The Ninety-Five Theses

Martin Luther's conscience tortured him.

How could a righteous God forgive him? But then he read in Romans, the righteousness of Christ is transferred to the believer. This was Luther's great discovery. He said, when I understood that the righteousness that Paul is talking about in Romans, the doors of paradise swung open, and I walked through. Luther considered that was the moment of his conversion, a moment so dramatic that it would lead him to confront the powerful Roman Catholic Church. Our focus this week is on the foundational principles of Christianity, the same principles rediscovered during the Reformation.

Dr. R.C. Sproul's message is titled, The Ninety-Five Theses. We're going to look this morning at 1515. I'm not going to get into 1520, which was the year he was excommunicated by the papal bull, Sergio Domino, or his great crisis in 1525 when he was engaged to Catherine von Bora.

But that's another story for another time. But I think the supreme crisis for Luther that shaped his entire life, and really was a provocative motivation for the entire Reformation, which was what he experienced in 1515. In 1517, we remember he was ordained at Erfurt as a priest.

In 1510, he went to Rome. But in the whole time that he was there at Erfurt, he was studying theology and biblical studies for his doctor's degree. In 1510, Friedrich Elector of Saxony started a brand new university at Wittenberg, and he was trying to amass in its initial stages an outstanding faculty. And so, he got Luther on loan for a couple of years of lectures from Erfurt, and he also brought in Philip Melanchthon as part of that faculty, and Karl Stott, and Jones, and a few others. But in any case, Luther lectured for two years, then went back to Erfurt.

He came back again to Wittenberg and lectured for quite a long time on the Psalms. And when he completed that work, he then began his lectures on Romans in 1515. Now, I'm using the year 1515.

There's all kinds of debates about that. Some people say it was as early as 1512. Some say as late as 1519. Most scholars put it in between 1514 and 1515.

For the sake of my cycle of five-year crises, I'm going to go with a 1515 date. But in any case, as he was preparing his lectures on Romans, he read an essay from Saint Augustine on the letter on the Spirit, which was not primarily an exposition of Romans, but it was dealing with other matters. But in that particular essay, there was a brief excursus that Augustine gave in which he cited a verse from the first chapter of Romans, from Romans 1.17. Romans 1.16, Paul begins with his statement about not being ashamed of the gospel of Christ and so on. And he goes on to say, in it, that is in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. The just shall live by faith. Now, Luther had commented initially that his entire career he struggled mightily against the whole idea of the justice of God. What he feared more than anything else was the justice of God, which is what every human being should fear more than anything else. And I just warn my students, don't ever ask God for justice.

You might get it. And so, Luther hated the idea of the justice of God. Now he's preparing his lectures on this verse that talks about the revelation of the justice or the righteousness of God and concluded with the statement, the just shall live by faith. And while he's reading this passage out of Augustine, Augustine had written that the righteousness of God that Paul is talking about in Romans 1 is not that righteousness by which God Himself is righteous, but rather a righteousness that God provides for people who are not righteous.

Let me say that again. Augustine was saying that when Paul writes in Romans 1 about the righteousness of God, he's not talking about the inherent righteousness of God, that righteousness by which God Himself is righteous, but he's speaking of a different kind of righteousness, a righteousness that God bestows by His grace upon those who do not have it. That is, here we see the beginning of the beginning of Luther's development of the whole notion of the imputation of the righteousness of God or the righteousness of Christ to the believer, which is affected by faith. As we will see later on, Paul expounds upon that greatly in the rest of his epistle to the Romans.

But the idea of imputation, that it's not that we are inherently righteous, but rather God counts as being righteous all of those who put their trust in Christ, because when they put their trust in Christ, the righteousness of Christ is transferred or counted or imputed to the believer by faith. And for this, this was Luther's great discovery. He said, when I understood that the righteousness that Paul is talking about in Romans, the doors of paradise swung open, and I walked through. And he sees this as his conversion moment, as his discovery of saving grace. And after all of the agony that he had been through and all of the other ways in which he sought to gain peace with God and never accomplished that, suddenly he said he was reborn, and he was at peace now with God, just as Paul explains in Romans 5, Paul explains in Romans 5, so that now you could have some understanding existentially of what this meant to Luther that made him able to stand against an avalanche of criticism and hostility against him from the world and from the church and from people even in his own university initially. And so he was able to take his stand because of his experience of salvation.

He wasn't going to trade that or negotiate that with or for anything. And so he said that that discovery then made him reread the Psalms in a different way, changed his own understanding of the Psalms. He began to see justification by faith on virtually every page of the Bible, all the way through the New Testament. And now these passages would jump out at him and confirm what his understanding in Augustine before him was of Romans chapter 1. So here we can say even before there was a general controversy, the Reformation or the scenes of the Reformation were sown in the personal experience of Luther. But then what happened in 1517, which we usually think of as the beginning of the Reformation with Luther tacking the 95 theses to the castle church door at Wittenberg, had its roots in a controversy with respect to the sale sale of indulgences.

