Martin Luther was indignant and, in 1517, published his famous 95 theses, “out of love for truth,” as he wrote in the introduction.a

Since Luther merely sought discussion among scholars, to which he as a professor had the right, the theses were written in Latin. But they created “a startling sensation,” according to Friedrich Oehninger. “Within 14 days they [the printed German translations] were known all over Germany, within 4 weeks in all Christendom. Some rejoiced that finally one man had taken a stand against the Roman oppression; for others, Luther became an object of hatred.” The effect of his theses surprised Luther himself. What did they reveal?

What Luther’s 95 Theses Revealed

According to his first thesis, “the believers’ whole life should be penance.” The sinner could attain peace with God not through letters of indulgence but through genuine repentance and Christian conduct. One of the last theses read: “Away, therefore, with all those prophets who preach to Christians: ‘Peace, peace,’ and yet there is no peace.”​—92nd.

Not tradition but the gospel must be “the highest” and the “real treasure,” Luther wrote. (55th, 62nd, 65th) True. Jesus set the pattern by teaching with the inspired Scriptures, saying of God’s Word: “Your word is truth.” (John 17:17; Luke 24:44) By deviating from this pattern, the clergy rejected the Bible as the highest authority and were caught in the trap of human teachings. Luther reproached them, saying: “Teachings of men are preached by those who say that the soul flies (out of purgatory) as soon as money jingles in the box.”​—27th.

Luther warned that “profit and greed increase” through such preaching. (28th) Religious history proves that the clergy neglected Scriptural warnings and became victims of the love of money. (Hebrews 13:5) A Catholic history book admits: “The root cause of decay in the church of that period was the fiscal policy of the Curia, which was thoroughly blemished by simony.”

When Luther raised his voice against “the ‘sanctified’ church tradition” and “bluntly denounced the church’s decline into the realms of money and power,” as one Protestant historian expressed it, he touched the heart of the problem: the general abandonment of early Christian teachings.

How Desertion of True Faith Started

The 11th thesis described one unscriptural doctrine as “a weed that obviously was sown when the bishops were sleeping.” This reminds us of Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds, in which he prophesied the planting of imitation Christians. (Matthew 13:36-43) After the death of the apostles, these false Christians, together with apostate teachers, mixed pure Bible teachings with Greek philosophy and introduced unscriptural doctrines such as immortality of the soul, hellfire, and the Trinity.b​—Acts 20:29, 30.

For example, the early Christians had no pictorial art, and the so-called Church Fathers viewed the veneration of an image as an “aberration and offense.” By the end of the fourth century, however, the churches were already full of portrait images of Jesus, Mary, the apostles, angels, and the prophets. According to Epiphanius of Salamis, the ones portrayed received improper veneration when persons curtsied before them. Gradually, the warning “guard yourselves from idols” began to be ignored.​—1 John 5:21; compare Acts 10:25, 26.

Professed Christians rejected Jesus’ command when they started to “lord it over” their brothers by organizing a clerical hierarchy. (Matthew 20:25-27; 23:8-11) Later, bishops of Rome claimed preeminence. While the “decay of ecclesiastical life under the reign of the secularized papacy proceeded unchecked,” the church made attempts “to reform itself but was incapable of doing so,” comments historian Oehninger.

The 16th century saw more changes. “The mood of the time was in his [Luther’s] favor,” Oehninger says, adding that “opponents attacked him, threatening him with death as a heretic, but they only drove him to make more and newer investigations on the basis of the Holy Scriptures, until the whole Roman system, as a mere human creation, began to crumble before his eyes.” But were the newborn churches truly free, as they claimed, from “awful abuses and false doctrines”?

The Reformation​—No Restoration

The call for reform in the 16th century led to a restoration of neither the “universal” church nor early Christian teachings but caused only a splitting of apostate Christendom into apostate parts that separated again. Today’s bishops, including Luther’s heirs, still seem to be “sleeping,” as the 11th thesis mentioned.