Four hundred ninety-nine years ago today, October 31, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses on the door of the Wittenburg church, challenging the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s sale of indulgences. He didn’t do this with the intention of starting what we know now as the Reformation. The nailing of these papers to the door of the church wasn’t as revolutionary an act as it might seem. At that time, the church door acted as a sort of bulletin board, and he was posting his theses there to get a discussion going and try to stimulate reform. They were written in Latin, the language of academia and liturgy, and not in German dialect, the language of the people.
We had the privilege of visiting this church in Wittenburg a couple of days ago and are showing a picture here that we took. The actual wooden doors burned down long ago and were replaced with iron doors on which the 95 theses are engraved. Martin Luther’s tomb is inside the church.
The Reformation really got underway because the church hierarchy insisted that Dr. Luther recant what he had written, and he said he could not comply, because his position was supported by Scripture and theirs was not. And so he was forced to split from the Roman Catholic church, and found many followers, and the rest is history.