As a result, Albert was deep in debt and looking for a way to pay it off. So Albert agreed with Leo to promote the sale of indulgences in northern Germany over a four year period, and split the proceeds.
An indulgence was a document that forgave the buyer any punishment for sin that he still owed God. If your sins had been properly forgiven, and if you had the right indulgences, you could escape the fires of purgatory and go straight to heaven. Or you could buy indulgences for your dead relatives and shorten their time in the unpleasant anteroom to Paradise.
Half the money from this sales campaign would go to Rome to help pay for St. Peter's Basilica, then being erected.
The whole thing was shockingly corrupt, but all too typical of the later medieval church. . The papacy was involved in wars in Central Italy, as usual, on top of its ambitious building program, and felt compelled to pursue any source of revenue.
But if this sale of spiritual benefits was not unusual, people protested anyway.
Three years later, when the indulgence campaign approached Saxony, a young professor of theology at the University of Wittenburg, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther, added his voice to the protest.
He posted on the church door a notice of debate that he proposed to hold on 95 theses, or propositions, that questioned the sale and even the efficacy of the indulgences. This was a common academic thing to do, like announcing a history colloquium today. In fact no one came to Luther's debate. Maybe every theologian in Wittenberg substantially agreed with him -- Luther was highly thought of there. But they were not indifferent, or if they were they did not stay that way long. By questioning Archbishop Albert's campaign, and even more the theory behind it, Luther was about to cause a storm that would split the medieval church. Luther brought this about not so much by nailing the announcement to the church door, which everyone remembers, but more by sending copies to a few friends and to Archbishop Albert, whose true sleaziness Luther did not realize. Luther naively hoped Albert would stop the sale.
Instead, Luther found himself being denounced in Germany and in Rome. A rather obscure if bright provincial theologian was being reviled as a heretic. Why so much fuss?
Luther had questioned the church's ability to intercede with God to avert the punishment of sin. This was a key power -- intercession to turn aside divine wrath was what the church was for. So Luther quickly found himself being called before an assembly of his own order, the Augustinians, to explain himself.
The general of the Saxon branch of the order, a man named Johannes von Staupitz, wanted to avoid trouble, so he asked Luther to avoid the direct question of indulgences. Instead he was allowed to explain his own theory of salvation. Staupitz got more than he bargained for.
Now the official 16th century view was that although people were sinful and fallen, it was possible for them to make up for their sins and earn their salvation with God's help. The sacraments of the church were meritorious works, as were the mass, ascetic practices, pilgrimages, etc. The church helped them accomplish this arduous task by dispensing extra merits earned in the past by dead saints and by Christ himself. That is how indulgences worked.
This did not satisfy Luther. Luther had worried a lot about his own salvation, because he felt he could never do enough to satisfy God. This personal feeling, plus the pressure of the indulgence controversy, had inspired in him a quite different view of salvation.
Luther said people did not earn salvation -- it was an impossible task for those blighted with original sin. Rather, omnipotent God performed the whole work of salvation. God gave man faith, and if man believed he would be saved. God did not judge man -- man was guilty and he deserved only damnation; rather, God justified man, made him just by giving him the faith to believe that Christ had saved him. Luther had not just made this up. He had found most of it in St. Paul's letters in the New Testament, and in the works of St. Augustine, the founder of his order.
This background helped win over the other Augustinians. In fact, Luther's theology was an immediate hit. They too must have felt the same impossible pressure to be perfect that had thrown Luther into despair. Luther said salvation was sure, because God accomplished it. Von Staupitz had failed to make Luther back down. In fact, Von Staupitz became one of his greatest supporters.
But of course the propounding of this doctrine made Luther seem all the more dangerous in Rome. If his views were accepted, the chuch was bound to be forced into a much more modest role. Influential theologians rolled out their biggest rhetorical and scholastic guns to stop Luther. Even more, the Pope put his officials into motion to get to Luther and contain the damage.
Luther was in a delicate position. His teaching, thanks in part to the printing press, was becoming very familiar and quite popular in Germany. But this could not prevent him from being seized and tried as a heretic, being forced to recant, or if he wouldn't, being imprisoned or executed. But Luther was lucky. His ruler, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, was sympathetic to Luther. Frederick had founded the University of Wittenburg not many years back, to give his part of Saxony some intellectual prestige. Luther was the biggest academic star the place had produced, and Frederick was none to anxious to have him condemned by the papacy. The papacy in its turn could not push Frederick too much. The emperor Maximillian was dying, and the pope wanted to ensure the election of Charles V. Frederick was one of seven electors who would chose the next emperor. So his insistence that Luther should receive due process, and not be condemned without a fair hearing, protected Luther from being disposed of quickly.
In October, 1518, the papal forces blew perhaps the only chance they had to win over Luther. A legate was sent to talk to Luther; but he was not there to debate, but just to give Luther a chance to back down. Luther refused his demands; he wanted to be convinced by Scripture and by reason that he was wrong.
Frederick continued to protect him. So while the papacy looked for another way to get at Luther, Luther was free to develop and spread his ideas. And develop and spread them he did.
The entire unwillingness of the establishment to enter into fair debate on the all-important matter of salvation pushed Luther slowly to the conclusion that the pope was indeed Anti-christ, who had highjacked the church, and was using its legal power to deceive and corrupt good Christians.
