Martin Luther & the Reformation

On October 31, 1517, an Augustinian friar walked to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Saxony, and posted a document. The document listed ninety-five points of dispute. The friar was A German Augustinian friar, theologian, and professor at the University of Wittenberg (1483-1546). Luther's challenge to the Catholic Church's sale of indulgences in 1517 triggered the Protestant Reformation. His theological writings, German Bible translation, and hymns reshaped Western Christianity and European politics permanently., a thirty-three-year-old theology professor who had been brooding over the state of his church for years. The act itself was routine. University scholars posted theses on church doors regularly as invitations to academic debate. Nobody expected what happened next.

Within weeks, printers across Germany had copied Luther's Latin text, translated it into German, and distributed it to a reading public hungry for exactly this kind of argument. By December, copies had reached France, England, and Italy. A local academic exercise had become a continental event. Luther had not planned a revolution. He got one anyway.

The specific target of his anger was the sale of Certificates sold by the Catholic Church that promised the buyer (or a deceased loved one) reduced time in purgatory. Originally tied to acts of penance, indulgences became a major revenue source by the late medieval period. Johann Tetzel's aggressive marketing of indulgences in Germany directly provoked Luther's 95 Theses.. The Dominican friar Johann Tetzel had been traveling through the German lands selling papal certificates that promised to reduce time in purgatory for the buyer or their dead relatives. "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs," Tetzel allegedly declared. The money funded the construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, a building project that had been hemorrhaging papal finances for decades.