This quick study on Reformation History was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on September 24, 2017. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.
Martin Luther had a problem. He was okay with the idea of indulgences, that piece of paper that seemed to get you time off of Purgatory, but he wasn’t okay with buying them. He felt it akin to the idea of Jesus scourging the Temple, not because there was money in the church, but because it seemed like there was a way in which you could buy your salvation. That didn’t seem right; in fact, the Scriptures outright condemn such a thing. So, when he started to think about these issues, he found himself confronted with his own personal archenemy, Johann Tetzel.
Tetzel was a German preacher and monk who made a bit of a name for himself. It seems he was quite the orator and could have been said to charm the light off of the sun. It so happens that he was quite skilled in theology as well, and was promoted as the head of the inquisition in Poland. That meant that he basically got to decide if people were teaching and believing heresy, and, if they were, kill them.
Somewhere along the line, Tetzel just disappeared. No one quite knows where he was for a couple of years, but in 1517, having gone back to his monastic order, he was promoted to Grand Commissioner of Indulgences in Germany. Now, remember that Pope Leo X began selling indulgences in order to get the Vatican out of bankruptcy and rebuild St. Peter’s Church. Indulgences were the only way, it seemed, to do this. So, Tetzel, preacher extraordinaire, was promoted to bring in the cash, keep the money rolling, send the bread and butter all the way to Rome.
And he did. Tetzel was good. He was really good. Tetzel knew how to work a crowd, and more than that, he knew how to give the crowd what they wanted before they even knew what they wanted. I would call Tetzel an innovator when it came to his methods; he was very innovative. If that sounds like a good thing, it’s not. I can tell you that there really has never been any point in history that, when someone decides to innovate in the Church that it ends up well. Innovation usually leads to spiritual death.
Now, Tetzel was pure Roman Catholic. Just about everything he taught and did was right along with Roman theology. But, when he began innovating, when he began to run horribly awful plays to scare people into buying more indulgences, plays akin to the scariest horror movie you’ve seen, when he began innovating, he got careless. He is famous for saying, Every time the coin in the coffer clings, the soul from Purgatory springs. He even said he could forgive the sins of the person who did unspeakable things to the mother of Christ. Tetzel’s methods lead to careless doctrine. And careless doctrine in Wittenberg got Luther’s attention.
No longer was Luther just concerned with indulgence selling. Now he was concerned with how they were sold. And as he pondered the methods, he began also began to question the entire practice, where it was found in the Scriptures, why certain things were occurring, until one day, October 31, 1517, he left his cloister, hammer in hand, and went to the town’s church and tacked a small document to the door. We talk about Luther’s 95 theses next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment