Indulge me for a while.

I recently read in the news that the practice of the Roman Catholic Church offering indulgences is making a resurgence (read about this here). As I read the article, I began to wonder what Martin Luther would have thought. As many of you already may know, it was the issue over the selling of indulgences that Luther initially launched his public criticisms of the Roman Catholic church. Indulgences are defined as the removal of temporal punishment for sins that have already been forgiven. You see, since Rome distinguishes between the removal of guilt and the actual punishment for sin, there remains a necessary step in the Roman Catholic system that Christians must undergo prior to entering heaven (hence: Purgatory). In order to limit one's time spent in Purgatory, the church offered, for the right price, indulgences. As Johann Tetzel, the famed indulgence preacher said, "When a penny in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs!" This as you can imagine, was a huge money-making enterprise, and also, no doubt, part of the motivation for its modern-day reinstitution.  

But as heinous as this practice may seem to be, it was not the major issue over which the Reformation grew. The move to morally reform corrupt church practices did not begin with Luther, nor did it end with him. As a matter of fact, the Catholic Reformation (A.K.A. Counter Reformation) was all about moral reform, and it was quite successful in cleaning up Rome's act, so to speak. The major issue which the Reformation was all about is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This is the teaching that Luther, whose theology had matured since the publishing of the 95 Theses, said the Church stands or falls upon. The Reformation was primarily motivated by theological concerns (soteriology in particular) and only secondarily, did moral, political, social, etc. concerns enter in.  Rome's answer to the Reformation, the council of Trent, understood this well. Trent did much to reform corrupt practices within, but perhaps its most emphatic denunciations were reserved for anyone who holds the doctrine of justification by faith alone (they receive an anathema).  This is what sets the Reformers apart from Rome as well as the Anabaptists; both denied any notion of imputation of Christ's righteousness in favor of a realist notion of salvation (i.e. God declare you righteous, only if you are really righteous). Moral corruption is nothing new (or unique to Rome, for that matter), what is important, however is the gospel.