Indulgences
On the last day of October 1517, an Augustinian friar and professor of Bible at a small Saxon university drew up ninety-five propositions for academic debate. Their subject was not the papacy, not the Mass, not justification by faith. Their subject was indulgences. Within three years the debate had become a fire that no one could put out.
It is worth asking why. Indulgences look, to a modern Protestant, like a curious medieval oddity — a paper certificate, a coin in a box, a piece of ecclesiastical fundraising long since abandoned. They were nothing of the kind. An indulgence was the visible tip of an entire system of salvation: a system in which the guilt of sin is forgiven by God but a debt of punishment remains, in which that debt is discharged by suffering here or in purgatory hereafter, and in which the Church holds a treasury of surplus merit that she may dispense to shorten the sentence. Touch the indulgence and you touch the whole. Luther touched it, and the whole came down.
What an Indulgence Is
Rome has never taught that an indulgence forgives sin. This must be said plainly at the outset, because Protestants have often attacked a caricature and thereby missed the real difficulty. Forgiveness of guilt belongs to the sacrament of penance; an indulgence operates afterward, upon what penance is said to leave behind.
The current definition, given in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and taken over word for word from Paul VI’s apostolic constitution Indulgentiarum doctrina of 1967, runs as follows:
An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints.1 Catechism of the Catholic Church§ 1471
Four things in that sentence carry the weight. First, temporal punishment: not hell, but a penalty in time, to be worked off in this life or in purgatory. Second, whose guilt has already been forgiven: the indulgence presupposes absolution and adds to it. Third, the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints: a deposit of merit on which the Church may draw. Fourth, the action of the Church: the transaction is ecclesiastical, dispensed by authority.
Indulgences are of two kinds. A partial indulgence remits some portion of the temporal penalty; a plenary indulgence remits the whole of it. The Catechism puts the distinction in a single line: an indulgence “is partial or plenary according as it removes either part or all of the temporal punishment due to sin.”2 They may be gained for oneself, or offered on behalf of the dead.
The Theology Beneath It
The indulgence rests on a chain of prior commitments, and the chain must be seen whole.
First, a division within the penalty of sin. Rome distinguishes the eternal punishment of sin, which is separation from God, from its temporal punishment, which remains after guilt is pardoned. The Catechism is explicit that absolution does not settle the second account:
The forgiveness of sin and restoration of communion with God entail the remission of the eternal punishment of sin, but temporal punishment of sin remains.3 Catechism of the Catholic Church§ 1473
Everything follows from that sentence. If a debt of punishment survives forgiveness, it must be paid somewhere, by someone, out of something. The rest of the system is the answer to that question.
Second, purgatory. If the debt is not discharged before death it is discharged after it, in a state of purification. Purgatory is not a second chance at salvation; it is, in Roman teaching, the place where the saved finish paying. The indulgence is therefore a means of shortening or canceling that payment, for oneself or for another.
Third, the treasury of merit. Christ’s satisfaction is held to be infinite, and to it are added the surplus satisfactions of Mary and the saints — men and women who, it is said, suffered more than their own debts required. This surplus constitutes a fund. The doctrine was given formal shape by Pope Clement VI in the bull Unigenitus Dei Filius of 1343, which spoke of a treasure acquired by Christ and committed to Peter and his successors to dispense.4
Fourth, the power of the keys. The Church claims authority to open that treasury by the power of binding and loosing given in Matthew 16:19:
An indulgence is obtained through the Church who, by virtue of the power of binding and loosing granted her by Christ Jesus, intervenes in favor of individual Christians and opens for them the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints to obtain from the Father of mercies the remission of the temporal punishments due for their sins.5 Catechism of the Catholic Church§ 1478
Remove any one link and the indulgence has nothing to stand on. If forgiveness leaves no debt, there is nothing to remit. If there is no purgatory, there is nowhere to remit it from. If Christ’s satisfaction needs no supplement, there is no treasury to open. This is why the Reformation could not treat indulgences as a mere abuse of discipline. The abuse was a symptom; the doctrine was the disease.
How the Practice Developed
Indulgences were not invented in a single stroke. They grew, as most corruptions grow, by small and reasonable-looking steps from a defensible beginning.
