26 Facts About Ninety-five Theses

Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences is a list of propositions for an academic disputation written in 1517 by Martin Luther, professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, at the time controlled by the Electorate of Saxony.

Ninety-five Theses argued that indulgences led Christians to avoid true repentance and sorrow for sin, believing that they could forgo it by obtaining an indulgence.

The Ninety-five Theses are framed as propositions to be argued in debate rather than necessarily representing Luther's opinions, but Luther later clarified his views in the Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences.

The Ninety-five Theses were quickly reprinted and translated, and distributed throughout Germany and Europe.

Ninety-five Theses had preached as early as 1514 against the abuse of indulgences and the way they cheapened grace rather than requiring true repentance.

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Ninety-five Theses preached about indulgences several times in 1517, explaining that true repentance was better than purchasing an indulgence.

Ninety-five Theses taught that receiving an indulgence presupposed that the penitent had confessed and repented, otherwise it was worthless.

Ninety-five Theses composed a Treatise on Indulgences, apparently in early autumn 1517.

Ninety-five Theses denies that the pope has any power over people in purgatory in theses 25 and 26.

Ninety-five Theses sees it as encouraging sinful greed, and says it is impossible to be certain because only God has ultimate power in forgiving punishments in purgatory.

Ninety-five Theses are written as propositions to be argued in a formal academic disputation, though there is no evidence that such an event ever took place.

Ninety-five Theses posted them on the door of All Saints' Church, as Luther was alleged to have done with the Ninety-five Theses.

Regardless, the Ninety-five Theses were well known among the Wittenberg intellectual elite soon after Luther sent them to Albert.

Ninety-five Theses were copied and distributed to interested parties soon after Luther sent the letter to Archbishop Albert.

The Latin Ninety-five Theses were printed in a four-page pamphlet in Basel, and as placards in Leipzig and Nuremberg.

Ninety-five Theses requested the opinion of theologians at the University of Mainz and conferred with his advisers.

Ninety-five Theses's advisers recommended he have Luther prohibited from preaching against indulgences in accordance with the indulgence bull.

Mazzolini wrote A Dialogue against Martin Luther's Presumptuous Ninety-five Theses concerning the Power of the Pope, which focused on Luther's questioning of the pope's authority rather than his complaints about indulgence preaching.

Ninety-five Theses responded with Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences, in which he attempted to clear himself of the charge that he was attacking the pope.

Ninety-five Theses later said he might not have begun the controversy had he known where it would lead.

Johann Tetzel responded to the Ninety-five Theses by calling for Luther to be burnt for heresy and having theologian Konrad Wimpina write 106 theses against Luther's work.

Indulgence controversy set off by the Ninety-five Theses was the beginning of the Reformation, a schism in the Roman Catholic Church which initiated profound and lasting social and political change in Europe.

Luther later wrote that at the time he wrote the Ninety-five Theses he remained a "papist", and he did not seem to think the Ninety-five Theses represented a break with established Roman Catholic doctrine.

The Ninety-five Theses made evident that Luther believed the church was not preaching properly and that this put the laity in serious danger.

Further, the Ninety-five Theses contradicted the decree of Pope Clement VI, in 1343, that indulgences are the treasury of the church.

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The posting of the Ninety-five Theses was established in the historiography of the Reformation as the beginning of the movement by Philip Melanchthon in his 1548 Historia de vita et actis Lutheri.