Indulgences: Patristic to Medieval Changes

one of the protestant concerns about church history is that in the medieval west there's a furthering an advancement of a kind of legalistic and transactional and even financial understanding of salvation such that the free grace of god given to us in the gospel is obscured and in the 16th century there's kind of a recovery of this understanding of our standing before god romans 5 1 peace with god and all that that entails and that this had been hugely obscured in the centuries leading up to the 16th century and i've talked a little bit about this

in my video on purgatory here i want to talk about indulgences now there's a lot to say about indulgences in this video i'm just going to focus on the historical development from the patristic era to the medieval era and kind of a simple video in some ways just very focused on that so i'll define indulgences and then give three examples of how they changed over time and the reason i find this topic helpful is not just because of the importance of understanding indulgences just that issue itself but also because i think the protestant concern about

this issue is kind of illustrative and representative of the general concern we have to greater and lesser degrees on lots of other issues in church history where when we use the word accretions we're talking about things that are coming into the mix in church history and the thing is the beginning of them as well as each individual change along the way are understandable they could be benign they could even be godly but the cumulative effect of the whole when you just go from point a to point b and you look like a thousand years later

is uh not good and this is what happens with indulgences they just mushroom up more and more and more into greater excess and greater abuse as you get further into the medieval period such that i think it's hard for us to even understand and appreciate how terrible life was for lay christians in that context and it's helpful for us to remember that now especially because we often hear these appeals to continuity with the church fathers and they you know so the idea is the catholic church is in continuity with the church fathers and these appeals

smuggle in so much change and so much development it's like when people it reminds me of when people take a political a contemporary progressive political or cultural issue and they'll appeal to the vision of the founding fathers and they'll quote from the declaration of independence or the constitution or something and they'll cast their current agenda or issue as kind of the unfolding of that original dream or or vision the american experiment is unfolding and now today this is the next you know it's like it's kind of a superficial understanding of historical continuity because there's so

much change and that's how protestants feel about many of the changes to our church history and this appeal to continuity and indulgences are representative of that so hopefully this will be helpful to talk through first what is an indulgence basically an indulgence is a remission of temporal punishments that is granted by the church so the catechism describes an indulgence as a remission before god of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven which the faithful christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the church which

as the minister of redemption dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of christ and all of the saints and indulgences can be either partial or plenary or full and you really to get indulgences you have to understand this theology of temporal punishments versus eternal punishments in catholic theology this distinction works in this kind of technical and systematic way and it drives a lot so sin has this kind of double consequence so eternal punishment is ultimately in hell and so you know if you commit a mortal sin let's say you stop going to

mass or you decide you want to use contraception or something like this under normal circumstances unless this is a mortal sin so unless there's exceptional circumstances this is a mortal sin if you die prior to confession you go to hell not purgatory hell okay but then there's temporal punishment this is temporal punishment it has more to do with the process of being purified from sin and this happens in this life and then it's finished in purgatory for many and you can read about that distinction right in the next paragraph of the catechism after the one

i just quoted now this distinction is how catholics respond to the charge that protestants often make that indulgences deter the whole idea of temporal punishment detract from the sufficiency of christ's death for dealing with the punishment of sin they say well it deals with the punishment the eternal punishment just not the temporal punishment because they build a whole theology out of this distinction between these two kinds of punishment and then temporal punishment is seen in this kind of transactional context so when the council of trent responded to the reformers concerns about indulgences they acknowledged though

that the acknowledgments of trent are always so vague they never set the parameters so clearly like okay what are you saying specifically but they acknowledged abuses in the practices in the practice of indulgences um but they affirm indulgences and in fact pronounce an anathema on anyone who says that indulgences are useless or who denies that the church has the right to grant them here's from the council of trent the sacred holy synod teaches and enjoins that the use of indulgences for the christian people most salutary and approved of by the authority of sacred councils is

to be retained in the church and it condemns with anathema those who either assert that they are useless or who deny that there is in the church the power of granting them now by the way some people try to downplay anathemas as though they're not as severe consequence and they'll say well it doesn't necessarily mean that you're separated from god or that this is a threat of damnation it's just a warning in terms of your ecclesiastical standing and things like this and i just think that that's wrong historically anathemas were consistently understood to everywhere i'm