Penitential discipline. In the early centuries a Christian guilty of grave and public sin was assigned a public penance — sometimes lasting years — before readmission to the Lord’s Table. The penance was a matter of church order and pastoral gravity, not of paying God.
Commutation. Bishops could shorten or exchange a penance for a lighter work: a pilgrimage, an alms, a fast. The relaxation was called an indulgentia. So far the transaction was disciplinary; it touched the Church’s penalty, not God’s.
The Crusades. The decisive turn came in 1095, when Urban II at the Council of Clermont offered the crusader remission of penance for the journey to Jerusalem. What had been a relaxation of church discipline became a reward for a meritorious act — and, in the popular mind, a transaction with God himself.6
The treasury defined. Thirteenth-century theologians supplied the mechanism, and Clement VI in 1343 gave it official voice. The Church now had, in principle, an inexhaustible fund and the keys to it.
Extension to the dead. In 1476 Sixtus IV permitted indulgences to be applied to souls in purgatory, by way of suffrage.7 This was the change that made the traffic irresistible, for it turned the indulgence from a personal discipline into an act of family affection. A man might be indifferent about his own penance; he was not indifferent about his mother.
The printing press. The last ingredient was mechanical. The same press that would carry Luther’s theses across Germany in a fortnight had for decades been turning out indulgence certificates by the thousand. Some of the earliest surviving products of European printing are not Bibles but letters of indulgence. The machine that would free the Word of God had first been set to work multiplying the paper that obscured it.
The Abuse: Mainz, the Fuggers, and Tetzel
By 1517 the system had produced a scandal so precise that it might have been designed to illustrate the doctrine’s worst tendencies.
Albert of Brandenburg, already holding two bishoprics while under the canonical age, wanted the archbishopric of Mainz as well. The dispensation was expensive. Albert borrowed the money from the Fugger banking house of Augsburg, and Leo X — needing funds for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s — authorized a plenary indulgence to be preached across Albert’s territories. The proceeds were to be divided: half to Rome for the basilica, half to the Fuggers to retire Albert’s debt. An agent of the bank traveled with the preachers to count the takings.8
The chief preacher was the Dominican Johann Tetzel, a man of real gifts as a crowd speaker and no discernible scruple. His sermons pressed the claim that the indulgence delivered souls from purgatory immediately and infallibly, and the sales jingle attributed to his campaign has outlived every sermon he preached:
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.9 Attributed to Johann Tetzel
Whether Tetzel uttered those exact words is disputed; that the claim was being made in substance is not, for Luther quotes it in order to condemn it, and Tetzel’s own instructions from Mainz went a long way toward it. The Instructio Summaria issued for the campaign assured buyers of a “complete remission of all sins” and promised that for souls in purgatory no contrition or confession was required of the giver at all.10
It is important to say what was and was not new here. Rome’s own theologians regarded much of Tetzel’s preaching as excessive, and the papacy would later discipline the traffic. But the excess was not an alien growth upon a healthy body. It was the doctrine of the treasury, the doctrine of temporal punishment, and the doctrine of purgatory, preached to ordinary people in the only terms ordinary people could act on. The scandal was the system speaking with an unguarded tongue.
Luther and the Ninety-Five Theses
Tetzel was forbidden to enter Saxony, but Wittenbergers crossed the border to buy, and Luther met the certificates in the confessional. Penitents came to him holding papers which, they believed, excused them from contrition. He was their pastor; he could not absolve what would not repent. That pastoral collision, not a scholar’s quarrel, produced the Ninety-Five Theses.
The document opens by relocating repentance entirely:
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [Matt. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.11 Martin LutherNinety-Five Theses, 1
That first thesis is the whole Reformation in a sentence. If repentance is the shape of the Christian life rather than a transaction to be completed and certified, then the entire apparatus of satisfaction and remission has lost its reason for existing.
