208 DESTINY DISRUPTED
In fact, the conviction gripped Luther that salvation could not be
earned, like a pension. It was a gift, which could only be received, and then
only through faith, an inner process, never through "works," external
deeds and doings.
Armed with this insight, Luther looked around and saw a world full of
people pursuing salvation through "works," and to make it all worse,
works prescribed by a vast, wealthy, well-organized bureaucracy, the
Church of Rome. It filled him with horror, for if his insight was true, all
these "works" were for naught!
Of all the "works" prescribed by the Church, the one that most alarmed
and offended Luther was the granting of indulgences. An indulgence was
a remission of punishment for certain sins, which the Church proclaimed
itself empowered to give, in exchange for good and valuable considera-
tions. The practice went back to the Crusades, when the pope offered in-
dulgences to those who signed up to fight the heathen Turk. Later, as
crusading opportunities faded out, the Church began to grant indulgences
in exchange for cash contributions. Given the petty corruption that in-
evitably infests any far-flung bureaucratic system, some clerics here and
there-let's face it-probably handed out indulgences in exchange for cash
contributions to, well, themselves. Any way you look at it, by Martin
Luther's time, the whole practice of granting indulgences had come to
mean that people could supposedly buy their way out of purgatory and
fast-track their way into heaven.
Making people pay to get into heaven was bad enough. But to Luther
the practice smacked of something worse. If salvation was a direct, per-
sonal interaction between each individual and God, then the Church was
extorting bribes to let people through a gate they had no actual power to
open or keep shut. It wasn't just corruption. It was thievery and deception
of the worst sort!
On Halloween night, 1517, Luther nailed an inflammatory document
to the door of a church in Wittenberg in which he set forth ninety-five
"theses," ninety-five objections to the Church and its doings. Luther's paper
was an overnight sensation, and it sparked the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestant Reformation was no single thing. Once Luther opened
the gates, the passion spread in numerous directions with numerous re-
formers launching separate movements and many new sects springing up,