Full Text for Church History 2- Volume 4 - When Did Indulgences Begin? (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED TEXT CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 04-CH2 ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***** >> JOSHUA: Hello, Professor. I'm glad Paul is giving me a chance now. My name is Joshua, and I'm serving in a small rural community in Wyoming. Our congregation members enter discussion about church history every once in a while, and I find I'm not always as well versed as I�d like to be to help answer their questions. So I've been looking forward to this class. I know that all of church history is important to know if we are to understand the confessions properly. So let me begin with a question which explores a time earlier than Luther's. We have been discussing with the medieval church said about indulgences. But I wonder whether this idea was part of the early church�s teaching before the medieval age. When did indulgences begin? >> DR. PAUL ROBINSON: As mentioned in my last lecture, the idea of indulgences goes back to the practice of penance, that you confess your sins, and to demonstrate your real sorrow over your sins, you�re assigned some sort of penance to do. That became a very common idea in the early Middle Ages, especially under the influence of the Irish monks. What happened to indulgences, though, that made them an issue for Luther really has to do with the Crusades, believe it or not. When the pope called for a crusade, when he called for soldiers to go to the Holy Land to take it back from the Muslims, one of the problems was how to encourage people to do this. So the pope decided that anyone who would offer to go on crusade could receive the so-called plenary indulgence. I mentioned that in the last lecture, too. That simply means a fall indulgence. It's remission of all the penalties that you�ve incurred up to that point in your life. The idea being that going on Crusade and, very possibly not coming back alive, was a big enough sacrifice to merit the cancellation of all previous penalties that have been imposed in confession. So Crusaders could get this plenary indulgence. But then the practice began of having one person pay for another to go on crusade. This is very similar to what happened in our own U.S. civil war where people who were called up to serve could pay someone else to go in their place. In the Crusades, too, it was very expensive to outfit a Knight for a crusade so very often, a rich merchant would pay for someone else to go. Then the question arose, of course, does the person paying also get the indulgence. And the answer was: of course, why not. And so what happened was gradually that payment from one person to the crusader simply became a payment to the church to receive the indulgence. So what began as a reward for going on crusade eventually came to involve a direct cash payment to get this indulgence. Part of the problem with this was how to justify it theologically. The idea of an indulgence was clear enough that it's replacing the penalties imposed in confession, but now, what's the rationale behind the plenary indulgences? What's really happening here? And what the theologians in the Middle Ages decided was happening was this: the pope was dispensing merits from a so-called treasury of merits. These merits were the extra good works done by Christ and Mary and the saints, more works than they needed for their own salvation that were now available to other Christians who were in need of these extra merits. And the Pope had the right to dispense from this treasury of merits. If you look at the text of the theses and 56 through 62, this is what Luther has in mind. He keeps talking about the treasuries of the church. And he doesn't specifically mention this treasury of merits, but he does say in 58, for example, "nor are they the merits of Christ and the saints because even apart from the pope, these merits are always working grace in the inner man and working the cross, death, and hell in the outer man. Luther's point being the merits of Christ and the saints are available to Christians, even without the Pope's intervention. But you see there Luther is reacting to the medieval theological justification for these plenary indulgences. The other thing to keep in mind is these plenary indulgences had become much more widely available in the late Middle ages. At the time of the Crusades, they weren't all that common. They became much more common beginning in the year 1300, which was declared a jubilee year by the pope. And so he made these indulgences available to anyone who would go to Rome and purchase one. You may recall that Pope John Paul II declared 2000 a jubilee year, and indulgences were made available in that year, although you no longer have to pay for them, but it's the same idea of a jubilee year and a special indulgence connected with it. So the practice is still very much there, although not in exactly the same way as it was in Luther's day. A lot of things that Luther complained about have been taken out of the system.