From there Luther works outward. He denies that the pope can remit guilt at all except declaratively (5, 6). He states that the truly contrite have what the certificate promises, without the certificate:
Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters.12 Martin LutherNinety-Five Theses, 36
He turns on the jingle directly:
They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.13 Martin LutherNinety-Five Theses, 27
And he pronounces upon the buyer’s false assurance a judgment as severe as anything he ever wrote: those who “believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.”14
Then comes the thesis that reaches past the abuse to the doctrine, and past the doctrine to the gospel:
The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.15 Martin LutherNinety-Five Theses, 62
There is the hinge. Rome had a treasury of merit; Luther answers that the Church’s treasure is not a fund of accumulated satisfactions but the good news itself. The closing theses set the Christian life against the sold certificate with deliberate severity: believers are to follow Christ “through penalties, death, and hell,” and so “be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace.”16
It should be remembered that in October 1517 Luther was not a Protestant. He believed in purgatory, held the papal office in respect, and expected Leo X to welcome the correction. The theses were written in Latin for academic debate. Their translation into German and rapid printing — which Luther neither planned nor at first welcomed — put a scholarly disputation into the hands of a continent.
The Verdict of the Reformers
As the Reformation matured, the critique moved from the abuse to the foundation. What Luther had questioned in 1517, the second generation denied outright.
Calvin treats indulgences in the Institutes immediately after satisfaction and immediately before purgatory, and he treats all three as one error. His language is not measured, and it is not meant to be:
These, to describe them truly, are a profanation of the blood of Christ, and a delusion of Satan, by which the Christian people are led away from the grace of God and the life which is in Christ.17 John CalvinInstitutes, III.v.2
His objection is exactly the one the system cannot answer. If the saints have surplus merit to lend, then their sufferings accomplished something Christ’s did not; and if Christ’s satisfaction is complete, the treasury is empty of everything but his, and nothing remains to be remitted. Of purgatory, on which the whole traffic depends, Calvin is equally direct:
Purgatory is a deadly device of Satan; that it makes void the cross of Christ; that it offers intolerable insult to the divine mercy; that it undermines and overthrows our faith.18 John CalvinInstitutes, III.v.6
The confessions followed. The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles disposed of the whole complex in a single article of one sentence:
The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.19 Thirty-Nine ArticlesArticle XXII, 1571
The word fond in sixteenth-century English means foolish. The article does not argue; it dismisses — and it grounds the dismissal where the Reformation always grounded it, in the absence of any warrant from Scripture.
The Answer of Trent
The Council of Trent sat, with interruptions, from 1545 to 1563. On indulgences it did two things at once, and both must be reported if the council is to be treated honestly.
It reformed the abuse. The Decree Concerning Indulgences, passed in the council’s closing days in December 1563, abolished the office of the professional indulgence-seller outright and ordered that “all evil gains for the obtaining thereof … be wholly abolished,” instructing bishops to collect the abuses of their own dioceses and report them to Rome.20 The commercial traffic that had provoked Luther was ended by the church that had permitted it.
But it confirmed the doctrine, and confirmed it under anathema:
Whereas the power of conferring Indulgences was granted by Christ to the Church; and she has, even in the most ancient times, used the said power … the sacred holy Synod teaches and enjoins that the use of Indulgences, for the Christian people most salutary … is to be retained in the Church; and It condemns with anathema those who either assert that they are useless, or who deny that there is in the Church the power of granting them.21 Council of TrentSession XXV, Decree Concerning Indulgences, 1563
Seventeen years earlier the council had already closed the door on the Reformation’s central contention. Among the canons on justification in Session VI stands one aimed precisely at the evangelical doctrine that forgiveness leaves nothing to pay:
If any one saith, that, after the grace of Justification has been received, to every penitent sinner the guilt is remitted, and the debt of eternal punishment is blotted out in such wise, that there remains not any debt of temporal punishment to be discharged either in this world, or in the next in Purgatory, before the entrance to the kingdom of heaven can be opened (to him); let him be anathema.22 Council of TrentSession VI, Canon XXX, 1547
Read that canon slowly, for it is the exact inverse of Romans 8:1. To say that the justified sinner owes God no further punishment — which is what Paul says, and what every Reformed confession says — is, by the judgment of Trent, to be accursed. The two positions are not variations of emphasis within one gospel. They are two different answers to the question of what the cross accomplished.
Indulgences in the Roman Church Today
It is sometimes assumed that indulgences quietly lapsed after the Reformation, or were abandoned at the Second Vatican Council. They were not. They were revised, regularized, and reaffirmed.
