The Ninety-Five Theses

 

The Ninety-Five Theses was a document written by Martin Luther published in the year 1517.  Luther wrote this document in order to get a message across to the Catholic Church.  He believed that the practice of selling indulgences was completely outrageous, so he wrote the Ninety-Five Theses as a sort of argument against the indulgence salesmen.  He had written it expecting that people would want to debate him on the matter but no one came out to debate him on it until 1519.

By writing the Ninety-Five Theses many church officials, including the Pope, became outraged with Luther’s radical behavior.  Luther simply wanted the practice of indulgences to be stopped.

Indulgences were being sold in order to help people who were either deceased or living to swiftly leave purgatory, a place in between Heaven and Earth where a person went to endure punishments for his temporal sins; sins confessed that a person had received penance for but the temporal punishment still remained.  Not only could indulgences be obtained by money but by completing pious acts, such as praying a certain prayer, reading the Bible for a certain amount of time and so on.

Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses impacted the whole Western World and possibly is one of the reasons why our world has the variety of religions that it does today.