aware of as threatening damnation and separation from god one of the ways you can see that is that nicea too they i mean that so after nicea too the bishops write a letter to the emperor and irene the empress and they're explaining you know we're anathematizing the iconoclasts here's what that means and they say anathema is nothing less than complete separation from god and they compare the iconoclasts to just the heretics of old and they're very clear about what that means so just to be very clear the catholic church at the council of trent anathematizes

those who deny the church's power to grant indulgences or if they say that they are useless now the protestant concern obviously is that this whole theology is is post-apostolic it's not biblical it's an accretion that kind of slowly comes in over time and it has the net effect of obscuring the gospel it the the very things the gospel makes clear this theology makes murky and kind of ominous you know and i'll talk more about that but uh when so in in response to that people do argue from various biblical passages like colossians 1 24 and

they try to find indulgences they try to they try to get the whole theology in which indulgences function from principles in the new testament to me it seems like building a castle on these tiny little toothpicks i mean there's these tiny little hints and then you're trying to build so much out of it but the other thing people do is they try to argue from church history and say that this is patristic and they try to argue for continuity from the patristic practice to the medieval practice and so the purpose of this video is just

to highlight some of the differences and how different they were and i want to highlight three in particular i just want to be clear though i'm not neces i'm going to describe some medieval practices i want to be clear that that's not necessarily representative of official catholic theology today so we're just looking at the history here how things change from patristic to medieval and i'll just mention three things the first is that in the patristic era there are these various forms of penance that develop especially for serious and public sins so for people who have

renounced the faith during persecution or for serious sins like adultery or murder or even things like bestiality or practicing divinization or consulting a magician or all kinds of things it's kind of interesting to read through you can read through the the canons of the synod of al qaeda no not what's a-n-c-y-r-a in 314 and it's you know giving all these kinds of canonical requirements for the completion of penance for these different kinds of sin and what stands out is how rigorous it was i mean the the sins are serious sins it's not just everyday sins

and the uh canonical requirements for fulfilling the penitential process are very severe i mean like for example if you steal something from the church you could be a penitent for seven years for example a long time and uh so the focus is on these on serious and public sins okay and then corresponding to that that you you get the development of various ways of relaxing the canonical requirements if someone is showing true contrition for example the punishment can be reduced in various ways and but even the even the relaxations are very rigorous you might be

fasting one day out of three for several years okay you might be among the catechumens for years while you're in the penitential process it's extremely rigorous and all of this is slowly developing throughout the patristic era and then by the time you get it's not until the medieval era that you get the kind of full system with the treasury of merit which i'll talk about purgatory and and kind of what we usually think of when we think about indulgences now during that process of development one of the things that happens is indulgences become more and

more common and the rigor goes completely out the window okay and it's not it it see it it ceases to be for just serious publicly known sins it becomes for all kinds of sins and even for just general good standing so martin kemnitz the lutheran theologian puts it like this he says since the satisfactions of the ancients together with public penitents have completely ceased and been abol abolished in the papalist church they are arguing about an empty title and about the shadow of a thing which no longer exists and they sell indulgences for satisfactions of

a kind that no longer exist so he's basically saying the frequency of the practice of indulgences and the loss of any sense of rigor in the actual and how it actually plays out means you're not even talking about the same thing you can't use the same word indulgence for what's going on in the 4th century for example and in the 14th they're totally different for those two reasons second change is that the practice of remitting canonical punishments in the penitential process becomes more and more transactional okay so initially the whole point is to produce true

contrition and penitence and repentance in the heart of the person who had committed the particular sin but then over time you get various positive actions that can be done that can substitute for the canonical punishments so it starts out you know let's say you have 60 days of fasting on only bread and water and then it will come about that you can substitute for that the reciting of a particular psalm 50 times or something like that or while on bended knees so if you you know recite this psalm 50 times a day while kneeling then

