knew prior to watching the studio is false. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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