Here is Brian’s article on the same event.
==============================
October 31st, 2017 is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his “Ninety-Five Theses” in 1517 to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenburg. This anniversary is being celebrated as Refomation Day in Germany and is a public holiday. The actual nailing is in doubt among scholars: I have not found any evidence of Luther’s Nails being sold by Protestant flim-flam artists as Religious Relics or indeed, that the nails which Luther used were the same nails that fixed an unrepentant Christ to the Holy Rood on Golgotha. I bet you there’s a Southern Baptist Rockin’ for Christ band called “LUTHER’S NAILS”, though.
What spirits were inadvertently released by a pious, stubborn and naive theologian on that All Saints’ Day, travelling through an aether known only to those with the Third Eye, from the Sacred to the Profane, leaving a Pandora’s Box never to be contained again in what began as a debate over religiously incorrect and corrupt magical thinking? This event marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which certainly did occur. And the Protestant Reformation led to much else.
Luther zealously disagreed with the very practical Catholic concept of indulgence. An indulgence was the monetary purchase of freedom from God’s wrath for sin. Of course, in Luther’s scheme of things, an indulgence was a sin itself. For those portly burghers in the pie hats who were less religious, more corporeal and mundanely practical, an indulgence could be, for example, a flatulence inducing second helping of bratwurst and sauerkraut washed down with yet another pewter flagon of excellent Weihenstephan Abbey beer (produced since 1040) and served by an indulgent, large breasted, blonde pig-tailed Fraulein who snorted when responding to lechery or ribaldry.
Specifically, Luther was speaking out against a particular indulgence scheme that rivaled the hifalutin’ hoodwinkery of priests turning wine into the blood of Christ as a sacrament of faith and which is not unlike our modern hopeful purchases of corporate shares on the stock exchange: we still trade in hope and filthy lucre. Albrecht Von Brandenburg, aristocratic Archbishop and Elector of Mainz had been made a Cardinal at 28 years of age. To pay for his pallium, an ecclesiastical vestment symbolic of the delegation of authority to him over the diocese by the Pope and to pay off other expenses of his cardinalship, Albrecht had borrowed 21,000-48,000 ducats from Jakob Fugger aka, Fugger the Rich, one of the richest muddier fuggers in history whose businesses spanned Europe and included mining, Italian textiles and banking. Fugger loans to the House of Habsburg kept it solvent and were instrumental in the acquisition through marriage of Bohemia and Hungary and Charles V of Spain becoming the Holy Roman Emperor. Fugger also established the world’s oldest social housing complex, a walled enclave within the city of Augsburg, Bavaria and still in use.
Young Albrecht had been granted permission by Pope Leo X to sell indulgences in his diocese so he could repay this loan to Jakob Fugger. There was caveat: Albrecht had to fork over one half of the indulgence sales to Leo X who had to finance the rebuilding St. Peter’s Basilica. Money, not God, makes the world go around. A well-heeled higher roller, Albrecht later took as his motto, “Lord, I admired the adornment of your house.”
Luther held that salvation and entrance through St. Peter’s Gate to the Sweet By and By are gained by neither earnest nor contrived good deeds. Nope, that would be the sin of pride or maybe wishful thinking. Rather, the obtainment of spiritual good stead is the gift of God’s grace which can only occur through a true believer’s faith in Jesus Christ as Lord Forgiver of Sin. God is love and we must love God to have his love. Most radically, Luther argued that the Bible is the only revealed knowledge from God and more significantly, held all baptized Christians to be a sacred priesthood. Each baptized Christian became his own counsel and conceiver of God. With a very short time, the import of the latter was profoundly manifested in the secular world and things have never been the same since.
Luther’s theses were printed and distributed across Europe within two months. Gutenburg’s printing press, which guided so much of modern history and was key to the Protestant Reformation, had only been invented some seventy odd years before.
It wasn’t long before Luther’s teachings spawned a hydra headed Protestantism, often to his consternation. Theologians had previously speculated about the fate of Christ’s foreskin and the number of angels that could dance on a pin head. Now, with conscience unfettered by Luther, Antinomians questioned whether one had to follow Moses’ commandments or civil laws if one was saved or whether one had to do good deeds to receive God’s grace.
Soon radical reformers threatened the new order envisioned by Luther with violent social unrest. Peasants believed Luther would condone attacks on the upper classes. Disaffected nobles joined the uprisings and by 1524, revolt turned into war. While Luther was sympathetic to the peasants he was outraged by their destruction of property and refusal to obey authority.
In his “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants“, his condemnation is unequivocal:
“Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel … For baptism does not make men free in body and property, but in soul; and the gospel does not make goods common, except in the case of those who, of their own free will, do what the apostles and disciples did in Acts 4 [:32–37]. They did not demand, as do our insane peasants in their raging, that the goods of others—of Pilate and Herod—should be common, but only their own goods. Our peasants, however, want to make the goods of other men common, and keep their own for themselves. Fine Christians they are! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. Their raving has gone beyond all measure.”
In 1526 Luther wrote: “I, Martin Luther, have during the rebellion slain all the peasants, for it was I who ordered them to be struck dead.” The rebels were defeated by the Swabian League in 1525 and the social revolutionary stage of the Reformation was spent. Luther’s Reformation went on to thrive within the gambit circumscribed by secular authority.
What began as a rant and then a religious debate, a demand for the reformation of the Church and the freedom to worship God, led to the unleashing of a tremendous energy pent up by centuries of feudalism into the dynamic individualism that transformed western society. The Protestant Reformation begat the quest for the shining city on the hill in this world. It vectored time into linearity with the future happening right now and our naive material belief in a progress which defies human nature and has God removed from our world but somehow waiting at the end of history. The material wealth, power and privilege held by a small and rigid class of aristocrats would now be pursued by all with relentless and insatiable appetite. Carpe Diem with vengeance. And community would become reduced to a marketplace of competing winners and losers comprised of atomized, distracted, disconnected and detached individuals seeking meaning in anomie.