spiritually mordant Jews in Rome. His message was among the simplest and most compact and personal possible: The transmission of faith requires nothing more and nothing less than faith itself. Romans teaches us that believing in God, which is faith, is enough for access to all the riches of heaven: God’s righteousness, an afterlife, forgiveness. By Luther’s age, however, access to those riches was not so simple. Among other things, spiritual control had become a source of lucre for the church. The glory of the Catholic Church, her magnificent cathedrals and clothes, and her insidious habits of selling passes to heaven in the form of indulgences - this was a deployment of faith and power marked by a venality that grated against Luther’s from-faith-to-faith sensibility. When he saw his own congregation increasingly slipping away to churches with priests who would do what he would not, which was to market and sell indulgences, he saw a rank, strange hypocrisy: The Church as an economic instrument. His rage boiled over in the summer of 1517, and he summarized his case against the Church in the 95 Theses that he nailed to the door of his local church on October 31s. Papa non vult nec potest ullas penas remittere preter eas, quas arbitrio vel suo vel canonum imposuit, he wrote in Thesis Five: No matter what you might pay him, the Pope can’t influence what happens to you after you die. Or, Thesis 78, Euangelici rhetia sunt, quibus olim piscabantur viros divitiarum. Indulgences are nets with which one fishes for the riches of men. As much as Luther was crying for a restoration of Saint Paul’s sense of a personal faith, he was also starting a difficult and - for the Church - unpleasant argument about power. Our relation to God, Luther meant, is our relation. It’s not something to be brokered or sold or negotiated. It does not require fancy clothes or cathedrals or hierarchies. For Luther, this new logic had engendered a profound spiritual crisis. He recalled, later in life,