Every man is a reformer; only it so often happens that he has the wrong reform. Except for Martin Luther. His 95 theses especially target the practice of selling indulgences. What are indulgences and how did the scheme work? The Roman Catholic Church said that the merits of Christ and the saints were in the good keeping of the church’s treasury. The church could open the vault at any time and give portions of the treasury at any time, to whomever it pleased. When someone paid for an indulgence, the church was deputized by Christ to take the payment for a bit of heavenly treasure. In effect, someone’s money could be taken by the church in payments to forgive sins and cancel moral debts.

Johannes Tetzel was the Commissioner of Indulgences in Germany. His legendary powers of persuasion triangulated guilt, goodwill, and das geldinto the most successful shakedown ever operated out of the back of a wagon.  When the financial needs of Rome became more pressing, Tetzel became more valuable. As Luther would prove, Tetzel was trading theological snake oil for eternal paradise. Thesis number 32, “Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.”

Luther didn’t realize the trouble his 95 theses would stir up partly because he was unaware of how personally invested the archbishop was in Tetzel’s indulgence drive. The Archbishop of Mainz was Albrecht of Brandenburg. As far as Luther knew, Tetzel sold indulgences to raise money for Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Truth be told, Albrecht didn’t merely permit Tetzel to sell indulgences in his territory. Albrecht was working with Tetzel, and that was because of a very dark secret.

How did it come to be that Albrecht was Archbishop of Mainz? After all, he was already the Archbishop of Magdeburg and the Vatican had a rule forbidding people from holding multiple archbishoprics concurrently. But, the Vatican’s pecuniary motivations knew few limits. Everything was for sale, which meant for the right sum of money, that which was officially verboten could be overlooked. So, to satisfy his appetite for power, the ambitious Albrecht had to acquire an extortionate amount of money.

How was Albrecht to wangle such a staggering figure? The answer was to borrow the twenty-three thousand ducats from Jakob Fugger of the fat-cat Fugger banking family. But how could Albrecht pay it back? Pope Leo X had a resourceful idea. If Albrecht sponsored an indulgence campaign in his territory, the pope would permit him to keep half of the money raised to pay back the Fuggers.

The details of this arrangement were kept quiet. Certainly, those who pitched their coins into the iron coffers didn’t realize what they were funding. It’s bad enough that the simple faithful thought they could buy forgiveness from sins and simultaneously construct St. Peter’s. Little did they know that half of their payment was financing debt of ludicrous proportions so that papal rules could be ignored by the pope.

Whenever anyone chooses riches and luxury as their centrum, they’ve set their sails for destruction. The trouble for Albrecht, Leo, and Tetzel was this: Luther had read his Bible and was eager to disclose what he found. These mighty men knew they were swindlers and Luther knew they were swindlers. The problem formed when they knew that Luther knew they were swindlers. The result was an ossified church in Rome. It’s a testimony to how much panic one honest person can spread among a multitude of avaricious charlatans.

Bibliography

Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2017), 44-46, 111-113, 122-126.

Here are some more articles if you’d like to read more about the Reformation

The Reformation: What is it?

The Reformation: Why was it Necessary?

The Reformation: Why was it tragic?