This is Communio Sanctorum, the history of the Christian Church, season two.

The title of this episode is 500 Years, Part 3, The Good and the Bad.

By necessity and due to time, we ended the last episode, really in the middle of recounting Luther's

great conversion experience, where he realized that the righteousness that God requires

isn't one that's born by good works, but it's the righteousness of God himself, which

he gives freely to those who put their

trust in the atoning work of Christ. Luther later wrote that he realized he wasn't the first

one to believe that. Many of the saints of your had come to the same realization. So it wasn't

salvation by grace through faith that initially set him at odds with the Roman church.

With God Luther in trouble was what came through the crack in his thinking made by that realization.

If the church was wrong about something as central and important to the faith as how to be saved,

what else might it be wrong about? The more he studied

scripture, the more he realized that the church had gone off the rails in many ways. The most

obvious and egregious to Luther's might at least was the sale of indulgences which at that

very moment was going on in Germany. Now, since we covered the idea of indulgences in season one, we're going to skip it here.

Suffice it to say that Luther regarded the sale of indulgences as a prime example of the

abuse of spiritual authority. It seemed criminal to him that church officials would hold out

the false hope to poor and illiterate peasants

with the idea that by buying a script of paper they'd have their time or a deceased loved one's time in purgatory lessened.

Luther was so incensed that he went on a campaign in Wittenberg to make sure that no papal rep ever came

to offer indulgences to the citizen three there. But when they set up shop and a nearby town

and the people of Wittenberg headed there to secure their script, Luther ramped up his complaints.

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