Tuesday, August 16, 2005

LUTHERANS REJECT CATHOLIC PRACTICE OF INDULGENCE
Pope Offers World Youth Day Participants Relief From Purgatory

By Wolfgang Polzer
Special to ASSIST News Service

COLOGNE (ANS) -- A Catholic practice, which gave rise to Martin Luther’s reformation in the 16th century, has surfaced again as a topical issue 500 years later. Pope Benedict XVI has promised the approximately 800,000 participants of the current World Youth Day in Cologne total indulgence, provided they confess their sins, repent and receive Holy Communion. Non-participants may receive partial indulgence if they pray earnestly for a courageous Christian testimony at the mass event.

The idea of indulgence is tied to the Catholic teaching of purgatory. In short, it means that temporal punishments for sins in the hereafter can be avoided or shortened by repentance and good deeds in this life. The church may issue indulgences for acts of repentance. In medieval times the church also sold indulgences.

Luther protested not only against the malpractice but also against this Catholic teaching in principle, as the leading Bishop of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany, Hans Christian Knuth, points out. Lutherans cannot accept purgatory and indulgence, even in a reformed modern Catholic understanding, as the Bishop emphasized in an interview with the evangelical news agency “idea”.

The teaching of purgatory and indulgence is, in his words, neither in keeping with the Bible nor the central articles of the Christian faith. The wages of sin cannot be removed by any human action, but only by the grace of God and through faith in Jesus Christ. Neither can His redemption be supplemented with good deeds.

In Knuth’s words punishment is a necessary consequence and often already an ingredient of sin, as in the case of adultery or drunken driving. The ultimate punishment is separation from God. But it is not some punitive measure to be “added on” by God.

Lutherans and Catholics are, as the leading Bishop of eleven million German Lutherans points out, in agreement as far as the importance of repentance and prayer is concerned. And despite the clear doctrinal differences Knuth does not advise young Protestants to stay away from the World Youth Day with a visit by the Pope.

But Protestants should watch the event very carefully and ask: “What is in agreement with the Gospel and the Holy Scriptures?” The Bishop is one of 20 non-Catholic church leaders who have been invited to meet the Pope, August 19, in Cologne. As the encounter will only last for approximately one hour there will not be time to delve deeper into dogmatic discussions, said Knuth.
 
http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/s05080061.htm
 
(Excellent article!  I'm glad to hear that the Lutherans rejected the practice of indulgences.)