And to understand that, let's take a few minutes to go back to that. In 1513, there was a Hohenzollern prince by the name of Albert who lived in the neighboring province called Brandenburg. And he was 23 years old. He had an older brother who had great ambitions for the Hohenzollern dynasty and for their household, and they wanted to have greater power and influence throughout Germany. And in 1513, what happened was three area bishoprics became vacant. There was, first of all, the archbishopric of Magdeburg. There was the bishopric of Halberstadt, and most significantly, the archbishopry of Mainz. And whoever was the archbishop of Mainz became virtually the pope of Germany. I mean, it was the highest ecclesiastical place of authority in the whole nation.

Now, the idea that Albert's brother cooked up was to gain those bishoprics for Albert, that he might be the archbishop of Magdeburg, the bishop of Kalberstadt, and the archbishop of Mainz, all at the same time. And the way to achieve that was to purchase these offices from the pope. I remember I said that the papacy at this time was at one of its most corrupt times.

You had Julius II, who was a Borgia pope, followed by Leo X, who's the one who excommunicated Luther, and he was a Medici pope. But in the meantime, the practice of simony was widespread by now. Simony is that sin that is condemned in the New Testament. When you recall, Simon Magus saw the miraculous works of the apostles and wanted to buy the Holy Spirit, you remember that, from Peter. And Peter said, you and your money perish with you, which is a polite way of saying you and your money go to hell.

We're not doing this deal. And so simony, it was so-called because it was Simon Magus who tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit. And so this practice of selling church offices became widespread at this time in history.

And of course, Albert was trying to take advantage of it. Now, besides the biblical prohibition against simony, you also had ecclesiastical prohibitions in place in terms of canon law in Rome. Number one, you were not allowed to hold more than one bishopric at the same time, and Albert wanted three.

Number two, he was too young to be able to be consecrated as a bishop as he was only 23 years old. But as far as the pope was concerned, money talked. And so a negotiation took place between the representatives of Albert and Albert himself with the pope, and he was able to secure all three bishoprics, two archbishoprics and one regular bishopric.

And the total cost of this was about $250,000. Now, when it came to buying these offices, he got involved in a little bit of negotiation with the pope. For example, with respect to the archbishopric of Mainz, this ongoing price was 12,000 ducats of gold. And in addition to that, the pope wanted from Albert another 12,000 ducats.

And he said, let's get our ducats all in a row here. And he said, no, I'll offer you 7,000, one for each one of the seven deadly sins. The pope had wanted one for every disciple with 12. They finally compromised on 10,000 for the Ten Commandments. But in any case, for this big deal to go through, Albert had to borrow the money.

And the big bank in that time was the Fugers in Germany. And so the Fugers brokered this deal between Albert and the pope. And so money was given to Albert, then given to the papacy in order to get these bishoprics in. And so the pope entered into an agreement with the Fugers to raise the money to pay for all of these bishoprics.

Okay? Now, in order to do this, this is how the indulgence program that was represented by Johann Tetzel started out. For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church had had this concept of indulgence which continued to expand in its application to get people have reduced time in purgatory or to get out of purgatory all at once to have a plenary indulgence to cover all of their sins now and forevermore. And it was tied to the sacrament of penance, which I'll explain a little bit later, to the works of satisfaction, which one has to perform, in other words, to be restored to saving faith. And among those works of satisfaction are commonly simple disciplines, like saying so many Our Fathers, so many Hail Marys, like we saw Luther and his pilgrimage to Rome go through in order to get the indulgences associated with the sacred steps there at the Lateran Church. Well, now this thing has expanded to include almsgiving, that the giving of alms would help a person be restored to a state of grace.

Again, I'm going to expand on that later on. But for now, the church, in order to raise money for the completion of the building of St. Peter's that Julius II had started and that ended in their running out of money and weeds growing in the foundation, now Leo X wants to finish that grand project. So he authorized the distribution of indulgences for sale.

Now, the idea was for a person to give alms and have it count towards a work of satisfaction, they had to be given genuinely and from the heart. The church eschewed any idea of a crass notion of buying salvation. They say salvation isn't for sale, sort of, but indulgences are if the heart is right and so on. And so with an agreement among Albert, the pope, and the Fugger bankers, we have this special indulgence commission where Tetzel was commissioned from Rome to go to the provinces of Germany and to bring the papal bull bull that announced this new indulgence program. And so Tetzel was a great salesman.