Nor was Luther alone in this feeling. Both theologians and lay people in Germany were willing to accept this picture of Rome, which everyone knew was corrupt, because they believed in Luther's theology, which seemed so clear, so commonsensical, so obviously based on Scripture. The press, now about 80 years old, found its first great topical subject. Germans and others, inspired both by Luther's criticism of abuse and his theology of hope, bought between 1517 and 1520 a grand total of 300,000 thousand copies of his works. (German pop. something over 12 mil in early 16th c.-- Spitz.) Luther by the power of his pen had created an army of sympathizers, who did not care when the Pope condemned their hero.
When the new emperor, Charles V, finally came to Germany in 1521, to bring the country under his rule, Luther was a phenomenon almost too big to handle. He was called before the imperial diet at Worms. He was almost overawed, but regained his courage and refused to recant without being refuted. Charles wanted to condemn him, but found that a significant number of princes would not go along. Only when both Luther and his princely sympathizers had left the diet was it possible to outlaw Luther and his ideas.
It is one thing to pass such a decree; another to enforce it. As soon as the Edict of Worms against Luther and his ideas was passed, Charles received news that Francis I of France had invaded his Netherlandish and Spanish territories. Charles ran off to fight, and found himself involved in a nine-year series of wars against the French, the Turks (who crossed the German border and beseiged Vienna) and even the Pope.
In the meantime, religious protest spread through Germany, into Switzerland,
and to Scandinavia and the Baltic countries.
The Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, a sworn monk and the ruler
of Prussia and Livonia, foresook his religious vows and made himself a
secular prince. He too, adopted a religious settlement based on Luther's
ideas. The Danish king took control of his church, and when Sweden revolted
against him, its new king confiscated all ecclesiastical property.
The growth of the reform, however, posed an increasingly urgent question. What, in fact, did it mean to follow Luther? Luther and the Wittenburg theologians, like most so-called heretics, had never meant to split the church. He wanted a general counci of the church to reform the whole thing.. But the opposition of the pope and the emperor blocked that route. In the meantime, religious enthusiasts were taking things into their own hands, especially in south Germany where imperial knights and free peasans saw Luther's protest against a corrupt church as a justification of their opposition to the greater princes. Revolt swept over south Germany, and was suppressed in a savage manner.
Luther was in many ways a conservative, primarily concerned with salvation and not interested in changing the structure of everyday lay life. Well before the Peasant's Revolt or the other dramatic religious revolutions, Luther had realized that a reform of the church was already taking place, and had to be organized now, before any hypothetical church council.
At Wittenburg, he and his friends undertook to provide a model for the church of Electoral Saxony and any other sympathetic region.
Luther wanted a drastic simplification, to purge the church of superstition
and superfluity.
When Charles V returned victorious to Germany in 1530, "Lutheranism" (he would hate the term) had taken control of perhaps half of Germany and had many sympathizers in the other half and in other countries as well. Religion divided the German princes.
Charles did his best to reunify Germany behind him and the old faith. His main effort to end the religious disunity was the Diet of Augsburg, another meeting of the German estates. Here the reforming princes openly opposed their overlord, and issued a Protestation, outlining their religious beliefs and determination for reform. (Here is where the name Protestant came from.) Charles V countered with a theological statement drawn up by the most prestigious opponents of Luther, and told the Protestants that they should admit themselves refuted, and return to the fold. They did no such thing, but merely walked out of the meeting.
Charles might have gone to war, but the Turkish threat revived, as did trouble with France. Throughout the 1530s, Charles agreed to a series of compromises with his Protestant princes to stave off war in Germany. His eternal hope was that he could get the pope to call a general council that would end abuses in the church. That done, Charles was sure that the Protestants would see reason.
Of course the real effect of this policy was to allow the further spread of Protestantism, which diminished the chances of reunion immeasurably. In fact, even the reformers found unity in their own camp to be an elusive thing. In was in the 1530s, for 10 instance, that Calvin created his own religious party in Geneva, a party that never saw eye to eye with the Lutherans, and is distinct to this very day.
It was not until 1544 that Charles was free to devote his energy to religion. He was able to force the emperor to call a church council at Trent, and demand that the Protestant princes send representatives. On the advice of Luther (who soon died) and other evangelical theologians, the princes refused. Finally, Charles launched a war against them, and beat them in 1547 at the battle of Muhlberg. It was a crushing victory, and for a moment, all of Germany was in the emperor's power. Perhaps, it seemed, the Protestants would be forced to take part in the council at Trent, and return to the Roman flock.
But by 1547, the Reformantion, as it is usually called, had been underway for an entire generation. The religious divide was well established, something that could not be healed simply by council, however prestigious and thoughtful. By 1547, the Catholic fathers at Trent had already come up with a definitive condemnation of Luther's theology, and begun to reform monasticism, the cult of saints, and other late medieval practices so that the Roman church could meet the Protestant challenge.
Lutherans and Calvinists were not convinced theologically, and had no interest in improvements in such things as monasticism, which they saw as corruptions and deceits of the devil.
For people on both sides, compromise would mean the sacrifice of power, money, the treasured habits of daily life, and salvation itself. There was no room to manoevre. And when Charles's political position eroded, the last illusion of an easy restoration evaporated. Only a bloodbath, a cataclysm, would have any chance. Charles could not, perhaps would not do this. Before he abdicated in 1555, he was forced formally to grant toleration to Lutheranism in those areas where it already existed. The reunification of the church, indeed, the reunification of Germany under the emperor, had both been stymied by Luther's doubts and eloquence.
Copyright 1999, Steven Muhlberger