then that substitutes for the fasting on bread and water for that day um or you know feeding a poor person could be another or an even almsgiving and things like this so given human nature it's not hard to see how once that starts in it can start to develop even further and it does very quickly by early 9th century there's a council in eastern southeastern france where you can read the laws they're enacting because this is during the time of charlemagne like 8 13 somewhere in there and they're making these laws to try to rein

in the abuses already because people are starting to you know sin with impunity in these high-handed ways and then make a pilgrimage to rome to make up for it and things like this it's not hard to see how people can abuse such a system and that was happening and then as you get further into the medieval era this just snowballs and it gets bigger and and more and more financial and this is where you start to see the idea of the treasury of merit and this theology comes into play the treasury of merit is basically

think of like this infinite star house of merits that is comprised of the merits of jesus christ uh also of mary and then also the other saints and in the catechism it speaks of the merits and good the good works and prayers of mary as immense unfathomable and even pristine and the idea here is this that the uh meritorious acts of one saint or or or mary or anybody can make satisfaction for another christian's debt of temporal punishment and guess who has the authority to make that kind of transfer the pope here's how the 14th

century pope clement vi put it this treasure he entrusted to blessed peter the key bearer and his successors that they might for just and reasonable causes distributed to the faithful in full or partial remission of the temporal punishment due to sin so the idea of a treasury of merit which is under the control of the pope to dispense is obviously a departure from patristic practice thirdly as you get into the patristic era so so it's becoming more common the rigor is completely gone it's becoming more transactional and systematized and it's also seen to be more

efficacious indulgences come to have a greater perceived sociological power here's what i mean as i read the church fathers i don't think the church fathers generally thought of a relaxation of canonical requirements for penance as itself expiatory or as necessary for the remission of temporal punishment such that if you die before you complete it you have to finish the process in purgatory there are statements you can find especially in some of the more rigorous kind of harsh uh figures in the patristic era like tertullian or cyprian who will speak very highly of the penitential process

and so you can interpret those statements like that like the penitential process itself is expiatory uh such that the relaxation of the stated punishment is itself an expiation of sin or of the temporal punishment of sin but i think the general more common way to think of it is that the penitential behavior is a manifestation of sincere repentance and what procures forgiveness and restitution is the whole thing that the penitential process is a part of which is ultimately about repentance and you can find so many statements in in john chrysostom or augustine where they're basically

saying you know you don't need because of course even then people are people are superstitious even in my baptist church people will think if i get baptized that makes me okay with god and therefore don't need to repent right or um peop it's not hard to find superstitions in church history so you can find augustine and chrysostom speaking against this and saying um you know you don't need pilgrimages you don't need labors you don't need a sum of money you just need a contrite heart uh you just need to seek the lord and and forgive

your enemies and cast off sin and rend your heart and tear your garments and fall on your knees before god and so forth it's like psalm 51 the sacrifices of god are a broken spirit and so that's why you can find throughout the patristic era the canonical requirements for penitential discipline vary widely from one time to another and from one place to another you don't have this rigid system pendants in the early church was about maintaining purity among the people of god that's why you had so much rigor to it and showing publicly that the

church does not have fellowship with sin and trying to motivate true contrition in the process of repentance and so forth and the difference between that and what eventually accrues in the medieval era is so massive i mean you think of john chrysostom someone like that who's so fiery in his rebukes and in his moral indignation can you imagine what chrysostom would say about medieval indulgences when i picture that i think of christos with fire shooting out of his ears you know i can't imagine how indignant he would be basically just looking at how indignant he

was at things happening in his own life you know and what happens is the because things just get worse and worse and worse and it becomes horrifically abusive and i think there can be a temptation to downplay or minimize these terrible things that happen but you know you have people procuring the maximum amount of money you'll have a pope who grants a plenary indulgence under one set of conditions a subsequent pope will nullify that and then jack up the price you'll have people commissioned specifically to go out and collect funds for particular projects granting indulgences