He wasn't that scrupulous, but he was very successful. And it was the sale of the indulgences was filled with pomp and pageantry. Weeks in advance of the papal legates coming to a particular town or village, the messenger would be sent out and say, next month, it's such and such a day. On that day, the papal representative will be here, and the indulgences will be available to you if you give the alms necessary for them.

And they even had a scale worked out of how much money an indulgence would cost for a nobleman compared to or contrasted to a peasant, and every different tradesman had a different level. But in any case, they would send the message in advance. Then the day when it would come, there would be this mass of holy procession where the papal bull, this document, would be carried on either a gold embroidered cushion or a velvet cushion, and it was like a circus coming to town. And all of the people would rush to the town square and get in line and make their payments to get indulgences for their relatives and so on.

We don't know if it's truth or legend that Tetzel used the slogan every time, a gilder in the kettle rings, a soul from purgatory springs. And so the idea was that you buy the indulgence, you're home free. Now, this was taking place across the border from where Luther resided. But it was so popular that people were so excited about it that people from Luther's congregation went over the border, took advantage of the sale of the indulgences from Tetzel.

They would come back to Wittenberg with their document of indulgence and wave it in the face of their friends and say, look, I have all my sins forgiven. And Luther now, as a pastor, was horrified because he knew some of these people were scoundrels and completely secularized pagans who were holding these documents up of indulgences. And it was because of that, out of his pastoral concern, that he wanted to discuss the matter with his fellow faculty members at the University of Wittenberg.

Now, to have an academic discussion, you would post theses to be discussed in a scholarly colloquium, not for public consumption. That's why Luther wrote them in Latin. He wrote these ninety-five theses, posted them on the church door at Wittenberg, and inviting the rest of the faculty to discuss indulgences in the whole system that it was involved with. Well, some enterprising students saw them and were amazed by them without Luther's knowledge or permission. They took these Latin theses, translated them into German, and because of the newly invented Gutenberg press, they were able to duplicate the theses, and within fourteen days, a fortnight, two weeks, the documents, the theses were in every village, city, and hamlet in Germany. And it was now wildfire.

And that's when people say that's when it all started. Karl Barth, reflecting on it, said Luther had no intention of making this a big public issue. He was going to discuss it simply with his colleagues, but the metaphor that Barth used was, he said that it was like a blind man who was climbing up the stairs in a bell tower, and he lost his balance, and he reached out in the dark and grabbed a hold of the first thing he could hold on, and it was the rope for the church bell. All of a sudden, the church bell started ringing and waking everybody in town, and that was the result of the theses. And so, not only was Germany a stir, but the word got back very quickly to Tetzel about the theses and to Albert. And both Albert and Tetzel reported the incident of the Ninety-Five Theses to Leo X in Rome, and he just dismissed it out of hand as this drunken monk in Germany, who cares or anything.

But the thing just kept escalating and escalating until finally Luther was brought to that imperial diet at Worms in 1521, where he was called upon to recant. And he said, you asked me to recant, you asked me to answer non-cernutum without horns. I cannot recant unless I'm convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason. I cannot recant, for my conscience is held captive by the Word of God and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. And the rest, as we say, is history. That's Dr. R.C.

Sproul, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Thank you for being with us. I'm Lee Webb. Luther's struggle to understand salvation isn't unique. We all must come to grips with the claims of the gospel. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with several Reformation Bible College students, and I asked them if perhaps they could relate to Luther's struggle. Let's listen to what Julie had to say. I think I had a basic understanding that the only thing that saved me was Christ's righteousness, but it had been so clouded by, I guess, things I'd picked up culturally and just in my own mind.

I really felt very unsettled. I was becoming more and more aware of my own sin, and I just had a lot of difficulty squaring how I could be sinful and yet acceptable to God. And so to really have it spelled out that it's not my righteousness, it's Christ's righteousness, counted in my favor.

And that's a very firm place to be. Indeed it is, and we appreciate Julie sharing that with us. And that's why we think it's so important to return to the very foundations of our faith. And our resource offer today provides you with an opportunity to do just that. For your gift of any amount today, we'll send you Dr. Sproul's teaching series, Justified by Faith Alone. It's 10 lessons in all on two DVDs, and we will send it to you for a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You'll find us at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. Providing you with teaching materials like this is our aim here at Ligonier. We want to help you study God's Word more deeply. If you haven't downloaded our free smartphone app, let me encourage you to do so. You'll have access to helpful study materials on the go. There's an archive of past Renewing Your Mind broadcasts along with books, articles, and blog posts that will help strengthen your understanding of God's Word.

Just search for Ligonier in your app store. Tomorrow we'll conclude our week by looking further at the basics of the Christian faith. R.C. 's message will remind us of the immense sacrifice that was required of Jesus on the cross. I hope you'll join us Thursday for Renewing Your Mind.