{"id":2240,"date":"2018-05-09T22:46:02","date_gmt":"2018-05-09T22:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/?p=2240"},"modified":"2018-05-11T02:55:25","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T02:55:25","slug":"95-theses-spiraling-out-of-contro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/2018\/05\/09\/95-theses-spiraling-out-of-contro\/","title":{"rendered":"95 Theses: Spiraling Out of Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

$\"95$ <\/a><\/p>\n

Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and ordinary lecturer at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When Martin Luther posted his \u201c95 Theses\u201d on the church door at Wittenberg, he may have intended no more than an academic dispute among faculty at the local university. At the time, he was Professor of Moral Theology, and the \u201cTheses\u201d were in Latin, the language of the academy. There is debate about when, or even if, this nailing of the theses occurred.<\/p>\n
The drama of Luther walking through Wittenberg with his hammer and his nails is very, very unlikely to have happened,\u201d says Professor Andrew Pettegree, an expert on the Reformation from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. \u201cThe castle church door was the normal noticeboard of the university. This was not an act of defiance on Luther\u2019s part, it was simply what you did to make a formal publication. It would probably have been pasted to the door rather than nailed up.\u201d<\/em> (Time<\/a>).<\/p>\n
Luther\u2019s bold statements were circulated widely among scholars, and soon \u201cwent viral\u201d (The Economist<\/a>). His work was translated into German, without Luther\u2019s knowledge, and thanks to the printing press, within weeks his ideas had circulated throughout Germany and beyond.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,\u201d he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he \u201cshould have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
You are surprised that I did not send them to you. But I did not want to circulate them widely. I only intended to submit them to a few close friends for discussion, and if they disapproved of the Theses, to suppress them. I wanted to publish them, only if they met with approval. But now they are being printed and spread everywhere far beyond my expectation, a result that I regret. It is not that I am against telling the people the truth, in fact that is all that I want, but this is not the proper way to instruct the people. For I have doubts about some of the Theses, and others I would have put much differently and more cogently, and some I would have omitted, had I known what was to come. Still, the spread of my Theses shows what people everywhere really think of Indulgences\u2026 (Martin Luther, Letter to Christoph Schuerl, March 5, 1518)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nonetheless, he persisted in advocating his views, and at first, not much happened. The Bishop of Brandenburg merely passed Luther\u2019s letter and the Theses on up to his superiors in Rome. Pope Leo\u2019s initial reaction was \u201cBrother Martin is a man of fine genius, and this outbreak is a mere squabble of envious monks.\u201d Later he wrote, \u201cIt is a drunken German who wrote the Theses; when sober he will change his mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, as the furor for reform continued to brew, Luther was quickly viewed by the church hierarchy as a threat. He was called to recant his views, refused, and was excommunicated.<\/p>\n
Whatever Luther\u2019s original intent, the 95 Theses brought sudden fame to Luther and his ideas, and precipitated a break with Roman Catholicism. Events quickly spun out of the control of either Luther or the Pope. The Indulgence controversy was the soil out of which a political, social, and ecclesiastical revolution grew. A quiet academic dispute went viral. The ideas of Luther challenged the established order and remade Europe.<\/p>\n
\n
Addendum:<\/p>\n
The traditional date of the start of the Protestant Reformation, October 31, 1517, more properly reflects the day that Luther mailed a letter, along with a copy of the Theses, to Albert, the archbishop of Brandenburg. This letter read, in part:<\/p>\n
Under your most distinguished name, papal indulgences are offered over all the land for the construction of St. Peter \u2026 I do not so much complain about the quacking of the preachers which I haven\u2019t heard, but I bewail the gross misunderstanding among the people which comes from these preachers \u2026 Evidently the poor souls believe that when they have bought indulgence letters they are assured salvation. They are likewise convinced that souls escape purgatory as soon as they have placed a contribution in the chest.<\/p>\n
The first and only duty of the bishops is to see that the people learn the gospel and the love of Christ \u2026 for on no occasion has Christ ordered that indulgences should be preached \u2026 what a horror, what a danger for a bishop to permit the loud noise of indulgences among his people, while the gospel is silenced \u2026<\/em><\/body><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and ordinary lecturer at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,99],"tags":[919,1038,1037,404,403],"class_list":["post-2240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-heroes-of-the-faith","tag-95-theses","tag-going-viral","tag-indulgences","tag-martin-luther","tag-protestant-reformation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2254,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions\/2254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}