The core of Luther’s concern was the selling of indulgences. When the pope got into a bit of a financial bind with the building of Christendom’s largest cathedral, St. Peter’s in Rome, he offered Christians pardons for sins committed in exchange for a contribution to the construction fund. Nobody in the empire was as clever or as crass in this enterprise as the Dominican preacher John Tetzel. It is said that his traveling quartet even sang, “When the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” Others composed their own version: “When the coin rings in the pitcher, the pope gets all the richer.” This type of humor should sound familiar to those of us who recall parodies of television evangelists on Saturday Night Live and lines from such musicians as Huey Lewis, who sings about a fat man selling salvation in his hand, and Ray Stevens, who quips, “They sell you salvation while they sing ‘Amazing Grace.’” However, at that early point Luther had just discovered the tip of the iceberg. As he poured himself into his lectures on the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians at the University of Wittenberg, he deepened in his understanding of the Scriptures’ central message. Tetzel’s crude salvation-selling campaign was just a symptom of a broader and deeper corruption of the medieval church in its faith and practice. Those who followed the Reformation were called “evangelicals,” taken from the Greek word evangelion, meaning “gospel.” Believing the gospel had been actually recovered was a radical point of view, but those who used the term believed that to be the case. It was not that there were no Christians and churches, or even bishops and archbishops, who did not believe the evangel. Many throughout the Middle Ages did their utmost to restore the gospel to its biblical purity. For instance, Luther’s own mentor, the head of his monastic order over all of Germany, taught salvation by grace and many of the other truths you will read about in this book. The same is true of Archbishop Thomas Bradwardine of Canterbury, a tireless defender of evangelical faith during the fourteenth century. A handful of other leading scholars cried out for a recovery of the biblical gospel. Nevertheless, preaching and teaching the radical message of a God who does all the saving and leaves nothing for us to claim as our own contribution was considered a threat to the medieval church’s authority over salvation management...
-Michael Horton, 'Putting Amazing Back into Grace'
