dulgence is to intervene in what stands between sinner and God. The intervention option was appropriated by the Church's doctrine of the "treasury of merit," or "spiritual treasury," a means of "giving us a share in the merits of the Blessed Virgin and of the saints" (Kinkead 193, 195).
Traditionally, indulgences were attached to the performance of some spiritual service--special prayers, a novena, or something similar. But by Martin Luther's lifetime, the Church had been selling indulgences for at least two hundred years. In 1517, to finance his patronage of Raphael and complete the construction of St. Peter's in Rome begun under Pope Julius II with Michelangelo, Pope Leo X (son of Lorenzo de Medici) "proclaimed" indulgences, which meant that he authorized their sale. Catholic theologians even at the time did protest against the practice, and the sale of indulgences was officially banned at the Council of Trent in 1562 ("Indulgence" 1331).
Martin Luther, Augustinian monk and professor of theology at Wittenberg, was obviously steeped in Catholic soteriological doctrine. But he was an ascetic contemplative who was preoccupied, almost obsessed, with anxiety over his salvation, something not uncommon in Europe at this "intensely religious" period (Hillerbrand xiii). Luther was also on what today would be called a fast career track in the Church hierarchy. But on a first business trip to Rome in 1510, he was "shocked by the spiritual laxity apparent in high ecclesiastical places" ("Luther" 1630). This drove him more deeply into anxiety, and he turned to the Bible for guidance.
He found it. Even as over the next seven years he rose higher in Church administration, Luther articulated with increasing force his view that salvation lay not in indulgences but in faith in God's love, as set forth in Scripture. Thus when in 1517 one Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar, showed up in Wittenberg openly selling Leo X's indulgences--"A penny in th...