Often, the sale of indulgences is represented as some horrible and radical error that proves the apostacy of Rome.
Now, it was practiced and it remains condemned, so I am not saying it did not happen, nor am I sayng that it was OK. But it is nothing compared to such glaring violations of the very letter and spirit of the Gospel as the Protestant notions of salvation being the product of faith alone. The sale of indulgences was a way to raise money for the church. That is all. No one was buying his way to heaven. The early Christians gave their ENTIRE livelihood to the Church. That is scriptural. That repentance of sin is something purely intellectual, not involving any work at all, -- THAT is unscriptural. St. John the Baptist, who preached penance, himself did a lot of it: hairshirt, fasting, monastic solitude. So it is proper to do something substantial in repentance of a sin already committed, confessed, and absolved. An indulgence was seen as a way to deliver a greater penitential value. A skilled worker, for example, would offer money, rather than his time, as penance. His reasoning would be that his business would not be ruined if he were to do his penance himself,-- for example, undertake a pilgrimage. Who are you, who pays money for the church ,the whole pocket change of it, and does not do any penance whatever, to judge someone who took his sin seriously?
When I see a modern heretic of Protestant persuasion, such as that Olsteen, preaching without shame market economics being God's will for us, I am wondering when will the Protestant community condemn and eradicate that insect with the same vigor it spends condemning Catholic practice of 500 years ago, done in a culture they don't understand and have, frankly, no better substitute to offer themselves.
I have no problem with people giving all the money they want to the church.
In the case of the sale of indulgences, bereaved people were told that their loved ones would suffer long sentences in purgatory unless let out by a indulgence, purchased by the loved ones to get their dear departed out early.
Or they bought themselves out in advance, either because they were terrified, or they wanted a paid license to sin.
Thus they were extorted most cruelly by an unbiblical doctrine. They were fleeced.
“Tetzel traveled with great pomp and circumstance through Germany, and recommended with unscrupulous effrontery and declamatory eloquence the indulgences of the Pope to the large crowds who gathered from every quarter around him. He was received like a messenger from heaven. Priests, monks, and magistrates, men and women, old and young, marched in solemn procession with songs, flags, and candles, under the ringing of bells, to meet him and his fellow-monks, and followed them to the church; the papal Bull on a velvet cushion was placed on the high altar, a red cross with a silken banner bearing the papal arms was erected before it, and a large iron chest was put beneath the cross for the indulgence money. Such chests are still preserved in many places. The preachers, by daily sermons, hymns, and processions, urged the people, with extravagant laudations of the Pope’s Bull, to purchase letters of indulgence for their own benefit, and at the same time played upon their sympathies for departed relatives and friends whom they might release from their sufferings in purgatory “as soon as the penny tinkles in the box.”
” Sobald der Pfennig im Kasten klingt,
Die Seel’ aus dem Fegfeuer springt.”
Mathesius and Johann Hess, two contemporary witnesses, ascribe this sentence (with slight verbal modifications) to Tetzel himself. Luther mentions it in Theses 27 and 28, and in his book Wider Hans Wurst (Erl. ed. xxvi. 51).
“The idea of selling and buying by money the remission of punishment and release from purgatory was acceptable to ignorant and superstitious people, but revolting to sound moral feeling. It roused, long before Luther, the indignant protest of earnest minds, such as Wiclif in England, Hus in Bohemia, John von Wesel in Germany, John Wessel in Holland, Thomas Wyttenbach in Switzerland, but without much effect.”
(History of the Christian Church, Philip Schaeff)
I don’t think the whole indulgences/purgatory thing is defensible, really.