Martin Luther's Amendments to the Christian Doctrine

only when the strongly-worded theses, of course, deliberately served plug-in that a number of ecclesiastical abuses could neither be warrant nor tolerated. In publishing these arguments Luther was not initially intent on generating a schism within the church and the historical separate given to the movement he ignited--the Reformation--truly describes the effect he hoped to have. precisely while objections to the exploitative sale of indulgences, the sale of church offices, and another(prenominal) abuses were very common in Germany Luther's objections went deeper than the political, economic, and even moral questions embossed by the church's behavior. Luther agreed with all the common objections to these practices but he had also gradually come to the conclusion that the only function that mattered in apparitional affairs was that of Scripture. Thus, when pressed, he was forced to discontinue that authority derived not from "the pontificate, an institution of human origin, but whole [from] God's own words, the Scriptures" and this meant that he was forced to reject the authority of the papacy insofar as it had not been directly sanctioned by the scriptures (Maland 88-89). This notion of the absolute nature of scriptural authority became much fully developed and necessitated the rejection of the papacy that led to his eventual excommunication. Luther indeed found himself leading reform from without rather than within the church. But s

Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire wishing of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of woful money with which to build a church building? The former reasons would be some just; the latter is most trivial (Luther).

The historical circumstance that conspired to provoke Luther's public presentation of his arguments against indulgences began with the sale of church offices on a grand scale. In 1515 Pope king of beasts X authorized the sale of indulgences for the purpose of building St. Peter's Church in Rome which was to be the magnificent and wildly high-ticket(prenominal) focal point of the temporal church and sign of the spiritual authority of the papacy.

Around the same time, however, the papacy came to an agreement with Albert of Hohenzollern, the archbishop of Magdeburg and executive director of the diocese of Halberstadt, to allow the sale of indulgences to meet the Curia's price for his encyclopaedism of still more lucrative benefices. Albert was a "profane new-fashioned man, still in his early twenties" and his intentions were entirely worldly in nature (Dickens, Martin 32). The Pope, therefore, not only demanded a price of 21,000 ducats for the new livings but also assessed Albert an additional 10,000 ducats for empowering him to hold so many offices at once. The Fugger family of bankers advanced Albert the money and were to recoup their investiture by receiving one half of the new indulgence and direct the other half on to Rome where it would be apply for the building of St. Peter's.

Dickens, A. G. Reformation and Society in Sixteenth-century Europe. New York: Harcourt, stabilise and World, 1966.

In part the misinterpretations of Luther's message were due to his exploitation of the vent of indulgences which had such great relevance for all segments of the population because it was the most outstanding of the group of abuses that symbolized for the Germans the tyranny and immorality of the Roman church. Wh
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