Indulgences: Luther, Catholicism, and the Imputation of Merit

At the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and the dawn of the Protestant movement, Indulgences: Luther, Catholicism, and the Imputation of Merit sets forth a revised theological interpretation of the Church’s practice of indulgences. Author Mary C. Moorman argues that Luther’s sola fide theology merely absolutized the very logic of indulgences which he sought to overthrow, while indulgences in their proper context remain an irreducible witness to the Church’s corporate nuptial covenant with Christ, by which penitents are drawn into deeper fellowship with the Church and the Church’s Lord. As Robert W. Shaffern, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Scranton, writes in his foreword to Indulgences, “Mary Moorman’s book joins a number of recent scholarly studies that revise substantially the old convictions about indulgences. She is mostly interested in how theological thinking about indulgences should be done today, with of course the help that patristic, medieval, and early modern authorities might lend. She brings to bear a broad range of primary and secondary sources on the issue of indulgences and constructs an impressive series of covalent images with which to understand the role of indulgences in today’s Christian Church.”

Product Details
Authors: Mary C. Moorman
Pages: 368
Publish Date: 2017
Publisher: Emmaus Academic
Categories: Academic, Books, eBooks, Emmaus Academic, Ethics and Culture, Mary C. Moorman, Theology
Hardcover $39.95
eBook $39.95
Mary C. Moorman

Mary C. Moorman brings her combined interests in law and theology to the fore in her debut work on the legal and theological framework which undergirds the Church’s indulgences. Moorman holds a Juris Doctor in law with a focus on religious legal systems from Boston University, the Master of Arts in Religion from Yale, and a PhD in Systematic Theology from Southern Methodist University. She has served as a lecturer in both law and religion at Southern Methodist University, the University of New Haven, and Boston University. Moorman’s research has been presented at the Sixteenth Century Society and the American Academy of Religion, and her most recently published work has appeared in The Wesleyan Theological Journal and in the anthology Seeing the Medieval: Realms of Faith and Visions for Today.