Voting is important and elections have consequences, but there are other ways to change the world. 503 years ago, Martin Luther did it with a post. Not a social media post like this one, of course, but a hand-written notice with 95 theses- or propositions for debate- tacked to a church door in Germany. Yes, elections have consequences, but the anniversary of Luther’s 95 theses reminds us that ideas also have consequences- sometimes earth-shaking consequences. You probably know the story of the 95 theses, but what were the ideas in Luther’s post that were powerful enough to shake the world?

Perhaps surprisingly, Luther didn’t say anything about Scripture alone or justification by faith alone in the 95 theses. What he wrote about was a particularly diabolical mistranslation of Scripture. He wrote:

1. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
2. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.

At the heart of theses statements is the difference between doing penance and repenting. Luther had discovered that the Roman Catholic Church had substituted “do penance” for Jesus’ word “repent” in Matthew 4:17. He realized that made them guilty of blatant Scripture twisting and he was calling them out on it.

This was a an earth-shaking discovery. The difference between repentance and penance may seem fairly obvious to us, but that’s because- thanks to the Reformation- we’ve had almost 500 years of sound Bible translation to make it obvious. But Luther only discovered the truth by going back to the Greek New Testament manuscripts. The only sanctioned Bible at the time, the Latin Vulgate, substituted “do penance” for “repent” so that’s what everyone believed. But when the truth was uncovered, it sure seemed like the Church was hiding something.

The Pope and others realized that Luther’s discovery of this translation “error” had ominous implications for the many tentacled system of works and penance that filled the coffers and bolstered the power of the 16th Century Catholic Church. Suddenly, there was no Scriptural justification for the selling of indulgences, the sacrament of penance, the confessional system, and a host of other traditions that held together the ecclesiastical superstructure of Medieval Catholicism. Entrenched priests feared they would no longer be able to fund their cathedrals and building projects. That fear resonated even with Pope Leo the Tenth, who had Luther excommunicated. Of course, far from silencing Luther or stamping out reform, the Pope’s excommunication just added fuel to Luther’s fire.

But the implications of the difference between repentance and penance go far beyond an indictment of the ecclesiastical abuses of the Church, as serious as that is. The difference in repenting and doing penance is at the very heart of the Reformation- indeed, it is at the heart of the difference in the true and false gospel! The reason is that doing penance can always and only ever be understood as an act of works. But repentance in the Bible is always and only ever an act of faith. So, although the phrase is absent, and in fact Martin Luther himself may not yet have made the connection, the seeds of justification by faith alone were planted in the first two of the 95 Theses. So long as penance was bound up with salvation, justification could only come by works. But when Luther translated Jesus’ words rightly, he severed forever the tie between penance and salvation, paving the way for the cascade of reformation truth that was to sweep across Europe and change the world forever.