Charles Beard: "Martin Luther and the German Reformation," Ch. 5-Ninety-...

“On the other hand, no one can deny that the sale of indulgences was at Rome simply regarded as a permitted expedient of Papal finance and took its place among other methods by which the fears and superstitions of men were made to contribute to the needs of the Church” (209). Tetzel was a native of Leipzig and trained at that University with the Dominicans, the preachers, and inquisitors. He appears in 1500 under Julius 2. In 1508-1509, he is in Gorlitz collecting money for a cooper roof at St. Peter’s. 1510—selling papal permission to eat butter on fast days for a bridge over the Elbe at Torgau. Indulgences were paraded around on pillows in processionals and affixed to church walls as educational, motivational and manipulative tools. Luther’s sermons in 1516 show his disagreement with this. He pens a letter to AB Albert of Mainz, but Al takes no action and refers the matter to Rome. Al was collecting from Tetzel to pay off his Fugger-loan (and who knows what else). Luther posts the famed 95 theses to Wittenberg’s door on 31 Oct 1517, the Eve of All Saints’ Day, the anniversary celebration of the consecration of Wittenberg’s Castle Church. Agricola calls it the “’half sheet of paper’ which so shook the world” (213). Within a month, the theses are throughout Christendom. Beard claims this was merely a call to an academic disputation and Luther had no idea how powerful and far-reaching the impact would be. Luther writes Leo X on 30 May 1518 that he had advised the Bishops and AB before 31 Oct 1517. Luther, to his own horror, met with silence from the Bishops and AB Al. As an aside, AB Al insisted on strict fiscal accounting on Tetzel’s money box, suspecting funny stuff. Beard stresses that Luther only wanted a correction of the abuses, not necessarily an end to these undefined issues of indulgences, more of a spiritual than theological impulse.