rived.
Luther "shared with his contemporaries the conviction that all mankind would appear before the Judgement seat of Christ" (Lienhard 86). The fear of eternal damnation had driven Christians for centuries and explained the power of the Church which alone could aid people in their search for salvation. Luther had been an Augustinian monk for three years and during that period he was perpetually "weighed down by the sense of sin and the hopelessness of winning forgiveness" (Stevenson 31). He was struck by the seeming gap between his own awful human sinfulness and the perpetual, glorious holiness of God and could see no way to bridge the separation between them. He was ordered to perform penances and to be truly repentant--all of which he did without ever feeling that he had eradicated the sinfulness that was inherent in his very being. When he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Wittenberg by Frederick the Elector of Saxony, later one of his strongest supporters, Luther acquired a reputation for holiness and for learning. Eventually, however, the Indulgences controversy of 1517 flared up and proved to be the key to his resolution of his greatest problem.
This protest against the Church's sale of indulgences "swelled into Protestantism" as Luther had discovered that faith alone provided the bridge across the terrible gap between sinfulness and divine holiness and recognized that indulgences and other interventions by the Church in the process of individual salvation were usually futile (Sykes 34). Indulgences, which were sold exclusively by the papacy, were the remittance of the consequences of sin in Purgatory--the place of punishment that lay between one's time on Earth and one's acceptance into heaven. According to the claims of the Church a "treasury of Merits accumulated by the saints could be made available to lighten the satisfaction incumbent upon a sinner in order to make reparation for h...