amassing huge amounts of money and uh intelligence is for the dead that are are earning huge you know thousands of years out of purgatory um chemnitz talks about going into a cathedral in a german city and there's a prayer listed on the doorway and it says whoever recites this prayer with good intent daily will get eight thousand years out of purgatory i mean that's the kind of stuff that's happening on the ground level i'm not saying that catholics are bound to that in their official theology but that was what was going on that's so different

from patristic practices or you'll find like you know there's a cathedral in or there's a chapel in jerusalem and there's 29 28 steps on the entryway to this chapel and the idea is whoever with with a with devotion walks up the steps for each step they get nine years out of purgatory and if you go up on your knees you also will relieve one soul from purgatory you know these are the kinds of things that are going on those are not really uh radical examples and then you have indulgences offered for military adventures the crusades

the ones that i've looked into most because i regard the waldensians as kind of uh ancestors of mine theologically and spiritually and they were horrifically persecuted and you know you can find indulgences as part of the motivation for that so like in 1487 pope innocent viii writes a bull offering a plenary indulgence for all who participate in a crusade against the waldensians he it's as nasty as you can imagine he calls for them to be crushed like venomous snakes and uh it's it's truly sickening to look into these things and see what happened to them

uh you know i won't even go into it i'll just say as bad as you can imagine and i dare you to research those things yourself or or look up the 1655 massacre of the waldensians these things are they're as bad as you can possibly imagine and as much as it's painful to consider such things today we have to do so because this is part of the history this part of what gets us to the present moment and we have to know what happened you know the what happened and it wasn't just you know put

it like this the women and children were not spared in these horrific uh military actions and indulgences are part of the goal you know you're granted an indulgence if you participate and so today catholics and protestants can alike look back on those episodes and be horrified by them but the point is this is obviously 10 million miles away from what augustine and chrysostom are talking about and they would be i mean think of the fire coming out of chrysostom's ears i can't even imagine what he would have said and so the this kind of summative

point here is this is illustrative of a broader protestant concern namely that sins and errors do pile up and build up like accretions in church history and when they do so we need to go back to apostolic teaching and practice as it's given to us in the scriptures and go back to purity and just to conclude in this way the reason i'm so concerned about an issue like indulgences is the whole theology that it participates in has the effect unfortunately of creating tremendous anxiety i see this the same anxiety i anticipate was in the hearts

and minds and consciences of medieval lay christians i see that same thing in people today people who are wrestling with you know there's all kinds of questions that it produces what if i commit a mortal sin and i don't get to a priest in time or i can't confess in time and how do i know if i've committed a mortal sin and what if i'm in the wrong church am i what if i'm damned to hell because i didn't make the right theological judgment of this church versus that church or just purgatory there are a

few things more terrifying than purgatory and the modern doctrine of purgatory is a much toned down compared to what it was in at the time of the reformation but still you know and the reason we're burdened about this is because we think it represents an obscuring of something the gospel has made clear and we in other words what jesus christ alone has done through his finished work on the cross is sufficient to relieve all punishments of sin without qualification such that everyone who simply repents of their sin and trust in jesus is placed into a

permanent status of peace with god romans 5 1 we have peace with god that's our status we are adopted as his children reconciled with him we have citizenship in heaven uh we're already ascended in the heavenlies with christ catholic would agree with all that but there's this system of theology where at the time of your death you might be in purgatory for a long time to finish off the temporal punishment and we would say that does detract from the sufficiency of the work of christ because even if you try to say this whole system of

between temporal punishment eternal punishment bottom line is that the whole system isn't in the scripture and we look at things like the thief on the cross and say that's the paradigmatic example this is someone who is literally saying i deserve crucifixion and jesus says today paradise and we believe that's what the gospel does and there's none of this ominous storm clouds hanging over your head of purgatory what if i commit a mortal sin etc what if i'm in the wrong church and all that anxiety is the very thing jesus died to free us from and

so i'm so burdened about these issues and i i've i mean i get emails and facebook messages all the time from people who are they can't sleep at night because they're wrestling with these things and my burden for them is that they would rest in the sufficiency and the security of the finished work of jesus christ thanks for watching let me know what you think in the comments [Music] you