In 1967 Paul VI issued the apostolic constitution Indulgentiarum doctrina, which simplified the system — abolishing the old reckoning in days and years, which had encouraged the arithmetical superstition that a given prayer bought a fixed quantity of relief — while restating the doctrine in full. That constitution supplies the definition the Catechism now carries. The Code of Canon Law of 1983 states it again in law:
An indulgence is the remission before God of temporal punishment for sins whose guilt is already forgiven, which a properly disposed member of the Christian faithful gains under certain and defined conditions by the assistance of the Church.23 Code of Canon LawCanon 992, 1983
The canon immediately following provides that any of the faithful “can gain partial or plenary indulgences for oneself or apply them to the dead by way of suffrage.”24 The Catechism says the same, and grounds it in the communion of saints: since the faithful departed are members of that communion, “one way we can help them is to obtain indulgences for them, so that the temporal punishments due for their sins may be remitted.”25
Nor is this a dormant provision. The Ordinary Jubilee of 2025, proclaimed by Pope Francis in the bull Spes non confundit, was accompanied by the customary grant of the Jubilee indulgence, with detailed conditions published by the Apostolic Penitentiary; the bull commends it as “a way of discovering the unlimited nature of God’s mercy,” and directs it “in a particular way” to the dead.26 Five centuries after Wittenberg, the pilgrim who fulfills the conditions still receives what Tetzel sold, minus the price.
Removing the money was a real reform, and it should be acknowledged as one. But the coin was never the heart of the matter. Luther’s first thesis was not about money, and his sixty-second thesis was not about money. The objection is to a treasury that supplements Christ, a punishment that survives pardon, and a Church that stands between the sinner and the sufficiency of the cross.
The Finished Work of Christ
The Reformed answer to indulgences is not chiefly an argument about medieval finance. It is a confession about what happened at Golgotha, and it can be stated in four claims, each of which rests on the plain speech of Scripture.
The satisfaction of Christ was complete. The letter to the Hebrews contrasts the endless repetition of the old sacrifices with the single offering of the Son: “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). A sacrifice that perfects for all time leaves no arrears. There is no surplus to be supplied by Mary, by the saints, or by the sufferer himself, because there is no deficit. From the cross the Lord said, “It is finished” (John 19:30), and he was not speaking of a first installment.
The pardon of God leaves nothing to pay. This is the precise point at which Trent pronounced anathema, and the precise point at which Scripture is least ambiguous. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Not a reduced condemnation, not a condemnation commuted to temporal penalty: none. Paul says that God forgave us all our trespasses, “by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:13–14). A canceled debt is not a rescheduled debt. And “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7) — from all of it, guilt and penalty together.
The benefit is received by faith, not purchased. “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). Peace is the very thing the indulgence offered and could not give, because peace is not a commodity to be dispensed but a standing to be received. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). See sola fide and sola gratia.
The gift of God is not for sale. When Simon offered the apostles money for the power of the Spirit, Peter did not negotiate a lower price. He said, “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!” (Acts 8:20). The first recorded attempt to buy a spiritual benefit in the Christian church was met not with regulation but with horror. That the practice should have been regularized, priced, franchised, and defended under anathema is among the heaviest indictments the Reformation ever brought.
And there is one more thing to say, which belongs to the pulpit rather than to controversy. The doctrine of indulgences is, at bottom, a pastoral answer to a real terror. Medieval men and women knew they were sinners and knew that God is holy, and the Church offered them something to do about it. The tragedy of the system is not that it took their fear seriously. It is that it took their money and left the fear in place, because a remission that must be renewed can never be rested in. Thesis 32 is the pastoral heart of Luther’s protest: those who trust the certificate are left, at the end, with a piece of paper.
What the gospel offers is not a reduction of the sentence but its abolition, and not a treasury of merit but a Person. Christ alone is the Church’s treasure, and he is not rationed. To the sinner who has nothing to bring and nothing to pay, the word is still the word of Isaiah: “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isaiah 55:1).
That is the answer to the coin in the coffer. The soul does not spring from purgatory when the money rings. The sinner is welcomed at the cross when he comes with empty hands.
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.
